Do you remember… "Me at the zoo"?

The first video ever uploaded to YouTube is nineteen seconds long, and it’s about elephants. On 23 April 2005, YouTube’s co-founder Jawed Karim posted a clip of himself standing in front of the elephant enclosure at San Diego Zoo. He tells us that the cool thing about the elephants is that they have really, really, really long trunks. Then he says that’s pretty much all there is to say, and it ends.

Nobody involved could have known what it was starting. There’s no music, no editing, no dramatic thumbnail and nobody asking you to like and subscribe. It’s just a man, some elephants and a friend holding the camera.

The video is still up, and it’s been watched hundreds of millions of times. People leave comments underneath as if visiting a monument, which in a way it is.

Everything that came after began with those trunks.