13 Of YouTube's First Uploaded Videos And How Many Views They Have Now

Nothing makes a millennial feel older than telling them that the 1980s started over 45 years ago, not 20. But if you really want to make them feel old, tell them YouTube recently turned 20. YouTube was created in 2005, a plucky video-hosting website that went on to become the dominant user-content entertainment platform, boasting 20 billion uploaded videos, tons of features you'll kick yourself for not using, and turning "YouTuber" into a legitimate way to feed one's family. A staggering 20 million videos get uploaded every day, and a 2022 Statista survey suggests that about 30,000 hours of content is uploaded every hour — equating to 1,250 days, or almost 3.5 years. In the beginning, it started with just a small clutch of videos. Which videos were they, and how many views do they have now?

Many of YouTube's early videos are still on the site for anyone to watch, but a good chunk have been removed or deleted over time. The ones on this list don't always technically hold the place number we've marked them as, but they remain the oldest. Each offers an intimate window into the site responsible for so much early internet culture. Let's take a look at what they're about and who their creators were.

It all begins with the famous "Me at the zoo" video. YouTube's co-founder, Jawed Karim, stands with a backdrop of the elephants at the San Diego Zoo. High school friend Yakov Lapitsky films Karim as he says, "Alright, so here we are in front of the elephants, and the cool thing about these guys is that they have really, really, really long trunks, and that's cool. And that's pretty much all there is to say." The 19-second runtime and 240p resolution are a stark contrast to today's 4K, sometimes hours-long YouTube videos. If you're frustrated that your YouTube video is taking too long to upload, be glad it's not 2005 with dial-up internet and video that looks like this.

By modern standards, "Me at the zoo" seems quite banal, but it encapsulates what YouTube was all about: everyday user-made content. Karim told USA Today that way back when, the reason for creating the site was Janet Jackson's 2004 Super Bowl wardrobe malfunction and the Indian Ocean tsunami the same year; he had been frustrated in his efforts to find videos of these events — and others. Although today it's mostly home to production-heavy, scripted, scheduled content, it's still the place you go to find videos of everyday things. Karim had a golden idea, and only a year after launching YouTube, the company struck a $1.65 billion acquisition deal with Google. Karim would leave the company shortly after.

Following in that vein of everyday user-made content, the second video ever uploaded shows what appears to be a man snowboarding down an undisclosed slope. He attempts to ride a rail, takes a spill at the end of it, and gets back up — a total of 10 seconds. True to the internet lingo of the time, the video describes his abilities as "skillz." One comment under the video jokingly christens this as the first fail video. Not much is known about the creator, "mw." "My Snowboarding Skillz" is the only video on the channel, although there was a second ("My Tubing Skillz") uploaded later that same year, which got removed for policy violations. User thisvintagegirl reuploaded it, where (presumably) mw rides down a rocky waterfall in a tube in Boulder Creek, Colorado. Aside from those two videos, the account was already inactive as far back as 2012.

Some internet sleuths in the YouTube fandom wiki did some digging. The snowboarding video, even by 2009, had remained obscure at less than 6,000 views. All they were able to find out is an alleged birth year of 1974 or 1975, putting mw in his late 20s to 30s at the time of filming. Whatever the case, mw is entitled to his privacy. It's likely he only wanted to store a couple of videos on YouTube to share with family and friends for a laugh.

"tribute" is technically the tenth YouTube video ever uploaded, according to Wikitubia, following a series of removed videos. In it, a young man stands in a narrow corridor (possibly a dormitory hallway), jumps up, plants his hands and feet on the walls, and screams — to the laughs of others off-camera. After he drops down, the cameraman says, "Very nice." It's another short video at only 5 seconds long. Although everything so far has only lasted a few seconds, YouTube's initial video length limit in 2005 was a short 10 minutes.

What is this video a tribute to, and what was the original intention of the uploader? Anyone's guess is as good as the next, but goofy college hijinks is probably explanation enough. The channel has no other videos, and there doesn't appear to be any evidence online of who the screaming guy is or who filmed him. If anything, it feels like a precursor to the short-form content we'd later see on Vine, years before it even existed and long before Vine had a downward spiral to being shut down.

The next video (technically the 26th ever uploaded) is the first time we see a YouTuber filming themselves doing something ridiculous out in public. A YouTuber (presumably channel creator "Paul") and his friends go to Waikiki Beach, where he allows strangers to shave the top of his head. During the video, Paul says, "I'm doing some premature balding today." In the background, we hear the song "Almost Cut My Hair" by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. At the end, Paul folds the longer side hairs over the top of his head so he looks like a balding man. If it were filmed today, there's a good chance it would be livestreamed, with super chat donations going to YouTube creators on the side.

The video's description reads: "so I decided that I wanted to know what I look like when I'm 50 and am eluding pure sexiness... we decided that the only way to get a haircut is in public... and upon further review... the ladies LOVE IT!" Not much is known about this mysterious Paul. The link overlaid on the video, at the time of writing, shows nothing. Using the Wayback Machine, you'll find that at various points it had a single GIF with the words: "Things coming soon. Hi Camille. What's shakin." Barring a more intensive investigation, it looks like this is another early YouTuber lost to time.

The next video belongs to a YouTuber who lays claim to the largest number of early YouTube videos on this list: Jones4Carrie. In the first — carrie rides a truck — we see what must be Carrie riding one of those miniature stationary children's vehicles usually seen in front of a grocery store, the sort you'd put a quarter into to keep a restless kid busy during a shopping trip back in the day. Carrie also has the next video on the list, titled "carrie chokes the chicken," where she jokingly strangles a toy chicken. There's no audio in either one. One could argue these are early examples of today's life vlogs.

Little is known about Carrie. She appears to have maintained a LiveJournal with regular posts around the time she created her YouTube channel, and had a MySpace account with the same username — now restricted. It's impossible to verify whether this is the same person behind the accounts. Wikitubia claims that her name is Caroline Jones and that her account was hacked at some point, causing her to lose access around 2010, but this isn't backed up with sources. Whatever the case, this is clearly a teenager having fun in the early days of the user-content internet.

Vernal Lullaby is best described as YouTube's first music video, long before Vevo and YouTube Music were battling it out with Spotify. With a relaxed, melancholy background melody, the cameraman takes us from their desk to the view out the window, presumably somewhere in New York City. The rest of the video is B-roll footage: balloons hanging off a storefront sign, a woman sitting in front of a cafe, a city skyline, and a man lounging on a rooftop chair in various positions.

There's very little we know about this video. The song is "This Lullaby" by Queens of the Stone Age, and the video description promotes the album it came from. One commenter (@VinOnline) claims that YouTube's founders once pitched the platform to a video blogging group as a better way to post their videos. At the time, YouTube's embedded Flash Player was a revolutionary take on video hosting that such a group would sink its teeth into. The video itself isn't anything more than "throwaway footage and editing practice."

"Sleep Like Lumber?" features the classic, ages-old prank of blasting an air horn into a sleeping person's ear to watch them leap awake, terrified. Except the victim in the video doesn't, hence the title. We see a guy sleeping on a sofa with a blue blanket. A friend (hopefully) comes up from behind and blasts him with an air horn. Several long seconds go by before he even moves; he wakes up, rolling over and looking around, confused. The video only goes on for 23 seconds.

YouTube these days is awash with prank videos of all kinds, especially the nastier variety that involve harassing random strangers. Videos like this — the harmless stuff among friends — are a nostalgic reminder of a simpler time. Given this video was posted only shortly after the first YouTube video, it's clear a wide variety of people were already trickling onto the site to use it for all sorts of purposes — personal videos, vlogs, music videos, fails, and, well, filmed prank videos.

The next three videos — "american life," "chem," and "free frosty weekend!" — belong to Jones4Carrie, too. The latter two have 71 thousand and 208 thousand views, respectively. In the first one, we see a classroom with two teens fighting over something while standing on top of the desks — according to the description, a Russian student named Dimitri trying to get back his stuffed mole. In the next video — "chem" — Carrie shows her face and then turns the camera to show the rest of the classroom. In the final video — "free frosty weekend!" — someone films Carrie as she eats a (free?) Wendy's Frosty.

These are far from the only videos Jones4Carrie would post; she uploaded videos of her nature trip to a lake, of Six Flags Park, and of the Staten Island Ferry over the following year. Her last video on this list — "family fight" — was posted June 11, 2005, and garnered 75,000 views. She's arguably the first YouTube vlogger, and comments under her videos lament that we no longer see random, unscripted stuff like this. It's a reminder that the internet — and, of course, YouTube — was a very, very different place 20 years ago, before algorithms and content creators.

Anyone alive to experience the early 2000s internet knows it was a really weird place. "Good Times!!!" is a perfect example. It's a stop-motion video where a guy pushes a pencil through his ear, rides around on a chair, and crawls out of a suitcase — among other things. Title cards randomly pop up saying things like "Dig it! Dawg!" The song playing in the background is Kool & The Gang's 1974 "Hollywood Swinging." To top off all the oddities, the description reads: "Here is some garbage with a tasty odor. Enjoy all." Early 2000s in a nutshell, right here.

This is, by the way, the same user who made the video "Sleep Like Lumber?" The rest of the content on the channel is pretty random. There are a series of videos filmed at Yosemite National Park, with the final video — "John Dance-a-thon" — posted in 2006. Wikitubia has compiled very little information on the creator, although one commenter claims to have identified his professional website. Like Carrie and others, YouTube was probably a fun distraction that he moved on from as he grew up.

YouTube wouldn't be YouTube without cat videos, and this was one of the first. The creator dangles a toy in front of their black cat while Nick Drake's "Hazy Jane II" plays in the background. Again, more of the sort of content YouTube was known for in the early days. There's not much to say about the video other than that, but there is something to say about the video's creator, "steve," who appears to be one of YouTube's co-founders, Steve Chen.

Chen had been working at PayPal (once Elon Musk's original intention for X.com) with YouTube's other co-founders, Jawed Karim (of "Me at the zoo" fame) and Chad Hurley, when the trio came up with the idea of a user-content video sharing site. According to his alma mater bio page, Chen was instrumental in negotiating the famously lucrative acquisition with Google and in building the infrastructure needed to host so many videos. He is no longer employed by YouTube, however, and now lives in Taiwan, working with tech startups.

It's quite impressive how, within a month of going live, YouTube more or less already had every type of content imaginable. With vlogs, music videos, and cat videos taken care of, the next inevitable category was people filming themselves doing wildly dangerous things. "First Backflip on YouTube!" is exactly that: A young man stands on the roof gutter of his home and performs a backflip off the edge, landing with surprising grace. The almost non-reaction from the two people sitting underneath him on the porch confirms that this isn't the first time he's done this. To use the jargon from the video, this is technically a "dismount" and not just a backflip.

The channel (COBALTGRUV) doesn't shy away from cashing in on the early-YouTube-video reputation; it asks users to subscribe and donate through buymeacoffee.com. Of every channel on this list, this is the only one that continues to post to this very day. COBALTGRUV makes everything from fishing videos, to UFO sightings, to rap videos. If this is still the original creator posting, then we have to give them credit for sticking with it over two decades — longer than even the biggest YouTubers out there.

"Stadion Bayen München" may be the first international video posted on YouTube. The cameraman pans and zooms around the Munich Olympic Stadium with no commentary or background music. The Munich Olympic Stadium was built in 1972 for the Summer Olympics, according to its website. This was a historic event for many reasons, one of which was that it marked the first Olympic Games hosted in Germany since the 1936 Berlin Olympics, infamously attended by Adolf Hitler.

Aside from that, the Munich Olympic Stadium is famous even today for its bizarre tent roof design, but also, sadly, because of the hostage situation that occurred during those 1972 Summer Olympics. Known as the Munich Massacre, this was a devastating event where Palestinian terrorists took the Israeli delegation hostage, resulting in a great deal of bloodshed. However, the games continued afterward. Putting all of that morbid history aside, we don't know anything else about the YouTuber who posted the video. It's the only upload on their channel, and no further information is provided.

The last video on our list is a reposting of a 1971 commercial, perhaps YouTube's first instance of archival content. In the commercial, a Native American man paddles a canoe up a polluted river to a polluted city, where people are quite literally throwing trash out their car windows to splatter at his feet. "Some people have a deep, abiding respect for the natural beauty that was once this country," says the narrator, "and some people don't. People start pollution, and people can stop it." The commercial ends with the camera zooming in on the Native American man as he sheds a tear.

Although leaning on racist stereotypes of Native Americans, this commercial was part of the growing momentum behind environmentalism. It was around this time that new engine emission rules changed vehicle designs forever. However, the commercial is deeply problematic for two reasons that aren't immediately apparent, according to Orion. One, the actor in the video (Iron Eyes Cody) was not a Native American — he was Italian-American; white actors playing minorities has been a longstanding problem in Hollywood. Two, the company behind the ad — Keep America Beautiful — was responsible for manufacturing the single-use waste (like cans and bottles) that was making the Native American man cry. The commercial was effectively a campaign to get Americans to clean up the mess they helped create. Fortunately, Native Americans did get some closure: In 2023, the National Congress of American Indians Fund acquired the rights to the "Crying Indian" ad.