New Delhi: Who thought that a novice video clip lasting just 18 seconds will become a cultural phenomenon? On April 23, 2005, video-sharing website YouTube uploaded its first clip, “Me at the Zoo”. The 18-second video clip showed YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim standing in front of an elephant enclosure at the San Diego Zoo.
In the unedited video, shot by Jawed Karim’s friend Yakov Lapitsky, Karim remarks “really, really, really long” trunks. Created with Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, the friends then uploaded the video in then-budding platform called YouTube. And the rest became history.
A simple, unpretentious video, taken by three friends in 2005 came to democratise content creation and change paradigms across industries as we see today.
Nearly 18 months later, tech giant Google bought YouTube in 2006 at a whopping $1.65 billion. The figure might not seem striking today, but nearly two decades back, it was a dazzling offer for a start-up that was barely 2 years old.
The deal was touted by the Gurdian as the “fastest internet success stories ever” turning “founders Chad Hurley and Steven Chen into instant multi-millionaires.”
Meanwhile, in January this year, Alphabet -Google’s parent company posted below expectations advertising sales, reported Reuters
“Against a backdrop of mixed U.S. economic signals, Alphabet’s powerhouse units Google and YouTube have faced competition for ad budgets from other online platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Amazon.com. With retail sales a bright spot, the company’s fourth-quarter ad revenue rose to $65.5 billion from $59.0 billion a year prior. That was short of analysts’ average expectation for $66.02 billion according to LSEG data,” Reuters wrote.