(KDVR/NEXSTAR) — Can you believe it? Friday marks 16 years since the first video was posted to YouTube.
It all started at the San Diego Zoo. The video was posted on April 23, 2005, by Jawed Karim. Karim, who is now 41 years old, is one of the co-founders of YouTube.
In the 18-second clip, Karim stands in front of the camera describing the elephants.
“Alright, so here we are in front of the elephants, and the cool thing about these guys is that, is that they have really, really, really long trunks, and that’s, that’s cool, and that’s pretty much all there is to say,” shared Karim.
A year after that post, Karim and his fellow co-founders, Steve Chen and Chad Hurley, sold the video-sharing platform to Google for $1.65 billion.
The video has since been viewed more than 162 million times.
YouTube, headquartered in San Bruno, California, was founded on Valentine’s Day in 2005. Shortly after the site’s “beta” launch in May 2005, it was attracting about 30,000 users each day, according to Britannica.com.
Today, YouTube’s stats show the company has grown a bit, with over 2 billion monthly logged-in users. The video site is in 100 countries in 80 different languages and 500 hours of content are uploaded every minute.
According to the company, over 1 billion hours of video are watched every day, including Karim’s clip.