The first YouTube video, titled "Me at the zoo", was published by co-founder Jawed Karim.

YouTube is an American social media and online video sharing platform owned by Google. YouTube was founded on February 14, 2005, by Chad Hurley, Jawed Karim, and Steve Chen, who were former employees of PayPal. Headquartered in San Bruno, California, it is the second-most-visited website in the world, after Google Search. In January 2024, YouTube had more than 2.7 billion monthly active users, who collectively watched more than one billion hours of videos every day. As of May 2019, videos were being uploaded to the platform at a rate of more than 500 hours of content per minute, and as of mid-2024, there were approximately 14.8 billion videos in total.

"Me at the zoo" is a YouTube video uploaded on April 23, 2005, recognized as the first video uploaded to the platform. The 19-second video features Jawed Karim, one of the co-founders of YouTube, being recorded by his high school friend, Yakov Lapitsky. In the video, Karim is seen standing in front of two elephants at the San Diego Zoo in California, where he briefly comments on the length of their trunks. Multiple journalists thought the video represented YouTube as a whole and stated it was a milestone of the platform's history. Karim has later updated the video's description several times. As of August 2025, the video has received more than 368 million views.

Jawed Karim is an American software engineer and Internet entrepreneur. He is one of the co-founders of YouTube and the first person to upload a video to the site. The site's inaugural video, "Me at the zoo", uploaded on April 23, 2005, has been viewed over 360 million times as of May 2025. During Karim's time working at PayPal, where he met fellow YouTube co-founders Steve Chen and Chad Hurley, he designed many of its core components, including its real-time anti-fraud system.