The oldest YouTube video is now in a museum as a design relic
Visitors can now watch YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim’s “Me at the zoo” in the V&A’s Design 1900-Now gallery.
A grainy video of elephants and a soft-spoken co-founder is now framed as design history. London’s Victoria and Albert Museum has officially added a reconstruction of YouTube’s oldest watch page to its permanent collection and has placed the platform’s first video, “Me at the Zoo,” in its galleries.
In a 19-second video uploaded by YouTube founder Jawed Karim on April 23, 2005, he stands in front of elephants at the San Diego Zoo and comments on their “really, really long trunks.” The video is raw and straightforward, but it marks the beginning of what has become the world’s largest video-sharing platform. Over time, it has racked up hundreds of millions of views.
In a public statement about the acquisition, YouTube CEO Neal Mohan called the exhibition an opportunity to revisit “the beginnings of a global cultural phenomenon.” The V&A curators described the reconstruction as part of a broader effort to preserve early Web 2.0 designs, recognizing that platforms created in the mid-2000s had a lasting impact on how people create, share, and consume content.
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