Elephants, music, or toddlers: Do you remember the first YouTube video?

Two decades ago, a new platform emerged on the internet with the goal of allowing anyone to share home videos. Its creators had no idea what a transformation it would bring to both the audiovisual and entertainment sectors.

YouTube Timeline

The creation of the platform

February 14, 2005

YouTube Inc. was founded by Chad Hurley, Jawed Karim, and Steve Chen, two engineers and a designer who were colleagues at PayPal. The original idea was to create a dating site where anyone could post videos, but within days the platform had no users. The website YouTube.com was launched on February 14, 2005.

The first video in history

April 23, 2005

On April 23, 2005, the first clip in the platform's history was published: Me at the zoo [Me at the Zoo], in which one of the platform's three creators spoke for twenty seconds about the elephants at the San Diego Zoo. It currently has more than 353 million views.

The Google purchase

November 13, 2006

In 2006, Google bought the platform for $1.65 billion. The company that owns the Google brand already had Google Video, but couldn't compete with YouTube, which, a year after its creation, was already receiving more than 65,000 videos daily and playing 100 million videos daily.

Most viewed videos

The song Baby Shark Dance It's the most-viewed video in YouTube history. This children's musical phenomenon, launched by the Pinkfong channel in 2016, has racked up nearly 16 billion views. Slowly It occupies the second position. Children's musical content often triumphs on the platform, as it features replayability and is easy to share.

Most searched on the platform

These are the five most frequently entered words by users globally.

• Song
• Movie
• Video
• Songs
• DJ

The most viewed music videos in Catalan

Rosalía tops the list of the most viewed Catalan music videos in the platform's history with F*cking Money Man (Millionaire + God$ No$ Money Book). The song We walked far away, by Doctor Prats, and A moon in the water, by Txarango, are in second and third place. In 2024, two music videos published in Catalan surpassed the million-view mark, Marina sta morena, by Higo Flawas, and Sexy Sex, by Mushkaa and Bad Gyal.

The YouTuber Boom and the Most Popular Channels

This figure was born among the users of the platform who produced and made videos like hobby, but currently some of them have become authentic celebritiesTheir job is no longer just to create content on a variety of topics, but also to interact with their followers in real time, a position that can be their main source of income. This role has also gained significant relevance within marketing, due to their ability to boost the presence of brands or promote certain products through advertising campaigns.

Currently, MrBeast is the YouTuber The most followed channel in the world. His real name is Jimmy Donaldson, and he was born in 1998. He is known worldwide for making videos centered around people completing challenges in exchange for large sums of money. MrBeast is just ahead of the Indian Bollywood music channel T-Series and Cocomelon, which offers educational entertainment for children through children's songs.

Famous faces on the platform

Rubius has been the Spanish YouTuber with the largest number of subscribers for many years, but was dethroned in the summer of 2023 by Mikecrack.

Infographic on the role of the ARA Domingo