The video, which features YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim, was uploaded by employee Yakov Lapitsky on this date in 2005. Aesthetically, it’s nothing special: Lapisky merely notes that elephants have “really, really long trunks, and that’s cool.”
Technologically, though, the video paved the way for the current phenomenon that is YouTube. Since that first video loaded, the site has housed far more video content than any other location in human history. Here are some recent stats from the company, now a unit of Google:
- 60 hours of video are upladed every minute; one hour of video is uploaded every second.
- More than 4 billion videos are viewed every day.
- More than 3 billion hours of video are watched each month on YouTube.
- More video is uploaded to YouTube in one month than the three major U.S. networks created in 60 years.
- In 2011, YouTube had more than 1 trillion views or almost 140 views for every person on earth.
