How many views did “Me at the zoo” get?

jawed · published 2005-04-23 · TubeCount #47, played 2026-07-28

Why this one

Jawed Karim, YouTube co-founder, uploaded 18 seconds of himself in front of the elephant enclosure at San Diego Zoo on April 23, 2005. The title is 'Me at the zoo.' It is the first video ever posted to YouTube. It has 394 million views and a comment section that has been running continuously for 21 years. The number is genuinely hard to place: too many for a boring zoo clip, not enough for the genesis of the most-watched video platform in history. By 2026 it functions less as a video and more as a pilgrimage site — people find it, confirm it exists, leave a comment, and move on. The algorithm never stops routing traffic to it because traffic is what built the algorithm.

How everyone did

7 players called this one. The average score was 27 out of 100, and on the thumbnail alone people were typically 24× off.