In 2005 a man made history when he shot a short clip for a video sharing site, but he didn’t even know what the webpage was for when he did it.
Yakov Lapitsky recorded ‘Me at the Zoo’, an 18-second video of his friend shot in front of elephants in San Diego, on April 23 that year, becoming the first person to shoot for YouTube.
The video, which has now been viewed more than 17million times, would transform the way that people use the Internet, watch television and communicate with each other over the past ten years.
The site is celebrating the 10th anniversary of its domain name today.
Mr Lapitsky, now 34, was working as a doctoral student at the University of Delaware when he shot his friend Jawed Karim at the San Diego Zoo speaking about the elephants’ trunks.
He didn’t even know about the video going up on YouTube until a month after his trip to California when Mr Karim posted it, according to the Toledo Blade.
Mr Karim, now 36, along with PayPal coworkers Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, had registered the domain name YouTube earlier that year.
The site would officially launch in November 2005, quickly racking up more than a million viewers per month by the next summer.
Now more than 1billion users use YouTube everyday and 300 hours of video, 60,000 times longer than the zoo clip, are uploaded every minute.
‘I didn’t think much of it other than it was pretty adorable,’ Mr Lapitsky, now an environmental engineering professor at University of Toledo, told the New York Daily News.
The beginnings of the site were small, with individuals uploading their grainy camera footage by bits and bytes at a time.
Many of the first videos were silly snapshots of life captured on camera, people propping themselves up on corridor walls or a man getting his head shaved.
What started as cute videos quickly became lucrative, and tech giant Google bought the company in 2006 for $1.65billion, when it was still unprofitable.
The site is now used for applications as diverse presidential debates, official music videos, web television series, clips of people’s pets and Internet-only news outlets.
It has expanded to 75 countries and 61 languages and had $3.6billion in net revenue in 2013.
The video sharing service is expected to reach $18.5billion in revenue yearly by 2019, according to Forbes.
