YouTube was created by Chad Hurley, Jawed Karim and Steve Chen, three employees at PayPal who became wealthy when eBay bought the company.
Looking for a new project, they hit upon the idea of a user-friendly video-sharing site after watching the Super Bowl XXXVIII halftime show.
During that performance, Janet Jackson's breast was briefly exposed in what was later described as a "wardrobe malfunction".
The three lamented they could not easily find video of the incident online.
But their initial plans for YouTube were not successful.
They considered the best path forward was to create a dating website where people could upload videos of themselves.
But finding willing singles proved to be a challenge, even after posting a Craigslist ad offering $100 for attractive women to upload videos.
They soon settled on just a standard video-sharing platform.
Each video could only be 100 megabytes long, not much more than 30 seconds of footage.
They posted their first video in April that year.
"Me at the zoo" is 19 seconds of Karim talking about elephants.
The amateurish and profoundly uninteresting video spoke to the appeal of YouTube - anybody could upload anything.
By the end of the year, YouTube had become a global sensation, buoyed by video clips uploaded without permission from their copyright owners.
It attracted millions of views before it was taken down because of a cease-and-desist from NBC.
In October 2006, less than two years after it was launched, YouTube was bought by Google in exchange for $1.65 billion in stock.
At the time, it was seen as a colossal sum of money for a tech startup.
In 2024, YouTube made $60 billion and remains the second most popular website behind Google itself.
"Me at the zoo" has been viewed 381 million times.
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