Who Was The First YouTuber?

Introduction

Do you ever wonder who was the first YouTuber? The first video was uploaded by none other than Jawed Karim. On April 22, 2005, he created the first YouTube channel, called Jawed.

He uploaded a video that was titled “Me at the Zoo”. His video was 18 seconds long, in which he was standing in front of an elephant enclosure at the San Diego Zoo. His video was recorded by his high school friend Yakov Lapitsky. Till date, that video has around 106 million views, 7576000 comments and 3.7 million upvotes. Little did he know that he would become the first ever YouTuber by posting that video. He certainly would have never thought that YouTube would become the largest video sharing platform later that it is now.

Who Was The First YouTuber?

Career/Early Life

By profession, he is a software engineer and internet entrepreneur. He was working at PayPal when he designed many of the core components of YouTube, along with the cofounders Steven Chen and Chad Hurley. He developed the concept and website of YouTube with them. After that, he enrolled in Stanford University as a graduate student in Computer Science.

He was also acting as an adviser for YouTube during that. He decided to focus on his studies and be an informal adviser when the website was introduced in 2005. Due to this, he received a lower share in the company compared to the other two cofounders. This is why he was not very well known to the public as being the founder. He still received a pretty hefty amount as his share, however.

Impact on Social Media

Jawed Karim is not famous amongst netizens. If you ask about who was the first YouTuber, people wouldn’t know it was him. In 2013, YouTube made it conditional to have a Google+ account for commenting on YouTube videos. This policy was highly opposed by the YouTube Community.

What Karim did was that he changed the title of his zoo video from “Me at the Zoo” to “I can't comment here anymore, since I don't want a Google+ account”.  Google had to publicly apologize due to the pressure from the YouTube Community. Google also had to drop that policy.

Inspirational Speaker

When you are the founder of something, people get inspired by you. They want to know your story. Being the founder of YouTube, Javed Karim gave a lecture about the history of YouTube at the University of Illinois’ annual ACM Conference, which was entitled “YouTube: From Concept to Hyper Growth” in 2006. He came back to the university in 2008 as the youngest Commencement Speaker in the school’s history.

Net Worth

His net worth is over $160 million. He has also invested his assets in AirBnB. He has another venture called the Y Ventures that he earns money from.

Conclusion

If you still haven’t Googled him, type in “who was the first YouTuber?” and you’ll know everything about him, along with YouTube’s founding history.

We hope that our article has answered any queries you might have about who was the first YouTuber and has increased your knowledge of YouTube’s origin story.