YouTube launches month-long celebration of 10-year anniversary

Hard to believe that YouTube is 10 years old, but there it is.

On April 23, 2005, the first clip was uploaded to a little private video sharing site. It was an 18-second clip about elephants at the San Diego Zoo. In May that year, YouTube launched in beta and became publicly available six months later.

So, the anniversary thing is a bit squishy. But, whatever. YouTube, in a blog post this morning, announced it was kicking off a month-long celebration for its 10th birthday. It’s called: “From A-Z: A Letter A Day Throughout May.”

“Ten years have now passed, and that site has grown to become not just the biggest video platform on the web — a community of more than one billion people, where hundreds of millions of hours of video are watched and billions of views are generated every day — but one of the largest and most diverse collections of self-expression in history,” read the post on the YouTube Trends blog.

We’re still waiting for the first post. But in the meantime, there were three videos from early days on YouTube that I recall seeing and thinking that this video-sharing-streaming thing could become a much bigger phenomenon.

Along with Charlie Bit My Finger (above) posted May 22, 2007, there was “Where the Hell is Matt?” in 2008:

And watching the Back Dorm Boys way back in 2006!

At the time, it seemed amazing that two guys with a webcam and a lip-sync gimmick became an international sensation. Of course, 10 years later, that’s pretty much the story of YouTube and the countless amateur video celebrities it has spawned.