The Victoria & Albert Museum in London has acquired the first video ever uploaded to YouTube, as well as an early watch page of the video-sharing platform, for its collection.
The video, “Me at the zoo,” was first uploaded to the site on April 23, 2005. YouTube was officially founded in February 2005 by former PayPal employees Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim. The 19-second video features Karim at the San Diego Zoo standing in front of several elephants.
The site launched in a public beta the following month and was sold to Google in November 2006 for $1.65 billion. Last year, financial analysts estimated it to be worth over $500 billion, if Alphabet (Google’s renamed parent company as of 2015), were ever to spin it off. That’s approximately 30 percent of the Alphabet’s overall value.
As the V&A explained in a blog post Thursday, the museum has acquired three objects: the original front-end code of the website as of December 9, 2006, the video file for “Me at the zoo,” and copies of YouTube advertisements from December 2006 and January 2007. Museum curators, YouTube’s User Experience team, and interaction design studio oio then worked together to reconstruct the YouTube watch page for the collection.
“As a cultural and social phenomenon, the YouTube watch page is not only emblematic of Web 2.0 and the rise of user-generated content, but also a prescient sign of what would become the creator economy and platform capitalism,” the blog post reads, explaining why the museum decided to acquire the objects. “It reveals the ways in which early design decisions would become central to broader economic and cultural systems that define contemporary life.”
The watch page is now on display at V&A South Kensington as part of its Design 1900-Now gallery and at the V&A East Storehouse.
The YouTube assets are not the first digital objects the museum has acquired, having previously acquired examples from the repoductive health app Euki in 2019 and WeChat, the popular Chinese messaging and social media platform, in 2017.
The blog post has an in-depth look at how curators reconstructed the watch page, that illustrates just how complicated conservation of internet and digital objects really is.
