Engadget's favorite videos from 20 years of YouTube
Published on: 2025-08-13 08:20:04
For those of us who've been on the internet for decades, today is a big milestone: the 20th anniversary of the first video uploaded to YouTube. That happened way back on April 23, 2005, only about a year and a half before Google made the shrewd move of purchasing the site. That first video is the all-time classic 19-second clip "Me at the zoo," the kind of video that came to define early YouTube. It's grainy, short and has no production values to speak of. Fast forward a few decades and YouTube has no peer in terms of its sheer volume of audiovisual content —the company says that a mind-boggling 20 trillion videos have been uploaded in the last 20 years, and 20 million are updated daily.
With all that in mind, Engadget's staff put their heads together to pick out the videos that have meant the most to them over the years. Not surprisingly, there's some weird stuff here, a lot of it from the early days of the platform. Apparently the stuff that really resonates with us isn't polish or
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