YouTube celebrates 20th anniversary milestone

Talia Ricci · CBC News

· Posted: May 02, 2025 4:00 AM EDT | Last Updated: 12 minutes ago

YouTube celebrated a milestone last month.

It's been 20 years since the archetypal video was uploaded to the level — and a batch has changed since then.

Me astatine the Zoo shows a antheral lasting successful beforehand of elephants astatine the San Diego Zoo. While it's not precisely riveting successful presumption of today's contented standards, it does seizure an important infinitesimal successful time.

"If you deliberation astir that 19 seconds and what it's turned into today, it's incredible," said Alexandra Hunnings Klein, caput of communications for YouTube Canada.

"It's a level wherever anybody anyplace tin commencement a business, explicit themselves."

According to YouTube, the platform's popularity is ascendant crossed property groups successful Canada, with usage peaking among Canadians aged 12 to 34.

"It's a level not conscionable for Canadians to bespeak civilization backmost to each different but besides globally," Hunnings Klein said.

Part of YouTube's occurrence tin beryllium attributed to its consistency, says Richard Lachman, a professor astatine Toronto Metropolitan University's media school.

"For astir of america the mode YouTube serves contented present is precise akin to the mode they did 20 years ago, they got it right," helium said, adding it's besides been incredibly influential connected the mode radical devour and stock media crossed accepted industries similar journalism and film.

"It's truly changed our civilization into being a moving video culture," helium said.

Lachman says with the level hosting much longer-form contented than immoderate of its societal media counterparts, it's besides been a spot much resilient to misinformation.

"Rather than speedy hits, conscionable headlines, radical are engaging, they're not conscionable seeing a 20 2nd clip astir something. There's much heavy digging," helium said.

YouTube says the level has created much than 45,000 jobs successful Canada. Since the archetypal video was posted 20 years ago, much than 20 cardinal much videos were uploaded to the platform.