The second video ever uploaded to YouTube is a snowboarder falling over. It is called “My Snowboarding Skillz”, it went up on April 23, 2005, and it runs for ten seconds. It missed being the first video on YouTube by twenty minutes. “Me At The Zoo”, posted by YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim, went up the same evening at 8:31pm Pacific. This one followed at 8:51pm.
What is actually in the video
Not a lot, and that is the charm of it. Ten seconds, shot on a camera that was never meant to film anything moving, of a rider riding slowly at a low rail and coming straight back off it. No edit, no music, no second angle. It is the kind of clip that would not survive five seconds on a feed today, and in April 2005 it was the second thing anyone had ever put on YouTube.
The only video that beat it
“Me At The Zoo” went up at 8:31pm Pacific on April 23, 2005. “My Snowboarding Skillz” followed at 8:51pm the same evening. Twenty minutes. “Me At The Zoo” is nineteen seconds of YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim standing in front of the elephant enclosure at San Diego Zoo, and it has been watched hundreds of millions of times since. The snowboarding clip has not. Twenty minutes is the whole difference between the two.
Why the early uploads all look like this
YouTube launched as a place to dump clips off a camcorder or a flip phone, with no expectation that anyone outside your group of mates would watch them. Grainy footage of someone falling over was the entire format. Twenty-one years on, the second video ever uploaded to the platform is a snowboarder biting it on a box, and we are going to take that as a win for snow sports.
