YouTube's First Video Turns 20 — Here's How Much the Video Giant Would Be Worth Today as a Stand-Alone Company It's the 20th anniversary of YouTube's first video, "Me at the Zoo."
By Erin Davis
YouTube turns 20 this year, and if it were a standalone business, it would be worth between $475 billion and $550 billion, according to analysts at MoffettNathanson, per CNBC.
As of press time, that would place it on the biggest companies in the world list around No. 16, in between No. 15 Visa ($656B market cap) and No. 17 Mastercard ($494B market cap). For context, JPMorgan, the largest bank in the U.S., is No. 14 with a $680B market cap.
Related: This Platform Beats Apple and Spotify With 1 Billion Podcast Viewers Every Month
The first video on YouTube was cofounder Jawed Karim's "Me at the Zoo". The 19-second spot of Karim jokingly describing the elephant's "cool" trunks at the San Diego Zoo launched the company to nearly overnight success: A year later, in 2006, Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion.
The video has more than 355,000,000 views.
Meanwhile, YouTube is now the No. 2 most visited website in the world, per SEMRush, behind Google. Both companies are currently owned by Alphabet.
However, since Google has been ruled a "monopolist" twice in less than a year (last week and in August 2024) and is back in court this week regarding the DOJ's request for the tech giant to sell its Chrome browser, or other assets, like YouTube, to remedy, it's unclear if the video giant will stay a part of Alphabet.
A judge will decide by August.
