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# YouTube's first video upload is in the V&A Museum
- URL: https://onemanandhisblog.com/2026/03/youtubes-first-video-upload-is-in-the-v-a-museum/
- Published: 2026-03-23T10:10:17.000Z
- Updated: 2026-03-23T10:10:17.000Z
- Description: Both the video and a recreation of a watch page from the mid-2000s are on display.
- Author: Adam Tinworth
- Tags: YouTube, digital archives, digital culture

Believe it or not, this is one of the most significant videos every recorded:

Why? Well, that's one of the co-founders of YouTube, in the first video ever uploaded to the platform, nearly 20 years ago.

The cultural significant of this has been recognised, two decades on, [by the V&A museum in London](https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/va-museum-youtube-first-video/?ref=onemanandhisblog.com):

> The Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) is helping preserve and document the history and culture of the internet with its latest landmark acquisition: a reconstruction of an early YouTube watch page, featuring the first-ever upload, "Me at the zoo.”

The exhibit's been live a little over a month, and is part of the [V&A's ongoing efforts to record digital culture](https://www.vam.ac.uk/articles/acquiring-an-early-youtube-watch-page-and-its-first-ever-video?ref=onemanandhisblog.com):

> The V&A is no stranger to the challenges of collecting and displaying digital objects, having previously acquired examples such as the reproductive health app [Euki](https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O1724809/euki-mobile-application/?ref=onemanandhisblog.com) in 2019 and the social media platform [WeChat](https://collections.vam.ac.uk/context/organisation/AUTH339854/wechat?ref=onemanandhisblog.com) in 2017\. The acquisition of the earliest available YouTube watch page featuring ‘[Me at the zoo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNQXAC9IVRw&ref=onemanandhisblog.com)’, dated 8 December 2006, captures a significant moment in the history of the internet and web design – the shift from a read-only internet to one centred on user-generated multimedia content, social interaction and collaboration, otherwise known as Web 2.0.

It's slightly alarming to me, as someone only in his mid-50s, that I'm becoming an elder of the internet. This blog, for example, is about three years older than YouTube. But knowledge of – and understanding from – the early days of the internet is being lost. Digital history, like all history, has a tendency towards cycles. We need to understand this past to take lessons from it. 

In journalism, we're looping back to managing communities around our journalism – the exact same work I and my colleagues were doing as YouTube launched. Everything old is new again.