London’s V&A preserves YouTube’s first watch page
London’s Victoria and Albert Museum has acquired a reconstruction of YouTube’s 2006 “watch” page, marking a significant step in preserving early internet culture, reports a Qazinform News Agency correspondent.
The interactive reconstruction, created in collaboration with YouTube’s User Experience team, includes the original video player and the platform’s first upload, “Me at the zoo”, a 19-second clip posted on April 24, 2005 by co-founder Jawed Karim. The video helped define the informal vlogging style that later fueled the creator economy.
“This snapshot of YouTube during the early days of Web 2.0 marks an important moment in the history of the internet and digital design,” said V&A senior curator Corinna Gardner. She noted that the acquisition demonstrates how the internet has shaped “today’s hyper visual world and the media and creator economy that go with it.”
Founded in 2005 by Karim, Chad Hurley and Steven Chen, YouTube was purchased by Google in 2006 for $1.6 billion and quickly became one of the world’s most visited websites.
“By reconstructing an early watch page, we aren’t just showing a video; we are inviting the public to step back in time to the beginning of a global, cultural phenomenon,” said YouTube CEO Neal Mohan.
The reconstruction is now on display at the V&A’s South Kensington site as part of the “Design 1900–Now” gallery.
Earlier, Qazinform News Agency reported that K-pop girl group BLACKPINK surpassed 100 million subscribers on YouTube, becoming the first official artist channel to reach the milestone, the platform said last Saturday.
