YouTube’s First Video Acquired by London’s V&A
February 18, 2026 | In the PressFrom Artnet.com (https://news.artnet.com/art-world/youtubes-first-video-acquired-by-londons-va-2746518)
A reconstruction of YouTube’s 2006 interface—complete with its original video player and the site’s first upload—has been acquired by London’s V&A Museum as a significant artifact of internet history.
The acquisition places YouTube alongside other born-digital artifacts in the V&A’s collection, reflecting the museum’s growing focus on preserving the design and infrastructure of the internet age. As institutions increasingly grapple with how to collect and display complex, obsolete software, the reconstructed “watch” page—produced in collaboration with YouTube’s User Experience team—offers a rare attempt to conserve not just a file, but the interactive experience that helped define the Web 2.0 era and the rise of today’s creator economy.
After its launch in 2005, YouTube became an immediate global sensation and was snapped up by Google for $1.6 billion the following year, after which it fast became the second-most visited website in the world. The site’s first video, Me at the zoo, a 19-second clip uploaded on April 24, 2005 by YouTube’s co-founder Jawed Karim, set the tone for the style of casual “vlogging” that would eventually turn thousands of everyday internet users into beloved content creators.
“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 added that the acquisition would allow the museum to show how the internet has shaped “today’s hyper visual world and the media and creator economy that go with it.”
As of February 18, the reconstruction is on view as part of the “Design 1900-Now” gallery at the V&A’s flagship South Kensington location. It joins several previous digital acquisitions, including WeChat, acquired in 2017, and the viral 2013 mobile game Flappy Bird, acquired in 2014.
An Interactive Reconstruction
YouTube was founded by Karim, Chad Hurley, and Steven Chen, developers and designers who had previously worked at the fintech company PayPal. They aimed to make the site simple and user-friendly, introducing interactive features that helped build a dedicated, social community.
Features of the reconstructed YouTube “watch” page include buttons for sharing, recommending, and rating the video that are still prevalent across the internet today. Their encouragement of social interaction to boost user-generated multimedia would be a hallmark of the Web 2.0. era that sites like YouTube helped popularize in the mid-2000s.
The interactive reconstruction sought to recreate the experience of watching YouTube in late 2006. It was produced in collaboration with YouTube’s User Experience team, a process that required inventive solutions to overcome the obsolescence of much of the software that sustained YouTube two decades ago.
“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’s CEO Neal Mohan.
The museum’s acquisition is composed of three parts. The first of these is the site’s original front-end code, as captured on December 8, 2006 by the Internet Archive, and the video player that was built to run on Adobe Flash Player. The second is the video file for Me at the zoo, and the third is the YouTube ads that appeared on its “watch” page between December 2006 and January 2007.
V&A’s Gardner hopes that this partnership will set a precedent for the future collection and preservation of significant but “complex” digital objects.
