YouTube Celebrates 10th Birthday With Memorable Ads With Animals

In honor of its 10th birthday, YouTube is taking a look at some of the most memorable moments on the platform, from A to Z, starting, not surprisingly, with animals.

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Date published
May 01, 2015 Categories

Back on February 14, 2005, three former PayPal employees – Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim – founded YouTube.

On April 23, 2005, history was made. An 18-second clip entitled “Me at the Zoo” was shot at the San Diego Zoo and uploaded to the then-private video-sharing site. Watching the first video on YouTube again today, it’s worth noting that animals – from the elephants in the background to the sound of a goat bleating near the end of the clip – have played an important role in the company’s history.

In May of 2005, YouTube launched in beta before becoming available to the wider public six months later. Ten years have now passed, and that video-sharing site has grown to become not just the biggest video platform on the Web — a community of more than 1 billion people, where hundreds of millions of hours of video are watched and billions of views are generated every day — but one of the largest and most diverse collections of self-expression in history.

So in honor of its 10th birthday, YouTube is celebrating users, the YouTube community. Every day over the next 26 days, YouTube will take a look back at some of the most memorable moments that users have shared on the platform in the last 10 years. It’s YouTube from A to Z. Literally.

Most Memorable Ads With Animals on YouTube

To kick off the A to Z of YouTube, the video-sharing site is starting with one of the most popular subjects of videos on YouTube – animals. The appeal of the animal video is pretty obvious. While they’re always adorable, in a broader sense, these videos comprise one of the few genres that transcends cultures and languages in order to bring joy to millions of people around the world. Featuring everything from cats riding Roombas to corgi stampedes, these videos require no outside context and can be shared with anyone and everyone you know.

In fact, people watched nearly 1.3 billion hours of animal-related videos on YouTube in 2014, according to the platform.

It’s no surprise that brands want to get in on the fun on YouTube, too. From video ads for white-out to car insurance, animals have been featured in some of the most popular ads on YouTube over the years. So in the spirit of awwww-ing all the way through May, here are five of the most memorable YouTube ads starring animals.

1. Budweiser

2. John Lewis

3. Tipp-Ex

4. Purina/BuzzFeed

5. KLM

You can also check out a compilation of some of YouTube’s favorite animal moments with this new tribute from Purina about pets and the humans who love them: Happy 10th Birthday to YouTube!

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