YouTube is now 5 years old!

It sure feels like it’s been around far longer than that. But no, it’s only been half a decade.

I remember the time when I first heard about it back in college. During that time, I was still cooped up in maintaining my anime fansite. As with most fansites, I served up video clips but they were not embedded on the webpage itself. The only way was to compress videos into WMV or RM format then put them inside zip files for direct downloads. Tedious work for both the webmaster and the site’s visitors.

Then came YouTube which I welcomed with extreme skepticism. High-speed internet back then was still too expensive for the average internet user. And being a webmaster myself, I thought that offering large bandwidth-consuming files like videos was an infeasible business. So it took me almost a year to register my YouTube account.

The video hosting site reached true mass popularity by 2006. Now, we can embed videos as easily as this on any page!

That’s Jawed Karim, one of YouTube’s cofounders, in the first video ever to be uploaded on YouTube. The first video on the site was just him talking about the largest land mammal on Earth. Haha!

And the first ever comment on YouTube?

But in my case, I waited two years before uploading my first video on YouTube. It was because I was shocked to find some of my anime music videos (AMV) were uploaded by other YouTube users. I felt a bit mad at first finding that they took credit for making them when I had spent hours just perfecting the timing and selection of the clips in those videos. But I’m really grateful to them because I would have entirely forgotten about these videos if not for them sharing it on YouTube.

To date, I’ve uploaded only one of my AMVs through my account and it’s my first video upload there too.

Someday, I’m gonna write about my whole anime music video making history. Haha!

But if there’s any lesson I learned from my story of YouTube it’s the fact that when it comes to technology, what is impractical and seemingly impossible right now may well become a common reality in less than 5 years!