YouTube, founded by ex-PayPal employees, turns 10 years old today. In case you underestimate the importance of YouTube, it has created celebrities (For example, Justin Bieber was discovered in YouTube videos), empires out of teengaers, the President of the United States uses it, and according to YouTube’s own statistics page, 300 hours of video are uploaded every minute (think about that).

After being founded, it only took two years for Google to buy it out for almost $2 billion, and it is now the de facto video service on the web. It is one of the reasons we all discovered we had to get rid of Flash and adopt the HTML5 standard which is much more secure and doesn’t require third-party software to play videos in a browser. Remember the days of the QuickTime player, or – shudder – RealPlayer?

Anyway, if you’re interested, here is the very first video ever uploaded to YouTube, entitled “Me at the Zoo.” Don’t expect to be blown away, it’s more historical oddity than anything else, but a very important one nonetheless.