London's Victoria and Albert Museum has added a reconstruction of an early YouTube page to its permanent collection, along with the first video ever published on the platform. The exhibit is on display in the "Design 1900–Now" gallery in the museum's main building in South Kensington, according to life.ru.

A historic video titled "Me at the Zoo" appeared on the platform on April 23, 2005. In the 19-second clip, 25-year-old YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim talks about elephants at the San Diego Zoo. To date, the video has garnered nearly 380 million views and over 18 million likes.

The reconstruction includes three components: the site's original front-end code, as captured by the Internet Archive on December 8, 2006, along with the Adobe Flash Player video player; the Me at the Zoo video file itself; and YouTube ads that appeared on the page between December 2006 and January 2007.

Museum staff, together with the YouTube team and the Oio design studio, recreated the platform's design and functionality as it was on December 8, 2006. The reconstruction took a year and a half.

The museum's senior curator of design and digital technology, Corinna Gardner, emphasized that this fragment from the early YouTube era reflects a significant stage in the development of the internet and digital design.

The new exhibit joins other digital artifacts in the museum's collection, including the WeChat messenger, which was added to the collection in 2017, and the Flappy Bird mobile game, acquired in 2014.