YouTube has added an Easter Egg to celebrate its 20th anniversary as a company by turning the video progress bar icon into a birthday cake.
Although YouTube was technically founded in February 2005, it didn’t host a single video until April 23 of that year.
The 19-second video, ‘Me at the zoo,’ was uploaded by Jawed Karim, one of the three founders, and features him standing in front of a herd of elephants at the zoo.
“Here we are in front of the elephants,” he said. “The cool thing about these guys is that they have really, really, really long trunks… and that’s cool. That’s pretty much all there is to say.”
It’s been 20 years since that video was uploaded, and YouTube is celebrating the anniversary with an Easter Egg on videos across the platform.
YouTube replaced the seek bar icon with a cake
The Google-owned company quietly made the change on April 23, but it’s not available on every video on the platform. Instead, you can only see the cake in some of the site’s biggest and oldest videos.
Jawed’s ‘Me at the Zoo,’ of course, has the update, but from there it may be hard to find it in the wild.
With nearly 16B views, PinkFong’s Baby Shark is YouTube’s most viewed video – and it features the Easter Egg on the progress bar. The second most watched video is Despacito, which also has the birthday cake icon.
It’s unknown if the they had any method of applying the Easter Egg to videos, as it appears rather random. Once you get past Despacito on the most-watched YouTube videos list, you rarely see the icon.
However, it’s on the trailer for Grand Theft Auto 6, which is one of the most hyped games that will release in 2025.
It doesn’t appear on one of the most iconic videos ever, either, as Rick Astley’s hit song “Never Gonna Give You Up” uses the standard red dot instead of the new Birthday Cake.
Better known as the Rick Roll meme, YouTube hasn’t completely ignored the iconic video as it shared its thoughts in the comments.
“Can confirm: he never gave us up,” they said.
Since YouTube’s first video, the platform has become the home of some of the world’s biggest internet and mainstream celebrities. They’ve become so popular, in fact, that even Netflix is looking to bring some to its platform.
Content shared from www.dexerto.com.