YouTube’s destiny as a virtual menagerie was foreshadowed early on by co-founder Jawed Karim. He was responsible for the site’s first clip: a video of himself in front of the elephant enclosure at the San Diego Zoo. Not long after, according to a New Yorker account of the company’s early days, co-founder Steven Chen uploaded a few clips of his cat, Stinky. Since then, this digital faucet ofmoon-walking ponies and guilty puppies has sent forth a deluge. At this rate, as Dominic Pettman, professor of culture and media at the New School, New York put it, “YouTube is likely to end up as the world’s largest nature preserve.”
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2014/10/birds_attacking_drones_why_these_videos_make_us_cheer.html