The old YouTube

The now-ubiquitous YouTube has changed a lot since its founding. In the 2000s, before the platform was sanitized, big companies took over, YouTube Kids, YouTube Premium, the "adpocalypse", and other annoying trends, in short, when the internet was still living in the Wild West, YouTube was completely different.

We need to go back to 2005, when three random guys created YouTube and released the platform's first video ("Me at Zoo"), video hosting on the internet was still very decentralized. When you clicked on the "videos" tab, you could find different sites offering different content. YouTube changed everything. Over the years, anyone could post their video on the internet, and anyone who wanted to find some content had to go through YouTube.

YouTube interface in 2005

It was in 2006 that the site began to become popular. At that time, the platform was basically made up of random videos with 360p resolution (digital camera standard). What Internet users wanted most was to record a video that would go viral and appear on television. Getting 1 million views was newsworthy, while today it is necessary to reach 1 billion.

On average, people did not follow YouTubers; instead, they followed videos.

In the early days of YouTube, music videos such as AMVs and remixes were common. They were simpler videos, usually made with Windows XP's Movie Maker, and one of the hallmarks of this era was the introduction and credits with a blue screen. The most popular songs were "Bodies (Swimming Pool)", "Dragonstea din tei (O-Zone)" and those by the band Linkin Park. A popular anime for videos of this type was Naruto.

Still on the subject of music, Sparta remixes were common, which were mashu-ups based on the scene "This is Sparta" from the movie 300. This type of video appeared in 2007.

YouTube interface in 2007

As mentioned before, Movie Maker was the main editing software used, and it was a trademark of the period. Many productions were just a sequence of images with music in the background and some text placed on top. This format was the most common for videos that had a song as the main theme.

As for game videos, gameplays usually have no narration, just the gameplay. Walkthroughs, TAS and Walkthroughs were abundant types. How can we forget those silent videos in 240p with the watermark "UnregisteredHypercam".

And speaking of games, without a doubt the most common topic on the internet at that time was Super Mario. A good portion of the videos published had something to do with the big-nosed character; you could say that the character dominated the old YouTube. There were remixes, fanimations, gameplays, hacks, fanarts, official animations, bloopers, etc.

This was a dark side of that time, since there were not many copyright issues on YouTube, people could search for episodes of series and cartoons on the platform itself more easily. In the midst of this, it was normal for a child to search for their favorite cartoon and end up coming across adult versions made by fans, such as SpongeBob on drugs or even the infamous YouTube Poop. This type of video has already been discussed here on the blog (link), but in short, it is the use of heavy edits on existing content with the intention of generating humor or simply irritating the viewer.

A plague on YouTube at that time was the so-called jumpscares, the famous scare videos (there's also a post about this). And along with them, the videos of supposed subliminal messages.

Anyway, this simpler time is over. All that's left is to rewatch the old videos, or at least what's left of them, since many were deleted or taken down by YouTube itself.

YouTube interface in 2009

What ended it?

These types of videos remained prevalent until 2011, more or less. From 2012 onwards, YouTube was already becoming more professional, with monetization becoming something more comprehensive. At the end of the year, "Ganganam Style" became the first video to reach 1 billion views, raising the standard of viralization to another level.

In the following years, the process of centralization and sanitization of YouTube intensified, in view of the arrival of large companies on the platform. With that came all the current evils, such as excessive ads, clickbait, YouTube Kids, premium packages, etc.

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