A video suggesting that Parkland survivors were crisis actors reached YouTube’s Trending Tab, further eroding public and creator trust in the platform’s ability to moderate itself at scale. YouTube’s moderation policies were called into question, with long-time news commentator and YouTube watchdog Philip DeFranco opining that "YouTube is either complicit or ignorant" in the video gaining more than 6 million views before Paul took it down.īefore YouTube could catch its breath, Infowars’ Alex Jones twisted February’s Parkland shooting into conspiracy theory fodder. The site ultimately took more than a week to address the debacle in an "open letter" on Twitter, which was widely derided. As YouTube scrambled to react, copies of the video appeared on the Trending Tab for a portion of users. Paul, one of YouTube’s top-earning creators at the time, endured scathing criticism and fumbled through a set of apologies. 31, 2017, Logan Paul uploaded what is commonly referred to as his " suicide forest video," a vlog in which he encounters, films, and reacts to a body hanging in Japan’s Aokigahara forest. Pons (left) and Koshy (right) opening YouTube Rewind 2017.Īs 2018 approached, it’s possible that YouTube thought the worst was over. There was only a single indication that YouTube was aware of the year it had endured: Kjellberg was notably absent for the first time in five years. The video featured at least half a dozen other Vine alums, including Logan and Jake Paul, and ended with creators smiling broadly and sliding through slime.
It opened with Stephen Colbert asking Lele Pons and Lizy Koshy, two innocuous Vine stars-turned-YouTubers, to tell him about 2017 to the tune of a "Despacito" and "Shape of You" mashup. Advertisers fled.Īs a result of this fallout, there was immense pressure on the platform to make YouTube Rewind 2017 as brand-friendly as ever. Then Swedish gamer Felix Kjellberg, otherwise known as PewDiePie and the platform’s most-subscribed creator at the time, made anti-Semitic comments and defiantly sparred with the Wall Street Journal. This change impacted the earnings of some of YouTube’s most prolific and beloved creators, who watched their revenues drop as their trust in YouTube dwindled. To placate these brands, YouTube offered new filtering options that excluded wide swaths of content from running alongside ads. In 2017, YouTube faced an existential crisis: the "adpocalypse," a platform-altering debacle in which advertisers pulled their spots after discovering that they sometimes ran alongside extremist and hate content. The number of featured creators ballooned, as did the inclusion of late night talk show hosts and mainstream celebrities.īy 2016, the video opened with The Rock and closed with James Corden’s Carpool Karaoke. That often meant its most colorful creators were sidelined in favor of sanitized alternatives. As YouTube evolved into an industry juggernaut and an advertising machine, Rewind transformed from a true year-in-review into a showcase of YouTube’s shiniest, least offensive elements, a commercial for the platform itself. Every year, the budget for Rewind grew bigger, the production slicker, the references more robust. It was celebratory, self-aware, and silly.
Initially a simple "top videos" list in 2010, by 2012, YouTube had debuted the Rewind format that would become standard: a recreation of the year’s top music videos, memes, and moments in vignettes that featured creators themselves. Rewind was originally a celebration of all the things that made YouTube great, a joyous community year-in-review. Instead, it became a symbol of how YouTube had lost its way, jumping the shark to the tune of "Baby Shark." The internet burned it to the ground, making it the most-disliked video in YouTube history within a week. A sore spot for creators and fans alike, 2018’s Rewind was the platform’s last earnest attempt at a year-end video that celebrated the creator community while also wooing advertisers. YouTube officially canceled Rewind in October, but the format died years ago. YouTube clarified that Escape2021 was not intended to "replace" Rewind, to which I say: tomayto, tomahto. This year, YouTube is trying something new: a 24-hour, gamified three-part interactive livestream called "Escape2021." Like YouTube Rewind, the ill-fated annual video event that preceded it, Escape2021 celebrated the year’s top content trends and featured some of the platform’s most popular creators, as well as major artists like BTS, Blackpink, Doja Cat, and Olivia Rodrigo.
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