In February 2025, YouTube turned 20. The video website has gone by means of rather a lot over the previous twenty years, together with an acquisition, an earnings glow-up, and a number of generations of star creators. In our 20 Years of YouTube sequence, we’ll look at the uploads, traits, and influencers which have outlined the world’s favourite video website — one yr at a time. Click on right here for a full archive of the sequence.
We at the moment are midway by means of this mission, equidistant from YouTube’s inception and the present yr. And in some ways, 2015 was the inflection level that separated the creator neighborhood’s previous from its current.
As PewDiePie introduced viewership and subscriber numbers to unprecedented heights, channels like DisneyCollectorBR signaled a shift to anonymous, faceless content material that’s nonetheless occurring at present. In 2015, multi-channel networks have been beginning to merge with the media firms that acquired them, the variety of lively creators was skyrocketing, and a humble lip-sync app known as musical.ly was simply starting to rework into the TikTok-ified large it might grow to be just a few years later.Subscribe for day by day Tubefilter High StoriesSubscribe
It was a second when technological improvements and substantial outdoors investments remodeled the that means of the phrase “creator.” It was additionally the beginning of a creative revolution. After chasing recognition from conventional Hollywood techniques for years, YouTube stars started to know the artistic potential of the platform that had launched them to international fame. A decade later, YouTube is now the most well liked factor on TV screens, and that cultural shift may need appeared utterly completely different if not for a highschool dropout with a director’s eye, a gritty filmmaking type, and a penchant for sporting distressed sun shades.
Even earlier than he launched his YouTube channel, Casey Neistat was a identified amount. After chopping his enamel within the underground New York Metropolis arts scene, he landed an HBO sequence alongside his sibling Van. The Neistat Bros ran for eight episodes in 2010, and Casey started importing to his namesake YouTube hub that very same yr.
Many creators who broke out on YouTube in 2010s selected to chase TV and movie offers. There have been some success tales, like Issa Rae‘s HBO sitcom Insecure and the Rachel Bloom star car Loopy Ex-Girlfriend. In lots of circumstances, nevertheless, makes an attempt to translate on-line video success to media like tv and movie met acquainted roadblocks.
It was unclear who these initiatives ought to be marketed to. The plain selection concerned catering to the star creator’s current followers, however a few of these individuals selected to look at digital content material due to restricted entry to TV (or a common distaste for it), so changing them into cable viewers proved difficult. Different creators struggled to adapt a sure vibe or humorousness into a conventional format, resulting in poorly reviewed fare. In some circumstances, a creator’s popularity proved so controversial that it sandbagged makes an attempt to launch a extra polished, sanitized kind of content material.
Lengthy story brief: For creator-led TV and movie initiatives of the mid-2010s, there was a spot between hype and significant reception. Again then, it was pure to take a position that web success tales may not be prepared for primetime. Then Casey Neistat confirmed up and reminded creators that they didn’t need to covet TV airtime. On YouTube, they might unlock a brand new artistic format that developed the normal media pipeline reasonably than chasing after it.
Neistat’s early YouTube movies comprise all of the hallmarks that will later outline his day by day vlog. His first add — a documentary in regards to the emergency brakes in New York Metropolis’s subway trains — is full of cheeky establishing pictures, handwritten annotations, daring modifying decisions, and vibey musical cues.
In 2015, he began making these intelligent, suave movies day by day. “I wish to make extra motion pictures, however there’s a lot happening in my life, it makes it robust,” he mentioned within the first of 534 consecutive day by day vlogs. “Beginning at present, my thirty fourth birthday, I’m going to make a film day by day, for some time in any case, or till I get bored.”
The day by day vlog wasn’t at all times a straight line, and its construction was removed from linear. Topics ranged from the adventurous to the mundane. That, greater than the rest, was the supply of Neistat’s powers. He wasn’t constrained by a studio that will have required him to make a certain quantity of content material or make it a sure method.
His vlog was one thing he may have known as off at any time, and its messiness as a artistic mission gave it a uncooked high quality that might by no means be achieved on cable. Neistat’s movies felt so actual that viewers chastised him for not spending sufficient time along with his household, though he spent greater than 23 hours of his days off digicam.
Alongside the best way, Neistat dabbled with different content material classes, just like the digital travelogue and Pink Bull-style excessive sports activities movies. By turning the standard vlog right into a wide-reaching, genre-bending experiment, Neistat paved the best way for the subsequent era of vloggers: Upstarts like Emma Chamberlain, David Dobrik, and Elle Mills, who imbued extremely private movies with sharp type and various subject material.
In fact, Neistat’s vlog was by no means meant to final ceaselessly, and by 2016, he was already pivoting to a distinct type of rapid, on-the-street filmmaking. His app Beme offered to CNN that yr, and he later moved on to different initiatives, similar to his Manhattan creator area 368.
For creators who felt pigeonholed by the flawed YouTube-to-TV pipeline, Neistat provided a brand new method ahead. He sensed that viewers have been craving deeper, extra intimate connections with their favourite web stars reasonably than upright, scripted interactions. A decade later, with the rise of streaming tradition, Neistat’s concepts have confirmed to be prophetic. He blazed a path others may observe with out leaving the confines of social media — after which he rode his skateboard proper by means of it.
