I don’t have to tell you that YouTube is a strange place: it’s full of cat videos and the stuff your drunk uncle uploads after a binge. With 300 hours of video uploaded per hour, yep, some of that stuff is WEIRD.
This article may not touch on every weird thing you’re found, but it will look at some of the weirdest things to come out of YouTube from the perspective of a social media professional and a casual fan.
1: Smosh started from the bottom
Smosh are currently one of the most successful teams on YouTube today. They have millions of subscribers, thousands of well loved videos, and are millionaires. Perhaps the strangest story of all is that they started with this video here:
This is the weird, and very adolescent, content they built their YouTube empire on. They now produce very high quality videos (for YouTube) like this:
Look at you with your half-decent costumes, production team, cool logo intro, and an actually pretty girl despite the fact you rose to fame on the back of a Power Rangers theme song video!
2: The most subscribed channel is pretty much pointless: PewDiePie
PewDiePie is a Let’s Play style of YouTube user – a YouTuber who literally plays video games, makes comments, and let’s you watch and listen to them. It’s like no one even plays video games anymore, they just watch PewDiePie as he has 36 million subscribers.
Here’s a typical video from Pewds, VERY NSFW language:
I said it was ‘pointless,’ but I never said I haven’t spent a few hours watching his videos either. There’s also his more comedic videos such as ‘Japanese Mouth Widener,’ which I won’t even link to…
3: Worst YouTube comments section
Dealing with negative YouTube comments are a social and video marketing reality. It’s impossible to say which is the worst comments section of all time, as so so many qualify, but if I had to pick one ongoing battle that never seems to end it would be the ScrewAttack! video of Goku vs. Superman:
Comments like this are common and blow up into the hundreds of replies on a weekly basis:
And that video is over 2 years old! At the time of writing this there were 727,000+ comments in total, and most of them are …well, you wouldn’t say them in front of your momma.
4: The most liked video is… sorry, Gangnam style
I won’t post this here for you to accidentally push play and listen to this song. And then accidentally dance around the office. And then accidentally push play again, even though you totally can’t stand this song. 😉
With over 9.3 million likes, PSY’s Gangnam Style is far and away the most liked video of all time. The next closest, Ylvis’ The Fox has only 3.6 million likes. Crushed.
Music dominates the list of Most Liked videos on YouTube. The first non-music related video came from the Kony 2012 campaign. Remember when the guy who started that went crazy? That was weird.
5: The most disliked video of all-time is exactly what you expect
The boy that loves to be hated…or hates to be loved, is Justin Bieber. His video for Baby is the most disliked video on YouTube of all-time: 4.3 million dislikes. And I am going to share it with you now because you haven’t been subjected to it enough yet:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=kffacxfA7G4
Luda’s verse is pretty tight for a pop song. To put the Bieber hate into perspective, the next most disliked is Rebecca Black’s terrible and catchy Friday. There are 1.4 million dislikes for her on that one.
Music again dominates the list, it isn’t until you get to this disgusting commercial from Rick Perry’s Presidential run based on fear-mongering and fake religious persecution:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PAJNntoRgA
The weird part is that this guy thought he could become President. 806,000 dislikes don’t seem like quite enough.
6: Most viewed non-music video is Charlie bit my Finger …what’s 2nd?!?
If you’ve used the Internet in the past 5 years you’ve seen Charlie bit my Finger …again! at least once. If you’re an English speaker, which I’d wager you are as you’re reading this, you may not know the second most viewed non-music related video is this:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYniUCGPGLs
What is that, Russian? Who knew Russians loved cartoon bears so much?
7: What YouTube looked like on it’s first day: May 5, 2005
YouTube recently celebrated their 10 year anniversary. Think of all the videos, all the incredible viral YouTube marketing that has gone on, all of the laughter, all of the sharing, and it all started from this screen:
Now, 10 years later, billions of views later, it’s this slick looking highly interactive tool:
You’ve come a long way, baby!
8: And now for something completely different
There are no words for this:
Why bother saying anything about a video who looks like a poodle exercising with poodles standing like humans?
9: The most popular cooking show is no Martha Stewart
Cooking shows are a television staple. You’ll find a number of traditional shows thriving on YouTube, but none do it quite like Epic Meal Time:
They are an excellent example of speaking to the YouTube audience. They didn’t go Martha Stewart, they went all out crazy. I’m not saying that your YouTube channel has to be as ‘out there,’ but it will go nowhere if you try to play it safe. Building a popular YouTube channel, and creating great videos, is an exercise in pushing buttons – some will hate you, some will love you, and even more will follow along for the fun.
10: Content ID is a robot that watches your videos
Content ID is a tool used by YouTube to track down copyright violations. Yes, YouTube is so popular that it needs a robot to watch videos for it to watch for copyright infringement!
You can watch the video on how it works, but the basics are they have a database of copyright-protected videos that they compared new videos too. How much video?
100 years of video is scanned every day by Content ID.
Now that is a crazy statistic to think about!
About the Author:
Ernest Thompson is a social media and crowd marketing writer at Buy Views. You can find out more about his YouTube Views service at the link. He enjoys watching most of the videos talked about in this article but has been a long-time fan of Epic Meal Time, Smosh, and Philip DeFranco.
Tom Treanor is the founder of the Right Mix Marketing blog. He’s the author of the Search Engine Boot Camp, the co-author of Online Business Productivity, and regularly speaks at industry and corporate events. His writing has been featured on the Content Marketing Institute, Social Media Examiner, Copyblogger and other leading industry blogs.
Thanks for sharing your guide, it certainly offers some helpful hints….
Thank you for this list. You helped me find Epic Meal Time!!! =)
Alright thats enough of that thank yous
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