As YouTube turns 20, we look at what the platform has done for us – and to us

The 20 YouTube videos that defined the platform’s first 20 years

Over the past two decades, YouTube has fundamentally changed how the world views and views itself.

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The internet’s most popular video-sharing site democratized screen time and has been the venue for the invention of a multitude of new genres – from unboxing to ASMR and video-game run-throughs. People have followed the platform from desktops to smartphones to, finally, their connected TVs – where YouTube reports that one billion hours of content are viewed every day.

On the 20th anniversary of YouTube’s first video upload, The Globe and Mail television reporter J. Kelly Nestruck and online culture reporter Samantha Edwards debate what the platform has done for us and to us – and what its future holds.

J. Kelly Nestruck: On April 23, 2005, YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim uploaded Me at the zoo – a 19-second clip where he stood in front of elephants at the San Diego Zoo and talked about their long trunks.

How long ago that now seems. Watching the short today is a reminder of the initial appeal of the amateur, unfiltered – and horizontal! – aesthetic of early video-sharing and YouTube’s early promise of a world where it was possible to, as the site’s early motto declared, “Broadcast yourself.”

Flash-forward to 2025: When I recently searched for “elephant” on YouTube, the first videos that came up were professional documentaries from long established brands like BBC Earth and Nat Geo Wild.

YouTube CEO Neal Mohan recently pronounced that “YouTube is the new television” – and released the surprising detail that, in the U.S., connected televisions have become the primary device for viewing. In Canada, on average, logged-in viewers are watching over 10 million hours of YouTube content on their big screen daily.

As we look back on how YouTube has changed our screen time, I wonder if the first question is: Has it actually changed all that much? Or is it just now the world’s primary, on-demand, ad-supported streaming service giving us, mostly, what we used to watch on linear television – old movies and music videos?

Samantha Edwards: I think YouTube has fundamentally changed the internet, as well as TV, politics, the news ecosystem, education, parenting – the list could go on and on. But I’ll start by saying that one of the big impacts of YouTube is that it birthed the term “creator” and the modern day “creator economy.”

Of all the social-media platforms, YouTube was the first to pay users for the content they posted. They did it through a revenue split based on ads: the creators would get 55 per cent and YouTube would get 45 per cent. This incentivized a whole lot of regular people to make videos, which like you said, made YouTube so charming and irreverent and launched a whole new world of celebrities.

YouTube now says there are 45,000 Canadian channels monetizing on the platform – and claims these support more than 30,000 full-time equivalent jobs and contributed over $1.8 billion to Canada’s GDP in 2023. But I agree that 20 years in, the “professionalization” of YouTube has been pretty astounding. It’s also been interesting, though, to see how when YouTubers get really big, they often will transition to more traditional TV, like Lilly Singh hosting a late-night NBC talk show after almost a decade making videos.

Nestruck: Singh’s such a fascinating example a successful YouTube creator – on the list of Forbes’ Top-Earning YouTube stars for years, reportedly earning US$10.5-million in 2018 – who put that on that back-burner to pursue a more conventional film and TV career. Why give up that kind of revenue and total creative control to host late-night, act in a Muppet series on Disney+ and judge Canada’s Got Talent on CityTV?

In a video of Singh’s called What Comes Next, from February – her first in almost a year – she answered that very question. “It became formulaic and I wasn’t creating any more: I was, like, serving an algorithm,” she says. “I want to grow and so I want to do TV and film.”

Netflix or CBC will give creatives money to make a show (if you’re one of the lucky few) and then market it – while YouTube only shares ad revenue with creators once they’ve uploaded content and its found an audience. That’s a lot of personal risk if your production values are higher than an iPhone and ring light. Indeed, it was recently reported by Bloomberg that MrBeast – who has the most subscribers of any YouTube creator – lost US$80-million in his media business last year. His average video costs somewhere between US$3-million and US$4-million to produce – the cost of a low-budget episode of American network drama.

Edwards: Earlier this year, chef and cookbook author Carla Lalli Music – who rose to fame in Bon Appétit magazine’s Test Kitchen video series – shut down her YouTube channel because, despite having more than 230,000 subscribers, she claimed to be losing US$10,000 a month on average making her videos. Even if you’re seemingly succeeding on YouTube, the payoff might not be there.

Of course, some of the most popular content on YouTube doesn’t necessarily have superhigh production value. For example, it’s people live streaming themselves playing video games, or people giving live commentary of other people live streaming their game play. And of course, there’s all the long-form podcasts on YouTube, which are essentially hours-long interviews in-studio without much editing.

If we’re talking about the cultural impact of YouTube, we have to talk about the rise of video podcasts. YouTube is the top distributor for podcasts, ahead of Spotify and Apple Podcasts. That is mind-boggling to me. Do you ever listen to or watch podcasts on YouTube?

Nestruck: I do! In fact, I primarily listen to podcasts on YouTube – like 31 per cent of Americans, according to Edison Podcast Metrics. I don’t really commute, so downloading something on my iPhone and finding my Bluetooth headphones and making sure they’re charged is too much effort. But I’m not really looking at the podcasts I put on – it’s a screen within my screen maybe, or in the background on my laptop while I work. I’m skeptical that many people are truly staring at Joe Rogan’s bald head for three hours at a time.

Edwards: I’m not so sure about that. A YouTube vice-president who oversees podcasts said in an interview with Vulture earlier this year that he believes there is a high percentage of people who actually watch the interviews because listeners (or, I guess, viewers) feel a more meaningful connection to the podcaster.

But I agree with you that a lot of YouTube content is consumed only in the background: I’m thinking hours-long white noise for sleeping, or soothing sounds for dogs with separation anxiety or loops of peaceful forest walks. I didn’t know the latter was a thing until an editor at The Globe told me he plays these videos on his TV when he’s at home.

Nestruck: Funny enough, I also do that, when I’m in hotels on assignment. I do think the video-podcast phenomenon speaks to other trends in consuming media that have occurred alongside the rise of YouTube.

For one, people aren’t, in general, engaging with screen content the way they did when I was a kid – when adults called TV the “boob tube” and imagined teenagers sitting in front of it, slack-jawed, staring, their brains rotting while tuned into MTV or MuchMusic. (Shoutout to Canada’s human serviette Nardwuar – who survived the death of music television and is now approaching four million subscribers on YouTube.)

Viewers aren’t necessarily looking at what they have on, at least not continuously. In 2019, Nielsen claimed that 88 per cent of Americans “use a second digital device while watching TV.” In 2023, YouGov found that 15 per cent of Canadians said they looked at their phones while watching TV “very often” and a further 36 per cent did so “fairly often.”

So sometimes YouTube is the TV, and sometimes it’s the “second screen.” It’s the second most visited website in the world after Google, which is also owned by parent company Alphabet.

Sometimes YouTube is described as the second most visited search engine. Do you ever search using it? When I want to find out about home repair, I often go straight to YouTube since Google tends to redirect me there anyway.

Edwards: I also use YouTube to search some DIY stuff, but, honestly, TikTok has really replaced that for me. These days, I think the main thing I use YouTube for is to look up archival videos – like old TV clips, concerts or other weird internet ephemera that doesn’t exist anywhere else. This morning I was searching for old performances of Billy Preston playing Nothing From Nothing because the song was used in the White Lotus finale. The top comments were all variations of “Thank you White Lotus for bringing us here.”

I read this incredible stat earlier this year from researchers at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. They spent a year studying the content on YouTube and found that videos with 10,000 or more views account for nearly 94 per cent of YouTube’s traffic overall, but make up less than 4 per cent of total uploads. Around 75 per cent of all YouTube videos have no comments and no likes. So as much as YouTube is an entertainment platform, the researchers said it also acts as core internet infrastructure – an online space to maintain a public record of city hall meetings, family vacation videos or school assignments.

Nestruck: Your mention of family video seems like a good segue to one of the most widespread uses of YouTube. The most viewed video of all time on the site – with over 15 billion views – is Baby Shark Dance, posted by Pinkfong, the English-language South Korean children’s media company. Aside from music videos, the top 100 are nearly all kids content. If YouTube really is the new TV, it’s the new YTV and MuchMusic especially.

I have to cop to the fact here that I don’t allow my children to watch YouTube at home – and keep them in walled, ad-free televisual gardens like TVO Kids or the kids account on Netflix, where content is reviewed by humans before it’s shared. I was scared off by Elsagate – the widespread reports around 2016 of disturbing material disguised as kids content. I also have a friend who warned me that his child got hooked on video-game run-throughs – and is now unable to sit through an actual story on screen.

I grew up in Quebec, where commercial advertising that targets children under the age of 13 is against the law. I didn’t actually realize until I downloaded YouTube Kids one day that this was not the law across the country.

YouTube Kids is not available in la belle province for this reason – though, I should note, the unintended consequence is that many under-13s just end up (against site rules) using the adult one that doesn’t have parental controls.

I also worry that my boys will develop a YouTube habit and then as teens will be led by algorithms and autoplay to more extreme or conspiratorial content.

I do realize YouTube responded to fears about rabbit-hole radicalization and, since 2019, has tweaked its recommendation system and undergone other significant reforms. But Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai was at Trump’s inauguration – and we’ve seen how easily Meta abandoned third-party fact-checking programs and paid moderators earlier this year.

Edwards: There’s been some changes to YouTube already in this new Trump era. Earlier this year, YouTube removed “gender identity and expression” from its list of protected groups in its public hate speech policy, which some LGBTQ+ advocates and creators say could result in a rise of hate on the platform.

And I’m glad you brought up YouTube’s algorithm and its unintended role in shaping the radicalization of young men. A 2018 analysis of far-right chat rooms from the investigative news site Bellingcat found that YouTube was cited as the most frequent cause for getting “red-pilled” online. And there have been other studies that have shown users watching “alt-lite” videos – videos that don’t explicitly support white supremacy but believe in ideas like replacement theory – consistently migrated to more extreme content. The last words of the Christchurch shooter before beginning his attack in a New Zealand mosque was an endorsement of a YouTube star: “Remember, lads, subscribe to PewDiePie.” This is part of YouTube’s legacy, too.

I want to go back to something you said earlier that really struck me: For kids, YouTube is TV. As we’ve discussed, the dream for a lot of YouTubers has been to eventually get big enough on the platform to eventually land a deal with Netflix or HBO or another major network. But I wonder if, for younger generations, such as the content creators coming up right now in their teens and early 20s, being a YouTube star is the end game.

Nestruck: While there are forms of “broadcast yourself” content that it is perfect for YouTube – shoutout to Narduar again! – the platform as the future home of prestige television feels like a stretch to me.

Ted Sarandos, the co-CEO of Netflix, obviously has a vested interest, but in a talk last month, he used MrBeast as an example of why those interested in professional content should use YouTube to “cut your teeth” before going to a network or streamer or producer that can take on the financial risk of investing in your next, more ambitious production. (Crave’s done a great job picking up shows and working with creators from Canadian YouTube ; see Letterkenny , Jus Reign’s Late Bloomer and Jae and Trey Richards’s The Office Movers .)

Though that might change if public broadcasters around the world start fully embracing YouTube as a primary distribution method for dramas and comedies, and not just as a place for marketing their new content or the last point of monetization for old content. We’ve already seen some CBC news programs and live events find their biggest viewership on YouTube; its recent Junos broadcast had over 730,000 views there, about 20 times the number that tuned in on Gem, its own streaming service.

I’ll also be interested in watching how YouTube-focused independent producers and studios grow – like Surrey, B.C.’s Linus Tech Tips, which employs a hundred people now, and the Vancouver-based YAP TV, which produces young-adult content that some have called the new Degrassi .

Edwards: YouTube-specific production studios do feel like the next era of the platform. But at the same time, I can imagine an inevitable, eventual pushback to superpolished content on the platform. Or maybe I’m just getting nostalgic for the early days of YouTube, when it was this communal space where we could all watch the same viral moments – Double Rainbow! Chocolate rain! Surprised kitty! – and the internet didn’t feel so fragmented. The “nichification” created by the platform’s algorithm has allowed hyper-specific influencers to blow up and build their own weird communities, but it’s also meant the end of the site as a communal experience. YouTube is a pillar of the internet. But 20 years in, what that actually looks like is completely singular.