ViralWorld

Early YouTube

One site, one upload button, and suddenly everybody was watching the same thing on the same day.

Starts in 2005, the year of the first YouTube upload. For the first time a video had one address anybody could link to and a counter under it. The edges are soft: nothing changed on the first of January. The six eras are this archive’s own way of dividing the years, not an agreed history.

Where people were
YouTube above all, with MySpace, Digg, 4chan and the big blogs sending people to it.
What it looked like
Single home videos, a few minutes long, mostly made for somebody the uploader knew. Alongside them the lolcat and the image macro, which fixed what a meme looked like.
How a thing spread
A front page and a most-viewed list that everybody was looking at. A clip got on the list, the list got it more views, and one video could hold the top place for years.
What changed
The file stopped travelling. People sent a link instead, and the thing they linked to had a view count, so for the first time it was possible to say what the most-watched video was.
What stayed
The view count as the measure of success, the family clip that outgrows the family, and the idea that an ordinary person could be known by a video.

Defining momentsWhat shows it

Kelly Shoes
Start with this one

Kelly Shoes

You might remember it as Kelly Shoes video, Liam Sullivan Shoes and 1 more

A character comedy video that reached the pop charts from YouTube alone.

The ones people still talk aboutRemember these?

Remembered, and worth knowingAlso from these years

More that people namedAnd the rest of the chapter

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