2000·Early web, before YouTube
Newgrounds
The site where a generation learned to animate, five years before YouTube existed.
A trend people joined in with
This Moment began as a web page, not as a video. Originally published on Newgrounds.
- SourceNot an upload originally
- MediaNot held by ViralWorld
What this was
Tom Fulp started Newgrounds in 1995 and turned it into an open portal: anybody could upload a Flash animation or a browser game, and everybody else voted on it. Nothing was commissioned and nothing was gatekept. The front page was whatever had survived the vote that week.
It first appeared in 2000, during early web, before YouTube.
It is the missing institution in most accounts of internet video, because those accounts start at YouTube. Before 2005 the place amateur animation actually lived was Newgrounds, and it is where an enormous number of working animators, game developers and studios started — Vice's history of the Flash cartoon treats it as the centre of the form.
Adobe's discontinuation of Flash in 2020 could have deleted the entire archive; Newgrounds built its own player and kept it running. The site is still operating, thirty years after it started, and remains the largest surviving repository of a decade of internet animation that would otherwise be gone.
Early web, before YouTube
- Crazy Frog 2003Early web, before YouTube
- Rejected Cartoons 2000Early web, before YouTube
- Bad Day office video 1997Early web, before YouTube
- Dancing Baby 1996Early web, before YouTube
- Shipping 1996Early web, before YouTube
- Scary Maze Game 2004Early web, before YouTube
- Dean Scream 2004Early web, before YouTube
- Salad Fingers 2004Early web, before YouTube
- This Land (JibJab) 2004Early web, before YouTube
- Ding Dong Song 2004Early web, before YouTube
Related
Nothing related yet. Relationships are recorded where evidence supports them, not inferred from similarity.
Behind the recordWhere it came from
There is no original upload to identify: this Moment did not begin as one. ViralWorld holds no copy of it either — what it was, when it appeared and what people called it is the record.
Nothing here is claimed to be the first publication of this Moment, because the first publication was not an upload. This Moment began as a web page, not as a video. Originally published on Newgrounds.
Not established. This index only names a creator where the evidence supports it.
- What happens
- Tom Fulp started Newgrounds in 1995 and turned it into an open portal: anybody could upload a Flash animation or a browser game, and everybody else voted on it. Nothing was commissioned and nothing was gatekept. The front page was whatever had survived the vote that week.