How YouTube became a pioneer for creative innovation
To the uninitiated, the video-hosting site YouTube may just seem like a chaotic crèche where on one side of the room, hyperactive teenagers dominate with rage-fueled gaming videos, and on the other, earnest young guitarists shrill into the camera with an abundance of vocal fry. Indeed, this is the case for small corners of the popular platform, yet, over the course of its 18-year history, it has bared witness to a technological and cultural revolution, hosting the thoughts, feelings and mini-creations of generations of budding filmmakers who haven’t just been interested in cynical financial gain.
The entire concept of monetisation didn’t come into effect on the site until 2006, one year after its creation, and even though the platform was a considerable success, with 20 million using the service per month, it was nothing compared to the 122 million who would visit on a daily basis in 2022. Social media, which is essentially what YouTube is, was yet to become a contemporary phenomenon, leaving early users of the video-sharing service to speak to their webcams in relative isolation.
To visit the 20 earliest videos on YouTube is to travel down an ethereal wormhole of 21st pop culture, where the soft video quality of the handheld shaky cam reveals an innate innocence that no longer exists in the modern world. Watching these videos is peculiarly melancholy, as well as undoubtedly fascinating, providing something of a cross-section of the site’s eventual content types, including prank videos, holiday home movies, skits, bizarre animations and cute animal videos.
Still, as the popularity of the internet and reality TV grew, so too did the thrill of YouTube, providing a space for content creators to be their own screen stars, building their visual identity without having to go on Big Brother, Pop Idol or Survivor.
No doubt, the popularity of prank and stunt videos, in particular, came after the success of MTV’s Jackass at the turn of the century, a show that kept friendly camaraderie and idiotic stunts at its heart. Filmed mostly using camcorders, the show wasn’t dissimilar to the content the likes of Ed Bassmaster, Greg Benson and Rémi Gaillard were making during the infancy of YouTube, long before the likes of Roman Atwood, Vitaly Zdorovetskiy, and Logan Paul would come along.
Among these more commercial names were a generous handful of budding creatives who cared far more about the quality of their filmmaking rather than the monetary gain they may be earning off their work. Such creators spanned genre and style, with movie reviewer Chris Stuckmann covering the latest releases from his bedroom, Swedish filmmaker David F. Sandberg making comedic animations, whilst the likes of Bo Burnham and Joe Penna (better known as MysteryGuitarMan) released catchy music skits. Those aforementioned names, along with the likes of Joseph Pelling, Rebecca Sloan, Dan Trachtenberg, Dave McCary, and stars Kyle Mooney, each used YouTube as a sounding board for unfettered creativity, with each one now thriving with a career in their respective field of filmmaking.
For a generation of young filmmakers, YouTube became the perfect platform where individuals could share their creativity with thousands of invisible eyes, steadily building their creative platform video by video. Without the popularisation of Facebook and Twitter, and the creation of Instagram and TikTok, YouTube became the world’s most effective social media platform, and creators were just blissfully unaware of its gravity – at least for a moment.
Speaking to NPR about his experience on the platform, Burnham stated in 2018: “It was 2006. It was just when it started. And I had written some little silly songs and wanted to show them to my brother who was at college. And someone said, you should post it on YouTube…YouTube was just a place for where it was like, you got a funny skit or something, post it here. It was, like, that and Myspace – were sort of the things people used”.
Without the commercial aim of monetisation, YouTube fostered a unique platform where creators urged the success of one another, creating a site which fizzled with youthful exuberance. Created by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim when they were each in their twenties, YouTube became a space formed by and developed for young people to seize the opportunity of new technologies.
The likes of Chris Stuckmann, Bo Burnham and David F. Sandberg used the platform much like a modern-day Instagram influencer, building their profile not with looks but with talent in the hopes of one day pursuing their artistic dream. Whilst the platform may now resemble something far more confusing and commercially cynical, YouTube was a pioneer of creative innovation, helping filmmakers thrive and find their voice.
