‘I went viral on YouTube 20 years ago – I’d flop if I posted it now’

The first video ever uploaded to YouTube is a three-part saga. At least, according to its creator.

‘Intro’, ‘the cool thing’ and the ‘end’ are the three chapters on the video, ‘Me at the zoo’, uploaded on April 23, 2005.

Jawed Karim, one of the site’s founders, chats to the camera as elephants flop around in hay behind him.

‘Here we are in front of the, uh, elephants,’ Karim says. ‘They have really, really, really long’ – he takes a suspenseful pause – ‘trunks.’

A little over 20 years later, YouTube now boasts an estimated 14 billion videos. That’s one and a half clips for every person on the planet.

Among those videos is one uploaded in 2006 of four guys doing an elaborate dance routine on motorised treadmills. It was a music video for the song, Here It Goes Again, by the American rock band OK Go.

The video on YouTube, which has 67million views, is not the original clip the band uploaded. That was taken down by the band’s record label, EMI, when it had just over 70million views, the band told Metro.

Damian Kulash, 49, lead singer of OK Go, shot the video at his sister’s house. One Grammy, three albums and nearly 20 years later, tens of millions have seen the four members get sweaty in wide ties and thick cardigans.

‘Unquestionably, the last 20 years would have gone very differently for me – that video opened a whole new universe of creative possibilities,’ Damian tells Metro between rehearsals for OK Go’s And the Adjacent Possible tour.

‘Or rather, it threw down the gauntlet with the greatest, most terrifying gift a creative person can be given: a truly boundless canvas.’

The video helped OK Go become so famous for inventive, colourfully elaborate videos that the band’s choreography has a separate Wikipedia page.

‘We’ve made dozens more of those weird, elaborate videos, and racked up over a billion views for art projects that simply couldn’t have existed in – or at least wouldn’t have fit the model of – any prior era,’ Damian adds.

‘My favourite YouTube comment this week is on our video for Love, a single-shot, over-the-top spectacle of kaleidoscopes and infinity rooms made by 29 robots controlling 65 mirrors: “Whatever. Whole thing was done with mirrors.”’

How OK Go posted Here It Goes Again on YouTube in the era of slick, MTV-ready music videos played a big part in the band’s success, he adds.

‘One of the founders, Chad Hurley, personally emailed us to ask us to give [YouTube] a try,’ he says, describing what posting a three-minute-long video did for the band as ‘tectonic’.

‘In a blink, it pulled the rug out from under the massive industry of legacy media and democratised the distribution of information to a degree the world has never seen before.

‘I don’t think anyone could have predicted all the ways the world would adapt and change, and those changes are so all-encompassing that I feel a little silly talking about what it meant for my band, personally.’

YouTube, Damian adds, also provided the then-startup band OK Go with a way to reach fans in a way that TV channels (and before the days of Instagram Live Q&As) never could.

‘One day we were a hard-touring indie rock band reliant on a record label, the radio industry, and being in a new city every night to connect with humans out there in the world,’ the guitarist says.

‘Then next, we had a direct line to millions of fans.’

‘My viral YouTube video changed my life’

Tay Zonday could say the same. 17 years ago, he posted a no-thrills video of himself singing an original song, Chocolate Rain.

With his deep bass voice and earnest delivery, Tay quickly became known as the ‘Chocolate Rain Guy’ as the clip tallied 140million views.

The open mic singer was suddenly making guest spots on Good Morning America, having his song dubbed ‘the most listened-to song in the world’ and winning the YouTube Music Award.

All while studying for a PhD in American studies at the University of Minnesota.

‘My viral YouTube video changed my life,’ Tay, whose real name is Adam Bahner, tells Metro. ‘People connected with me because Chocolate Rain embodied novelty.’

This was in 2007, the now 42-year-old voice actor stresses, when homemade videos in 240p like Chocolate Rain drew crowds of clicks.

But the platform isn’t what it was when Tay first joined. He questions whether Chocolate Rain would have been met with the same success it did back then if it were uploaded today.

This is partly down to the YouTube algorithm, which decides what videos to suggest to a viewer. The recommendation system directly drives about 70% of views on the platform, researchers say.

Some YouTubers say they approach the platform as if it were a science – from opening or closing their mouths in a video thumbnail to rarely taking a break from uploading – to please the algorithm.

‘Today, loyalty determines content success. The most loyal audience that clicks and watches the most wins,’ Tay says.

‘Keeping people in loyal content bubbles is like feeding everyone sugar. YouTube makes perfect pastries, but should not have the power to decide the world’s diet.’

‘YouTube has beautiful moments, but it’s Icarus flying too close to the business sun,’ he adds. ‘It must make changes that will be bad for business and good for humanity.’

Damian similarly wonders how successful the band would have been if they had signed up for YouTube account in 2025.

‘It’s funny that we’re only in our 40s, but we’re already being treated as the grandfathers of a cultural form,’ he says.

‘But internet generations are fast, and I’m flattered by the recognition we’ve gotten from today’s superstars.’

As YouTube and the people who upload, watch, share, remix and meme videos continue to change, Damian doubts the band will change with it.

OK Go projects can take nearly a year to create, making modern live streamers, next-day delivery shopping haulers and vloggers seem like ‘speedy little creatures’.

OK Go will never be as speedy as today’s generation of YouTubers – and Damian’s perfectly okay with that.

‘The 20th century is the sea, and it’s filled with gorgeous, venerable cultural creatures like painters, rock bands, journalists, movie directors, and the like,’ he says.

‘The 21st century is the land, now crawling with speedy little creatures like influencers and live streamers.

‘OK Go is one of the delightfully weird creatures that crawled out of the sea in the first place, an amphibian that straddles both worlds and survives in a peculiar environmental niche we found in that transition between land and sea.

‘We get to sink into our art projects with the effort and intentionality of the old world sea creatures, but it’s the new ecosystem of the land animals that carries them off into culture.’

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