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Related videos: Mr. Beat and MrBeast Compared (Released 5/17/2024) If Every President Played Squid Game (Released 6/20/2025) Mr. Beat Plants a Tree for MrBeast #teamtrees (Released 10/27/2019) What I really think about HistoryTubers (Streamed live 11/12/2023) How YouTubers are Changing the Culture (Released 3/13/2025 on my second channel, The Beat Goes On) And as promised, here is the script from my video: Jimmy: I’m MrBeast. Most of you are probably watching this on your phone right now. And you’re watching it on YouTube. But how did this all even get started? In 2004, when I was six years old, a guy named Jawed Karim couldn't find two videos online: Janet Jackson's Super Bowl wardrobe malfunction, and also footage of a recent tsunami. Honestly, my mom wouldn’t have let me watch either. Two of the biggest news stories in the world…nowhere to be found online. His friends Chad Hurley and Steve Chen had a similar frustration…they couldn't share videos online they recorded during a dinner party. But all three of them had just made good money at PayPal, and they kept landing on the same idea: video sharing shouldn't be this hard. Fast forward to Valentine's Day 2004 in Hurley's garage. They needed a name. "Tube" meant TV so why not make it more personal. YouTube! They bought the domain that night. Funny enough, Karim's original pitch was actually to make it a dating site…people uploading videos of themselves, “Hot or Not” style. But obviously that didn't pan out. Mr. Beat: Pan out? Hey, what are you doing? Jimmy: I’m making a history video about YouTube! Mr. Beat: But this is MY channel. I’m Mr. Beat. YOU’RE Mr. Beast. Remember? Jimmy: The only thing that separates us is a measly “s” Mr. Beat: I appreciate that, Mister, but I’M the American history guy. I can handle this. Besides, what do YOU know about YouTube? How are you even qualified? Jimmy: Well, I do have more subscribers than any other YouTuber Mr. Beat: Yeah I heard about that. (pause) Ok look, I’ll let you hang around to chime in every now and then, but otherwise you’re just gonna have to let the teacher teach, ok? Jimmy: I was just trying to make this more exciting. Mr. Beat: Oh you’re helping alright (turn and wink at the camera) (with Mr. Beat now narrating) Ok, so where were we? Hotornot. Yes, Karim, Hurley, and Chen, originally meant for YouTube.com to be a dating site. However, after Yahoo bought Flickr, a site that let folks upload and share photos, for apparently $25 million, the three decided that YouTube should basically be more like Flickr. In other words, YouTube would become a place where anyone could share personal videos. April 23, 2005. That’s the day Karim uploaded this (play “me at the zoo”)...the first video uploaded to YouTube. That video’s still up today, by the way…it currently has _____views….oh wait….now it has_____views….ope…refreshing it again….now it has _____ Mr. Beast: Please stop that By that time, Karim, Hurley, and Chen had enough money from investors to launch a beta version of the site, which means YouTube would be public but they’d still be making lots of changes to it in order to make it better. After they opened up YouTube to the public in May, they had a problem. Just a tiny one. People weren’t uploading videos to the site. Well that actually seems like quite a big problem since the site was nothing without people uploading their stuff. Oops. But that began to change when they did two things…
Well that seemed to work. By September YouTube 100,000 views a day. Wow! Mr. Beast: I get 100,000 views a second. Mr. Beat: Brag about it THIS, a Nike ad uploaded by some random person, was the first YouTube video to break one million views.^1 By the time the site went fully public on December 15, 2005, YouTube was getting 8 million views a day.^2 But not everyone appreciated the fact that YouTube let users post pirated clips from TV and movies. Ya know, like the people who made lots of money from TV and movies. In February 2006, after THIS Saturday Night Live video went viral on the site, NBC asked YouTube to take it down for real. But flash forward to just a few months later, and NBC was like “uh, we’re good,” and paid YouTube to promote some of its shows. On May 18, 2006, I decided to post my first-ever video on YouTube. There it is. It’s a clip of my band, Electric Needle Room, performing a song at a local show. The video is still up, by the way. it currently has 1,697 views…oh wait….refreshing…no, it still just has 1,697 views. How about one more time, for good measure? Dang it, It still has 1,697 views. Mr. Beast: Please stop that. Well that’s depressing Of course, back then internet speeds were quite slower than they are now, so even low res videos like this one took FOREVER to upload. I vividly remember beginning the upload before I went to bed and then waking up the next morning to find the video STILL UPLOADING. How old were you in May 2006? Mr. Beast: I had just turned 8 years old Around the time of Mr. Beast’s 8th birthday, YouTube had adopted the slogan “Broadcast Yourself” and was growing way faster than any other video platform online. In July 2006, users were uploading around 65,000 new videos every day and the site was getting around 100 million video views a day.^3 Mr. Beast: All my channels get around 100 million views a day Mr. Beat: Brag about it And due to this success, a little company called Google had its eyes on YouTube. It had tried its own video sharing platform, Google Video, but honestly it was kinda lame. What do you do when you’re lame but others are awesome? You buy the awesome so it’s yours! Or uh…buy the others who are awesome so that YOU can be awesome. On October 9, 2006, Google announced it had bought YouTube for $1.65 billion in stock. At the time, YouTube had only around 65 employees. As it turns out, YouTube was one of the best investments Google ever made. In part due to Google’s infrastructure and money it needed to scale up, the site continued to dramatically grow. 2007 was indeed a HUGE year for YouTube. In May, the site started its Partner Program to let people get paid for the videos they posted. Basically, the uploader of the video got to share the revenue produced by advertising on the site. And it was way more generous than any other site. Even to this day, YouTube usually takes 45% of the advertising revenue from videos in the Partner Program, with 55% going directly to the uploader. Mr. Beat: I know that, to this day, I still make most of my revenue from YouTube ad revenue. What about you? Mr. Beast: __________________ Back in 2007, though, only a select few creators could make ad revenue from their stuff. Still, within months some of these creators were already making six-figure incomes from YouTube alone.^4 THIS 56-second viral video, first posted on YouTube in May 2007, eventually went on to earn hundreds of thousands of dollars thanks to this program. I should add that YouTube also began to identify copyrighted content to make sure the actual rights holders got the ad revenue, not the pirates. YouTube made such a splash in 2007 that even presidential candidates were announcing their campaigns via the platform. One of those candidates, a U.S. Senator from Illinois named Barack Obama, took advantage of the platform for his campaign quite well. And one last thing about 2007. During that one year alone, YouTube consumed as much bandwidth as the ENTIRE INTERNET DID in the year 2000.^5 Holy wow. By 2008, “vlogs” were all the rage. What is a vlog you may be asking. It’s like a blog but for video. What is a blog you might be asking. Oh, well short for “weblog,” blogs are just websites in which people regularly post stuff from, often in a diary-style format. What is a diary you may asking. Mr. Beast: Please stop that Mr. Beat: Ok moving on. What were the first YouTubers you remember watching as a kid? Mr. Beast: ______________________ Despite the popularity of vlogs, over the next two years, YouTube was still primarily known as a place where viral videos did well, but not so much regular programming. Ya know, cats and wild moments caught on video type of stuff. But that changed when giant media companies began partnering with YouTube. Not only that, this is when YouTube added live events and better playback features. By the end of 2008, the site had begun experimenting with HD video. By the end of 2009, you could upload full 1080p HD videos, baby. Mr. Beat: Do you remember when you couldn’t post videos longer than 10 minutes? Mr. Beast: I’ve always been able to post videos longer than 10 minutes. I think you’re just old. Mr. Beat: Ah, so they raised it, and they must have lowered it again after that. Huh. In July 2010, John and Hank Green, famous on YouTube for their Vlogbrothers channel in which they sent weekly vlogs to each other for the whole world to see, held the first VidCon, a convention for video influencers. Over the following years, it’d go on to become one of the biggest gatherings of creators, fans, and brands in the world. I mean, John and Hank are STILL sending each other weekly vlogs. It’s like the world’s longest conversation. On July 29, 2010, YouTube officially increased the upload video length limit from 10 minutes to 15 minutes.^6 Eventually YouTubers, as they were now called, could unlock way longer video lengths through verified accounts. As a matter of fact, verified accounts can now upload videos up to 12 hours long. Mr. Beat: What’s the longest video you’ve ever uploaded to YouTube? Mr. Beast: ______________________ Also by 2010? A company called Vevo was providing music videos to YouTube. Music videos quickly became the most popular on the platform…since…I don’t know…I guess music is a big deal or something. Since this time, every video that has become the most-watched on YouTube has been some sort of music video. Today the most-watched YouTube video of all time is, unfortunately, the Baby Shark Dance, which is quickly approaching 17 BILLION views. Ugh. That’s disgusting. By 2011, algorithms had started to become more sophisticated at influencing recommendations and subscriber behavior. It was in January of that year, 2011, that I decided I was going to start a channel where I could post my educational videos…videos that I had previously only shown my students in the classroom teaching American history. This might surprise you to hear, but there weren’t many educational channels on the platform at the time. Heck, Crash Course didn’t even exist yet and Vsauce was still making video game videos. Heck, in 2011 there also weren’t many news and politics videos, beauty and fashion videos, reaction content, or even kids content. However, over the next five years (2012-2017), YouTube became a platform for careers, not just viral hits. Channels like PewDiePie and Smosh began to accumulate millions of subscribers. YouTube developed its own CULTURE. Video creators began to take sponsorships, sell merchandise, and do live events. Multi-channel networks, or MCNs, became a thing to organize bigger operations. YouTube expanded globally, with localized sites and languages. As smartphones became more common, more and more folks began to exclusively watch videos on their phones. I don’t think we appreciate today how wild of change this was…to watch a video on your phone! Crazy Town. For years, most people watched YouTube videos on their phone. Mr. Beat: When did you start your channel and what type of videos did you make? Mr. Beast: ______________________ By 2015, YouTube had become the main platform for music, news, and pop culture. That’s also when YouTube Red debuted, now called YouTube Premium, in which viewers can pay a fee to access ad-free content and original programming. 2015 was when I started my Presidential Elections in American History series, by the way. Mr. Beat: When would you say was the “Golden Age” of YouTube? Mr. Beast: ______________________ In 2017, YouTube introduced Super Chats in which viewers can buy a chat message so that it stands out among the pack during livestreams. Within a year YouTube would introduce channel memberships, a way for dedicated subscribers to get extra perks for their loyalty to one channel. But it was also around this time that YouTube went through some growing pains. Because, for the most part, just about ANYONE could post ANYTHING on there, some controversial stuff got posted, and advertisers got pretty darn worried when their ads got played in front of videos that…I don’t know…glorified violence and promoted extremist groups and stuff? The “YouTube Adpocalypse" described a trend that began in 2017 in which MANY advertisers boycotted and withdrew their ads from the platform, resulting in a bunch of negative traditional media coverage. In response, YouTube dramatically cracked down on offensive content and made it much more difficult to monetize controversial videos. It also strengthened its YouTube Kids app to filter out stuff seen as “inappropriate” for kids. That same year, TikTok launched, and I’m not talking about the Kesha song. Unlike YouTube, TikTok was built for the phone. It featured VERTICAL videos, extremely short vertical videos. In fact, the max length for early TikTok videos was just 15 seconds, and for the longest time the max length for them was just 60 seconds. Well, by 2019 TikTok had become huge, especially with the young folks, and so I started a TikTok account. There’s my first TikTok video I ever posted, on December 14, 2019. Yeah I think I was trying to impersonate Napoleon for some reason. And YouTube responded by introducing Shorts, (no, not THOSE kind of shorts. Yes, THOSE kind of Shorts) which it first rolled out in 2020. Mr. Beat: Do you remember the first vertical video you ever made? Mr. Beast: ______________________ The first Short I released, on July 30, 2021 and about embargoes and sanctions for some reason (man I’m a dork), looked really weird since I stretched my body to fit the horizontally-shot video how I wanted it to vertically. What the heck? A random black bar at the top of the video? Man, I struggled. Shorts quickly became huge. By early 2023 they had reached tens of billions of daily views. That’s billions with a B. By 2024, they had become the platform’s most dominant growth engine and the best way for new channels to quickly find an audience. Indeed, Shorts, which now have a max length of three minutes, completely rewired YouTube’s discovery algorithms, production cadence, and even economic incentives. It also seemed to shorten our attention spans. The COVID-19 (COVID-19) pandemic saw YouTube continue to dramatically grow, especially since so many folks were stuck at home. In fact, my channel did so well during the pandemic that, in 2021, I left teaching in the classroom to join the hundreds of thousands of people around the world who already considered themselves full-time YouTubers. Mr. Beat: When did you decide to become a full-time YouTuber? Mr. Beast: ______________________ Despite the popularity of Shorts, YouTubers were now making more epic long-form content than ever before. We’re talking really high production values which now compete with the big budget Hollywood studio films. Oh you want an example? On November 24, 2021, Mr. Beast, the guy who keeps trying to take over this video, released a video called “$456,000 Squid Game in Real Life!,” a video based on the hugely popular South Korean Netflix show Squid Game. The video took $3.5 million to produce and its recreated sets were visually stunning. Mr. Beast’s ambition I’d say paid off, as the video got 100 million views in less than three days and currently has around 914 million views.^7 In recent years, YouTube has rolled out new features like automatic language dubbing, shopping timestamps, video chapters, premieres, and AI filters, which uh…has been interesting. Last year, YouTube made more than $36 BILLION in ad revenue alone.^8 Today, YouTube is the second-most-visited website in the world. The only site that tops it? Google search. YouTube is now mostly on the big black mirrors, not the small ones. Yep, more people watch YouTube on TV today than any other device. One could argue that YouTube is bigger than every cable and broadcast network combined. Today, there are literally tens of millions of YouTube channels. Based on my estimates, there are probably at least 2 million people around the world who do what we do for a living. YouTube full-time, I mean. I argue it now has created more millionaires under 30 than Hollywood or the TV, film, or music industries ever did. YouTube has turned hobbies into careers. It has democratized and decentralized media production, distribution, and fame. The term “influencer” only became a thing due to YouTube. It’s changed how we learn and how we interact with each other. It changed advertising and commerce. It’s transformed politics, culture. It’s now THE dominant discovery platform- from music to food to clothing to everything in between. Simply put, YouTube has continued to keep the spirit of innovation and creation more alive arguably more than any other place today, digital OR physical. Which brings us to today. And who better exemplifies YouTube’s impact and influence than the most impactful and influential YouTuber of all time. One who has dramatically changed the world through their philanthropy and cultural influence. I’m talking about the Scottman, of course! Scottman895 Travel! (looking over at Mr. Beast) Oh, and Mr. Beast. Mr. Beast: I can’t believe this all started with a nipple Mr. Beat: History is weird, man. Thanks for staying curious Up here is a video in which I argue all the best art around the world is now found on YouTube. Over here is a subscribe button to subscribe to Mr. Beast. He really needs all the help he can get. Plus, rumour has it, you get a cookie for subscribing. Speaking of which, where’s my cookie? _______________________________________________ ^1.https://web.archive.org/web/20151113090506/https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=i_JS1YG8H2c ^2.https://web.archive.org/web/20170512055717/http://www.businessinsider.com/key-turning-points-history-of-youtube-2013-2 ^3.https://web.archive.org/web/20181231004209/http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/tech/news/2006-07-16-youtube-views_x.htm ^4.https://web.archive.org/web/20170501011034/http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/11/business/media/11youtube.html ^5.https://ghostarchive.org/archive/zVjof ^6.https://archive.nytimes.com/bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/29/youtube-gives-users-their-15-minutes-of-fame/ ^7.https://web.archive.org/web/20230713151654/https://www.scmp.com/magazines/style/news-trends/article/3157862/inside-youtuber-mrbeasts-real-life-squid-game-viral ^8. https://www.justice.gov/atr/media/1398706/dl Sources/further reading: Like, Comment, Subscribe by Mark Bergen Purchase here: https://amzn.to/3MRRB2C YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture (Digital Media and Society) By Jean Burgess and Joshua Green Purchase here: https://amzn.to/4j00W4I https://ghostarchive.org/archive/Qm8fL https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/articles/ztq2g2p https://web.archive.org/web/20170516152014/http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1570795,00.html https://usatoday30.usatoday.com/tech/news/techinnovations/2005-11-21-video-websites_x.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20230523124430/https://thenextweb.com/news/youtube-rolls-out-redesigned-one-channel-layout-to-all-users https://web.archive.org/web/20240505223149/https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/04/viacom-v-google-decision https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/2024-us-youtube-impact-report/?utm_source=chatgpt.com Creative commons credits: Coolcaesar Gage Skidmore
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