Can it really be only five years ago? YouTube is so culturally ingrained that thinking of a time before it existed is almost as mind-boggling as thinking of the pre-internet era itself. None the less, the site's first video looks very much like the historical artefact it is. Uploaded on 23 April 2005 "Me at the zoo" is a poor-quality, 19-second clip featuring co-founder Jawed Karim standing in front of San Diego Zoo's elephant enclosure. He says: "The cool thing about these guys is that they have really, really long, um… trunks." He pauses. "And that's pretty much all there is to say."
Except of course, there was a lot more to say. Five years after Karim and two fellow PayPal employees Chad Hurley (now YouTube's CEO) and Steve Chen (now chief technology officer) founded their video-sharing website, it hosts more than 120 million videos and 300 million accounts. Thanks to its founders, who sold it to Google a year after its inception for $1.65bn, the word "viral" now suggests a popular video before it does a nasty infection.
The site is a phenomenon that's generated a whole culture of sub-phenomena with its canon of YouTube celebrities. Never before had anyone with a video camera been able to reach a potential audience of millions and for many – including pensioner Peter Oakley and BMX rider Danny MacAskill (both featured here) – they did so by accident. But when Hurley announced in 2007 that the site would start sharing advertising revenue with key "content providers" it meant that stars like Tay Zonday (also featured) were able to turn their hobby into financially viable, even lucrative, careers.
Tthe science behind what makes a video a hit and a vlogger a star remains vague. As Zonday says: "You could sooner herd cats than plan for the public to like or dislike something." It's an illuminating choice of phrase: cats are, of course, a pretty good bet. Likewise babies, though it's still perplexing that a merely moderately amusing family moment is the most watched YouTube video of all time. "Charlie bit my finger" is a 56-second clip in which Charlie, aged one, bites the finger of his big brother Harry, aged three. It's been viewed almost 177 million times.
Inanity, banality and peculiarity may flourish, but there remains much more to YouTube than cats playing keyboards. With its ability to grant an audience of millions to any clip the site has extraordinary democratic potential. Last year, footage of Neda Agha-Soltan being shot in the chest in Iran was put on YouTube instantly and became an arrestingly powerful tool in the protest movement against the Iranian government.
The site's democratic character had already taken on new, practical uses with the so-called "YouTube election" of 2008, when what many had dismissed as a site for short-attention-spanned teenagers became a battleground for one of the most momentous presidential fights in history. And, in her own, albeit unorthodox way, Amber Lee Ettinger (aka Obama Girl) was part of that fight. Here we profile her and nine other figures who, for better or worse, have come to define the YouTube generation.
TRISH SIE - The director
"You can't look at a row of treadmills in a gym and not want to fool around on them," says director and choreographer Trish Sie, who created the much-watched video for OK Go's single "Here It Goes Again". Filmed in a corner of Sie's dance studio, it features the four-piece band prancing around in perfect sync on six running machines, and has been seen more than 50 million times since its release in 2006; it was performed live at the MTV Music Video Awards that year, and earned Sie a Grammy in 2007. "I filmed it months before it was put online, and didn't think anything had come of it," says Sie, the sister of OK Go's lead singer Damian Kulash. "My main concern after the shoot was getting the store to take back all the treadmills we'd had to buy…" Now 38 and living in Los Angeles, Sie directs music videos (another for OK Go is imminent) and TV adverts (recently for Levi's), and is plotting her first feature film. TL
PETER OAKLEY - The grandad
youtube.com/user/geriatric1927
Peter Oakley, an 82-year-old widower living alone in Leicestershirecountryside, is glorious proof that age need be no obstacle to online celebrity. Beginning each vlog with the cosy greeting, "Hello, YouTubers", Oakley's gentle dispatches – his thoughts on current affairs, as well as reflections on his life and history – have impelled millions to take him to their collective bosom. His first video, "First Try", publisheduploaded on 5 August 2006, has been viewed nearly 3 million times; that year Oakley was the most subscribed user on YouTube. In one episode of his "Telling It All" series he professes himself "overwhelmed" by the responses, saying, and says, "If I should break down during this video then I will click the button and I'll come back to you as soon as possible but I just need to say thank you, thank you, thank you." Nonetheless, and has expressed unease over his fame, saying, that "The only people I want to talk to are you": he only wants to talk to his devoted subscribers. HH
OBAMA GIRL - The campaigner
Who'd have thought that a very small pair of red hotpants would play their part in electing the first black president? Probably not Amber Lee Ettinger, aka Obama Girl and star of "I Got a Crush… on Obama" (17,280,518 views and counting). In the clip Ettinger lip synchs along to an R&B tune (sample lyric: "You're into border security/Let's break this border between you and me") and dances alongside footage and photos of the prospective president. Those famous red shorts with "OBAMA" printed across the bum have their brief moment at the end. Speaking from New York, she says: "I always look back at the video and think, 'Boy, if I'd known it was going to become so big, I would have brushed my hair and done a makeup touch-up.' I was just having fun and all, like, 'Whatever!'" Ettinger was studying fashion design in New York and working as a model and actress, when advertising executive Ben Relles saw her website and cast her in the video for his site BarelyPolitical. They shot it in about seven hours. Relles suggested that she might "get a couple of interviews" out of it but instead: "Overnight I was thrust into the media spotlight and the political world." And when she says "overnight" she means it: the morning after the video was posted on 13 June 2007, Ettinger says: "My house phone was ringing off the hook. Every TV station wanted to interview me and I was like, 'Oh my gosh, what did I get myself into?'" When Relles pitched the idea to her she'd agreed partly because it reminded her of a Saturday Night Live sketch. She realised just how big "Obama Girl" had become was When she was asked to be on that show: "That was the moment when I realised, wow, this is awesome." HH
TAY ZONDAY - The singer
If you've watched the video of Tay Zondaycorrect singing "Chocolate Rain" you won't have forgotten it, not least because the song launched a thousand parodies. In it Minneapolis student Zonday (real name Adam Nyerere Bahner) plays keyboard and sings his irritatingly catchy and lyrically oblique song in an extraordinarily deep Barry White-esque voice. The video was posted in April 2007, "sat around for a few months" and then exploded. It's now had more than 49 million views. Zonday says: "I thought I'd have my week or two of fame and then it would go away, but it just kept going." He has some theories on his popularity: "Some people say I have a voice/body mismatch so there's that dissonance between a young-looking person and the deep voice.Some found comedy in my mannerisms; I wasn't originally intending comedy but, you know, if I've made somebody's day brighter then great." As a viral sensation, Zonday had countless approaches from agents and managers, "but I knew that I wasn't able to drop everything and go from being a nerd in my living room to being Michael Jackson". So he continued making music at home – and still does, only now the 27-year-old lives and works in LA. HH
JUSTIN SANDERCOE - The tutor
youtube.com/user/justinsandercoe
Australian-born Sandercoe began his career as a guitar teacher when he was 12 by putting up a sign in his bedroom window in Tasmania and charging his friends a dollar a lesson. he has since found a considerably larger audience. Now, aged 34 and living in West London, he's reached about 60 million people with his guitar tutorial videos, making him one of the most popular "how to" YouTubers of all time. He describes his videos as "helping the poor, the shy and those just too busy to make regular lessons", yet his online honour system, in which people who can afford to are encouraged to make donations, means he's able to make, in his words, "a comfortable living". HH
DANNY MacASKILL - The thrillseeker
In autumn 2008, bicycle-shop employee Danny MacAskill rode his trial bike around Edinburgh, jumping and flipping over railings and walls, while his flatmate filmed the action. The results were edited into a short film. "We had a premiere at my flat," recalls MacAskill, now 25. "We watched it three times, then flicked to the telly. It was a bit of an anticlimax."
But one of his friends was impressed, and uploaded it to YouTube. MacAskill, who'd put up videos in the past, expected a few thousand hits. "The next day I was getting phone calls from the BBC," he says. "Literally the next day. Within about four days it had more than a million views."
Now, 16 million views later, he has been signed up by Red Bull as one of its sponsored sportsmen, and tours the world performing stunts. He no longer works at the bike shop. "It's nice to see the world," says MacAskill. "I used to spend my holidays cutting peat on the Isle of Skye." TL
PHILIP De FRANCO - The commentator
His sarky wisecracking on the issues du jour has earned the bumptious 24-year-old the accolade of being the seventh most subscribed user of all time, as well as Wired's sexiest geek of 2008 award. De Franco publishes a post four times a week (Monday to Thursday) in which he holds forth, breathlessly, on celebrity gossip for three or four minutes while also posing a question of the day (examples: "What would you do if you had one day left to live?" and "What is your fetish?") One online fan has claimed: "Watching him is like drinking laughs from a fire hose."
He started posting videos on the site in 2006 when he was studying for his final exams at East Carolina University and soon became one of YouTube's first paid partners – a user whom it shares ad revenue with because they bring in so much traffic. Last year DeFranco claimed that he earned $250,000 dollars a year from his activities. Which, for a project begun as a time-wasting activity in a dorm room, isn't bad going. HH
KEVIN AND JILL - The newlyweds
Why walk down the aisle when you can dance? So reasoned Kevin Heinz and Jill Peterson when they got married in a small Minnesotan church in June 2009, and so choreographed a five-minute aisle dance for their wedding that involved body-popping ushers and a somersaulting groom. Innocently uploaded to YouTube soon afterwards – "Her dad had been harassing me to get it out to other family members," explained Kevin – the footage quickly went viral, notching 3.5 million views in two days and 47 million in the eight months since.
"It exploded," said Jill, who would see the dance recreated on prime-time US television in a wedding between two characters in popular sitcom The Office, and subsequently parodied by YouTube pranksters who filmed the couple's imagined divorce proceedings, also set to music.
The song used in the original dance, "Forever" by Chris Brown, charted as a result of the craze, but it proved a controversial choice: Brown had recently been arrested for domestic abuse after assaulting his popstar girlfriend Rihanna. The couple deflected any criticism by encouraging viewers to donate to a relevant charity, and raised £10,000 in two months.
"I didn't expect this kind of reaction in a million years," said Jill, before recreating the dance in its entirety, complete with wedding party, outside New York's Rockefeller Centre for NBC's Today show. The couple are still married. TL
JUDSON LAIPPLY - The motivator
youtube.com/user/judsonlaipply
Performing a mash-up of popular dance crazes through the ages – from Elvis's wobbly "Hound Dog" legs to Jay-Z's "Dirt Off Your Shoulder" shuffle – Judson Laipply has made himself the most-watched adult in YouTube history. (He'd be the most-watched person if it wasn't for the inexplicable popularity of a British baby called Charlie biting his brother's finger.) Since first uploading his "Evolution of Dance" video in 2006, Laipply has been seen twisting, kung-fu fighting and macarena-ing more than 140 million times, and in 2007 was commissioned by BBC4 to make a series of similarly styled idents. Internet fame has not swayed the 34-year-old from Ohio from his day job as a motivational speaker. "When all of this first happened," said Laipply during the TV debut of a follow-up dance, "Evolution of Dance 2", in 2008, "I told myself I want to stay focused on who I am." He has, however, published a book, Might as Well Dance. TL
NOAH KALINA - The artist
tinyurl.com/noahkalinacorrect
Starting in January 2000, when he was 19, New York art student Noah Kalina took a close-up picture of his own face, every day, for six years. His initial intention was to display the photographs individually, but after YouTube's emergence in 2005 Kalina transformed his idea into a video project, editing together the 2,356 snaps into a continuous film and adding a haunting piano soundtrack composed by his then-girlfriend. The result made for an extraordinary, rather eerie study of the human face and its slow deterioration over time. (It's also interesting seeing how often Kalina gets a haircut.) Kalina now works as a professional photographer, his video having been viewed almost 15 million times to date. In 2007, the director of Lausanne's Musée de l'Elysée, William Ewing, said of the project: "There is nothing comparable in the history of photography" – and that same year Kalina received a greater compliment when his project was parodied by Homer in The Simpsons. TL
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