As this year comes to a close, YouTube makes a video that’s supposed to capture the viral trends on the platform called YouTube Rewind. They’ve been doing this for a long time, which originally featured the top watched YouTuber from that year going over the top ten watched videos with a clip from each. The following year they changed the format to what we know now. YouTube typically pulls popular YouTubers from the current year and popular trends on the platform. At first, this received positive feedback from viewers and creators alike. However in the past recent history videos, there has been some major critique. Viewers and sometimes creators will voice their frustration that their favorite trend or YouTuber wasn’t featured. This year was the same.
This year’s theme was “Controlling Rewind”, where a mixture of YouTubers and celebrities talked about their ideal YouTube rewind around a campfire. Trends featured included Fortnite, Mukbang, The Royal Wedding and the “In My Feelings” challenge as well as some others. While these do reflect some of the popular trends from this year, this leaves out so many popular and special YouTube moments. Some of the popular moments on YouTube that they left out from this year include Kylie’s pregnancy announcement, David and Liza breaking up, Shane Dawson’s documentaries series, Logan Paul suicide forest and a boxing match between YouTubers. Instead we’re left with a Rewind with some pop culture references, but none too specific to the platform.
For years now, many people have commented that YouTube rewind features too many mainstream celebrities and not enough YouTube celebrities. This year, the celebrities featured were Will Smith, John Oliver and Trevor Noah but that was it, so YouTube took some criticism. However, they still left out some people who shaped the year. David Dobrik and none of the members from vlog squad made the cut even though the group won a streamy this year. Shane Dawson and none of the people he covered made it, including Jeffree Starr. Shane himself even tweeted his complaints saying, “How the f**k they gonna do a mukbang moment and not have @trishapaytas?,” another YouTuber who was passed over in this year’s video.
YouTube Rewind in the past has been a way to celebrate the accomplishments of YouTube. This year’s felt more like an ad but one that showed YouTube in a different light. This upsets viewers, who view it as a slap in the face to their own popular creators. Already, the video has over 2.3 million dislikes. Another thing about this YouTube Rewind that was different then the regular YouTube Rewinds was the amount of dialogue in it. Usually the video features clips of viral videos or a recreation of them with various YouTube stars. This year’s rewind had YouTubers talking about social issues they deemed important. While it’s always good to talk about changes in society, it came across as being politically savvy for advertisers.
Personally, I think this year’s YouTube Rewind was one of the worst. While I did like the “Sisters in Space” scene, I think they left out a lot of popular YouTube collaborations. They also didn’t have enough people from each subgroup of YouTube, specifically Vloggers. I think they should stick to the usual format and they shouldn’t be scared of asking controversial YouTubers to be involved. Those YouTubers make up a big part of the platform and the Rewind should reflect that.