As YouTube has changed throughout the years, so have the types of videos that have gone viral. This chart showcases 5 different years, a viral video from each year, and how many views each video got. Over the years, the term “viral” has definitely changed in numbers. The first video in 2005 titled “Me at the Zoo” was pretty popular at the beginning of YouTube, with about 11,000 views by the end of 2005. While some videos can get up to billions of views today. This just goes to show how popular YouTube is today, compared to the year of its launch. Not only was “Me at the Zoo” pretty viral at the time, but it was the first video ever posted to youtube by one of the original creators. 

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        Each video represented here is a different genre of video, showcasing the differences in what is viral for each separate year. The second video is about a guy seeing this double rainbow outside of Yosemite National Park. He is in awe of this double rainbow. It is 3 minutes long and he spends this time talking about and appreciating the beauty of the rainbow. Many people thought his amazement by this was pretty funny, which is why it became as viral as it was in 2010. As YouTube began posting clips from different television shows and movies, these videos became extremely popular. Lip sync videos, something that was big during the early stages of youtube, turned into games on late night talk shows. This is the next viral video that is on the chart. It is a lip sync battle that was on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. This was a lip sync battle between Will Ferrell, Kevin Hart, and Jimmy Fallon. This was during the popular sip sync trend in 2015 that had been going around youtube, so these videos of celebrities doing it were pretty popular. This became a staple of the tonight show, with many different celebrities participating in this. This video had 54 million views in 2015.

       The next video on the chart is very different from the others. This video was from 2020, so at this point YouTube has been around for a while now. This is when it started to become more popular for creators on YouTube to be “cancelled”. Viewers would start to notice inappropriate behavior from some of the famous creators at the time and work together to call it out. It led a lot of viewers to discover things they didn’t know before about some of their favorite youtubers, as well as a lot of them losing their subscribers. In 2020, Shane Dawson had a huge loss of subscribers after people found some more disturbing videos and clips of him from the past. This led to him creating an “apology” video, which in the end didn’t help his career very much. This was the start of many other people being cancelled, and many more apology videos. The last video on the chart is a viral video from 2025. This video is a clip from a kiss cam at a Coldplay concert which caught a man cheating on his wife at a concert. Coldplay made a joke about the two people’s reaction, but it actually ended up being true. This video caught a lot of people’s attention, though it ruined the career of the man in the video. It had more than 60 million views in just a couple of days as this video was spread around many different social media platforms including YouTube, Tiktok, and others. 

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      Overall, both the amount of views to make a viral video has changed, as well as the genres of videos that have gone viral over the last 20 years of YouTube. These things continue to change as trends change and YouTube grows older. Who knows what viral videos could come from the next couple of years?