How YouTube Took Over the World
It all started with a dick joke. Twenty years later, the colossal video-sharing site rivals TV networks, Hollywood and TikTok — with no signs of slowing.
BY JESSE WILL
Some afternoon in the summer of 2010, I was standing in a dingy office building in New York’s Garment District, staring at the screen of an iMac and doing what hundreds, maybe thousands of others were also doing at that same exact moment: watching a video called “Yosemitebear Mountain Double Rainbow 1-8-10.” Despite the shaky footage, the wind noise and the pixelated video, Paul “Yosemitebear” Vasquez’s footage of a “full-on double rainbow all the way” stretching across the Sierra Nevada foothills, and his crying, cracking voice — “What does this mean?” — sucked me in.
Watching it now, the video, running over three minutes and now with 51 million views, seems almost interminable by today’s standards. (Back then, we had different attention spans.) In the office, we laughed at Yosemitebear, but I wanted to teleport off of that drab carpet and into the brush of a Mariposa County mountainside. The clip felt transcendent — something about the weirdness of being alive, seeing something extraordinary, yet overreacting to it — and sharing that with the world…it might have been peak YouTube.