Top 10 Most Infamous YouTube Videos
Chloe Watson, Associate Writer
photo courtesy of UnSplash.com
YouTube is a great website – whether you need a crash course in psychology or a vine compilation, you’ll find something for you. Still, a site where anyone can upload anything isn’t going to be perfect all the time. Thus, here are ten of the most infamous YouTube videos to ever grace the second screen.
It’s all in the title. “Sitting and Smiling” is a series in which a guy, probably in his twenties, sits and smiles at the camera, for about four hours. It’s one of those things where you’re not even sure if it’s supposed to be scary – there’s something very unsettling about it, especially considering it’s a 300-part series.
9. Just Trying to Blend in With My Green Screen
Jenna Marbles is a treasure. If you’re unfamiliar, she has a reputation for making extremely specific videos with clickbait-style titles, but she always delivers. Â In this video, she wrapped herself in green, painted her head green, and disappeared into the background. There’s something unexplainably satisfying about it.
This song will get stuck in your head and refuse to leave. Â It was a meme for about a month back in 2018, which is probably how it got so popular in the first place. It’s a simple song and dance video, for children, but it’s so, so incredibly catchy.
You wouldn’t think a simple jump scare would be so effective, especially a badly-edited one from 2006. But life is just full of surprises.
Jake Paul was a Viner-turned-YouTuber whose overnight fame seems to have gotten to his head. I’ve never met any of his fans, but he has 17 million subscribers. This music video alone has almost 230 million views. Apparently, a lot of people like hearing a white kid rap about how much money he has.
5. PewDiePie’s “How About That…”
Pewdiepie (Felix Kjellberg) currently holds the record for most subscribers on the platform, around 83 million at the time of writing. However, in a video that has since been deleted, Kjellberg made several anti-Semitic jokes, and the media was furious. Still, he was not apologetic, rather claiming it was blown out of proportion.
DHMIS is a series of well-made music videos created through animation and puppeteering, in the Sesame Street style. Each video starts out pretty mundane, but takes a dark, visceral twist in the second half as everything falls apart into gore and insanity. It had a massive fanbase around 2012, but seems to be coming back sometime soon.
3. Despacito – Luis Fonsi ft. Daddy Yankee
It felt like you just couldn’t escape this song for a while. At almost 6 billion views and 31 million likes, the music video is currently the most viewed video on the platform. I’m not even sure why – it’s a jam, sure, but it’s not the typical viral music. It even became a meme.
2. Logan Paul’s Suicide Forest
In one of the most controversial YouTube videos ever, Logan Paul posted a vlog in which he went to a suicide forest in Japan. Much of the video was seen as inappropriate, from Paul joking about the experience and even showing the body of a recently-deceased man. Many fans were furious, and it was quickly taken down. He has since apologized, but many people accused him of insincerity.
Oh, dear YouTube. The company tries so hard to give its fans what they want. If you don’t know, Rewind is a video YouTube puts out at the end of every year, looking back on the platform’s evolution. Given that 2018 was a year ripe with controversy, that didn’t make for a great review. Maybe it was that host Will Smith looked like he was in pain, or that 2018 wasn’t YouTube’s finest year, but it skyrocketed into becoming the most disliked video on the platform in less than a week.
There’s something beautiful about terrible content – we can all laugh at it together. Infamous YouTube videos range across all genres – gamers, bloggers, music videos, even animation. According to NGU junior Autumn Lowry, “YouTube’s variety is what makes it special; they have something for every kind of person.” And that’s what makes a platform worth celebrating.
