YouTube Rewind is dead. Can Escape2021 take its place?

This year, YouTube is trying something new: a 24-hour, gamified three-part interactive livestream called "Escape2021." Like YouTube Rewind, the ill-fated annual video event that preceded it, Escape2021 celebrated the year’s top content trends and featured some of the platform’s most popular creators, as well as major artists like BTS, Blackpink, Doja Cat, and Olivia Rodrigo.

YouTube clarified that Escape2021 was not intended to "replace" Rewind, to which I say: tomayto, tomahto.

YouTube officially canceled Rewind in October, but the format died years ago. A sore spot for creators and fans alike, 2018’s Rewind was the platform’s last earnest attempt at a year-end video that celebrated the creator community while also wooing advertisers. Instead, it became a symbol of how YouTube had lost its way, jumping the shark to the tune of "Baby Shark." The internet burned it to the ground, making it the most-disliked video in YouTube history within a week.

[Disclaimer: The author worked as a consultant to YouTube’s Culture and Trends Team from September 2017 to January 2020. She provided suggestions around each year’s top-trending content but was not directly involved in the production of YouTube Rewind.]

It wasn’t always this way. Rewind was originally a celebration of all the things that made YouTube great, a joyous community year-in-review.

Initially a simple "top videos" list in 2010, by 2012, YouTube had debuted the Rewind format that would become standard: a recreation of the year’s top music videos, memes, and moments in vignettes that featured creators themselves. It was celebratory, self-aware, and silly. Every year, the budget for Rewind grew bigger, the production slicker, the references more robust. As YouTube evolved into an industry juggernaut and an advertising machine, Rewind transformed from a true year-in-review into a showcase of YouTube’s shiniest, least offensive elements, a commercial for the platform itself. That often meant its most colorful creators were sidelined in favor of sanitized alternatives. The number of featured creators ballooned, as did the inclusion of late night talk show hosts and mainstream celebrities.

By 2016, the video opened with The Rock and closed with James Corden’s Carpool Karaoke.

In 2017, YouTube faced an existential crisis: the "adpocalypse," a platform-altering debacle in which advertisers pulled their spots after discovering that they sometimes ran alongside extremist and hate content. To placate these brands, YouTube offered new filtering options that excluded wide swaths of content from running alongside ads. This change impacted the earnings of some of YouTube’s most prolific and beloved creators, who watched their revenues drop as their trust in YouTube dwindled. Then Swedish gamer Felix Kjellberg, otherwise known as PewDiePie and the platform’s most-subscribed creator at the time, made anti-Semitic comments and defiantly sparred with the Wall Street Journal. Advertisers fled.

As a result of this fallout, there was immense pressure on the platform to make YouTube Rewind 2017 as brand-friendly as ever. It opened with Stephen Colbert asking Lele Pons and Lizy Koshy, two innocuous Vine stars-turned-YouTubers, to tell him about 2017 to the tune of a "Despacito" and "Shape of You" mashup. The video featured at least half a dozen other Vine alums, including Logan and Jake Paul, and ended with creators smiling broadly and sliding through slime. There was only a single indication that YouTube was aware of the year it had endured: Kjellberg was notably absent for the first time in five years.

Creators Lele Pons and Lizy Koshy sitting side-by-side

Pons (left) and Koshy (right) opening YouTube Rewind 2017. Credit: YouTube

As 2018 approached, it’s possible that YouTube thought the worst was over. Then, on Dec. 31, 2017, Logan Paul uploaded what is commonly referred to as his "suicide forest video," a vlog in which he encounters, films, and reacts to a body hanging in Japan’s Aokigahara forest. Paul, one of YouTube’s top-earning creators at the time, endured scathing criticism and fumbled through a set of apologies. As YouTube scrambled to react, copies of the video appeared on the Trending Tab for a portion of users. The site ultimately took more than a week to address the debacle in an "open letter" on Twitter, which was widely derided. YouTube’s moderation policies were called into question, with long-time news commentator and YouTube watchdog Philip DeFranco opining that "YouTube is either complicit or ignorant" in the video gaining more than 6 million views before Paul took it down.

Before YouTube could catch its breath, Infowars’ Alex Jones twisted February’s Parkland shooting into conspiracy theory fodder. A video suggesting that Parkland survivors were crisis actors reached YouTube’s Trending Tab, further eroding public and creator trust in the platform’s ability to moderate itself at scale. June brought Tanacon, August the much-publicized Logan Paul vs. KSI fight. And then, on Aug. 29, Kjellberg posted a video playfully calling on his viewers to help him defeat a looming threat: the Indian production studio T-Series, whose YouTube channel was set to pass his own in subscribers. Kjellberg’s "bro army" waged an all out guerrilla war: hacking printers and buying billboards encouraging the public to subscribe to Kjellberg and unsubscribe from T-Series, in an attempt to stave off the inevitable.

The PewDiePie vs. T-Series campaign would last more than seven months, with Kjellberg admitting defeat in April 2019. It was not so much a battle between one of YouTube’s most recognizable, beloved, and problematic creators and an Indian production studio as it was an allegory for the end of an era. Kjellberg was held up as the last bastion of the old YouTube guard. If he succumbed, the YouTube we grew up loving — politically incorrect parodies, home videos, and double rainbows — no longer belonged to creators and the community that had built it.

PewDiePie vs. T-Series also highlighted the growing divide between the demands of advertiser-friendly content and creators’ ability to keep up. Large studios like T-Series could produce more content in a week than a single creator could in a year. Celebrities were opening YouTube channels with teams of producers and backing from YouTube itself. Plagued by burnout and worn down by demonetization, creators found themselves teetering on the edge of an uneven playing field.

YouTube Rewind 2018 tried its best to create a shimmering highlight reel of a terrible year. The result was, as tech creator Marques Brownlee put it, a "chaotic barrage of clips that’s really hard to watch." The video opened with a (much-memed) Will Smith cameo and went on to cover Fortnite, parody K-pop, and then pause for an awkward segment acknowledging a bevy of social issues, including mental health, Asian representation in entertainment, the "empowering art of drag," education, women’s empowerment, and "people who put aside their differences."

The flub led to an almost-inspiring unification of fandoms. PewDiePie fans were upset that their idol and efforts to defeat T-Series had not been acknowledged. Creators were upset that they had been portrayed as unbearably cringey. Driven by a combination of anger, embarrassment, and disappointment, they began to dislike the video en masse. They were eventually joined by the BTS Army, who were disgruntled after view count freezes and the removal of tens of millions of views from BTS music videos (a result of YouTube’s perpetual fight against spam views) complicated their streaming efforts and jeopardized their record-setting goals.

Together, they made YouTube Rewind 2018 the most-disliked video in YouTube history. In 2019, YouTube returned to its list format and in 2020, they pointed to the global pandemic as a reason for skipping Rewind altogether. Finally, in October 2021, YouTube announced Rewind would not be returning and that they would be highlighting creator-made rewind videos instead.

So, is Escape2021 an improvement over Rewind? I think so. Ultimately, Rewind tried to be too many things to too many audiences. "The problem with YouTube Rewind," explained Brownlee, "is pretty simple: YouTubers and creators and audiences see it as one thing" — a celebration of the best moments on the platform — "and YouTube… sees it as something completely different" — an advertiser-friendly highlight reel.

YouTube can’t make everyone happy, and Escape2021 knows that.

Ultimately, Rewind tried to be too many things to too many audiences.

The event featured notably brand-safe creators and trends. Mark Rober made an elephant toothpaste volcano, with an assist from Mr. Beast, as a gaggle of schoolchildren looked on. Soccer fan content creators AFTV commentated a nail-biting marble race crafted by Jelle’s Marble Run. A very charming magician duo faced off in a test of their skills. And there were no less than four “Real or Cake” guessing games featuring Sideserf Cake Studio. Most of these segments were accompanied by interactive gameplay for viewers in the live chat. This creator-centric content was offset by games and music video trivia highlighting artists like The Weeknd, Blackpink, Doja Cat, and The Kid Laroi. The finale featured a virtual concert with Maneskin and BTS, hosted in Minecraft. The tempo of the event was relaxed, even slow at times. It was beautifully produced and palatable and, most importantly, it didn’t feel forced.

Julia Alexander, who reported extensively on YouTube for The Verge and Polygon from 2017 to 2021, and whose work is referenced throughout this piece, says Escape2021’s format makes sense.

"YouTube is at the point where their creators exist in their own infamy, they kind of don't need to be involved," she says. "If we look at YouTube's trajectory over the last five years, what they want to put emphasis on as a brand, it's just become much more music-focused."

An illustrated image of someone looking at a notebook with "Escape2021" scrawled on the page

A lo-fi scene from Escape2021. Credit: YouTube

So putting on a show with big artists and spotlighting brand-safe creators is a smart path forward. "That way, it's hard to argue YouTube as being inauthentic," Alexander adds. "You can argue YouTube is making an advertising play, and they are. But at the end of the day, that's still better coverage than what they're going to get out of Rewind [which is] simply, ‘It's cringey.’ And that's the best option."

According to Alexander, there’s not a huge difference between YouTube Rewind and Escape2021. "One is in celebration of YouTube," she explains, "and one is in recognition of YouTube."

As I contemplated the stream, and watched a giant knife cut into an inanimate object for the 10th time to reveal whether it was made of cake or not, I realized what she meant. Whereas Rewind sought to encapsulate the culture of the platform, Escape2021 seeks to capture the content. Creators represent a wild spectrum of perspectives and personalities; they’re complicated, difficult to predict, and messy in all the ways humanity can be. Content, on the other hand, is a commodity. Content can be controlled.

Whereas Rewind sought to encapsulate the culture of the platform, Escape2021 seeks to capture the content.

Still, Julia thinks it would be wise for YouTube to invest in a new way of celebrating all of its creators, even the ones that don’t meet its advertiser-friendly standards, "in a way that is not just a commercial on NFL Sunday." That’s especially crucial when Black and LGBTQ+ creators report feeling that demonetization affects them disproportionately.

The question is, "What [do] you do that celebrates [creators] and reiterates that you are one of the few companies [providing them with] a good revenue split? Looking at those types of positives," she says, will be the key to rebuilding that relationship.

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