In February 2025, YouTube turned 20. The video site has gone through a lot over the past two decades, including an acquisition, an earnings glow-up, and multiple generations of star creators. In our 20 Years of YouTube series, we’ll examine the uploads, trends, and influencers that have defined the world’s favorite video site — one year at a time. Click here for a full archive of the series.
By 2010, the YouTube viral video had arguably reached its peak. At the time, the platform’s homepage put the spotlight on trending content while also carving out space to showcase emerging creators in categories like music and gaming. YouTube’s response videos hadn’t been removed yet, and the site’s greatest hits sparked conversation and commentary. One of YouTube’s most notable reaction series, The Fine Bros’ Kids React, had premiered a year prior.
It was amid that landscape that a quirky musical foursome — siblings Andrew, Michael, and Evan, as well as Evan’s wife Sarah — authored a legendary remix of a viral news clip. The “Bed Intruder Song,” as The Gregory Brothers‘ most-watched video is known, is both an iconic relic of its era and a precursor to the era of social media content that would arrive years later.
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The inciting incident that led to the “Bed Intruder Song” took place in July 2010, when a home invader attempted to assault Kelly Dodson of Huntsville, Alabama. Kelly and her brother Antoine managed to fend off the attack without suffering serious harm, but the story was just getting started. An ensuing interview with a local news channel went viral, thanks to Antoine’s flamboyant retelling of the preceding events.
As Evan Gregory explained it in an email to Tubefilter, the original interview with the Dodsons went massively viral on YouTube. “You couldn’t miss it — for 2-3 days straight you’d open up youtube.com and the homepage was 40 different reuploads of the same interview,” he said. “Every entry on the Trends page was a reupload of that interview.”
If you’ve been following this series so far, this pattern may sound familiar. Like Bill O’Reilly’s on-set meltdown and the original New Moon trailer, the Dodson interview was a tentpole event that invited platform-wide participation. The easiest way to reach millions of viewers was to latch onto a video that had already done exactly that.
By July 2010, The Gregory Brothers had contributed to that ecosystem for years. Their auto-tuned “songifications” of news media helped them reach new heights during the 2008 election, and they had broken into general pop culture through a collab with “double rainbow” guy Yosemitebear. Now, with Antoine Dodson’s over-the-top delivery serving as inspiration, the stage was set for the Gregories to produce their biggest hit yet.
If you haven’t contributed any of the 157 million views the “Bed Intruder Song” has received, please allow me to catch you up to speed:
Before long, Dodson’s original interview was playing second fiddle. The “Bed Intruder Song” became the viral YouTube sensation of the moment, ascending to the same homepage from which The Gregory Brothers had originally drawn inspiration. Evan Gregory told Tubefilter that the North Carolina A&T marching band’s on-field rendition of the remix is his favorite response to the “Bed Intruder Song.”
The Gregory Brothers eventually connected with Dodson and collaborated with him on additional videos. Evan Gregory noted that YouTube’s bygone annotation feature is responsible for forging that connection. Though annotations eventually gained a reputation as spammy cards that function poorly on mobile devices, Dodson may have never met the Gregories if he never responded to an annotated callout that popped up at the start of the “Bed Intruder Song”.
“The way we got in touch with Antoine is that we put a huge red annotation across the whole screen at the beginning of the video asking him to email us,” Gregory said. “RIP annotations, and thank you for helping put us in touch with Antoine.”
15 years later, a viral phenomenon’s path to mainstream recognition is completely different than it was 2010. The YouTube homepage is far more personalized than it was back then, response videos have faded into memory, and an exponentially larger number of creators now vie for attention. For what it’s worth, The Gregory Brothers’ songification skills haven’t diminished a bit.
Even amid a landscape that would look foreign to YouTube denizens of 2010, the legacy of viral hits like the “Bed Intruder Song” can still be felt. Evan Gregory noted that the songified remix would probably be a vertical video if it were uploaded today, and getting in touch with Antoine wouldn’t have required a big red annotation.
“When Antoine’s interview went so viral, we thought musically it could really slap as an anthem, and also that hopefully we could get in touch with Antoine and kick off some kind of partnership,” he said. “Nowadays these kinds of partnerships are even more common in the Shorts era because of the way TikTok pioneered connecting sound usage across videos.”
Antoine Dodson is on TikTok himself, and his role in the “Bed Intruder Song” still resonates across the internet. Home security company Wyze, for example, recently teamed up with Dodson for a cheeky sponsored video:
As this series stretches on, our focus will shift away from one-off viral hits and toward the creator content that currently defines its namesake industry. It’s impossible to know whether the “Bed Intruder Song” would become the most-watched video of the year if it came out now, but thanks to vertical, short-form platforms like TikTok, the amusing oddities of contemporary life still have a space where they can shine.
Here’s what I’ll say for sure: If you took Dodson’s advice and hid your kids/wife, you can probably get them back out now. After all, it’s been nearly 15 years. At this point, the coast is probably clear.
