20 years of YouTube: In 2015, Casey Neistat revolutionized the vlog without removing his shades

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.

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We are now halfway through this project, equidistant from YouTube’s inception and the current year. And in many ways, 2015 was the inflection point that separated the creator community’s past from its present.

As PewDiePie brought viewership and subscriber numbers to unprecedented heights, channels like DisneyCollectorBR signaled a shift to nameless, faceless content that is still occurring today. In 2015, multi-channel networks were starting to merge with the media corporations that acquired them, the number of active creators was skyrocketing, and a humble lip-sync app called musical.ly was just beginning to transform into the TikTok-ified giant it would become a few years later.

It was a moment when technological innovations and substantial outside investments transformed the meaning of the word “creator.” It was also the start of an artistic revolution. After chasing recognition from traditional Hollywood systems for years, YouTube stars began to understand the creative potential of the platform that had launched them to global fame. A decade later, YouTube is now the hottest thing on TV screens, and that cultural shift might have looked completely different if not for a high school dropout with a director’s eye, a gritty filmmaking style, and a penchant for wearing distressed sunglasses.

Even before he launched his YouTube channel, Casey Neistat was a known quantity. After cutting his teeth in the underground New York City arts scene, he landed an HBO series alongside his sibling Van. The Neistat Bros ran for eight episodes in 2010, and Casey began uploading to his namesake YouTube hub that same year.

Many creators who broke out on YouTube in 2010s chose to chase TV and film deals. There were some success stories, like Issa Rae‘s HBO sitcom Insecure and the Rachel Bloom star vehicle Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. In many cases, however, attempts to translate online video success to media like television and film met familiar roadblocks.

It was unclear who those projects should be marketed to. The obvious choice involved catering to the star creator’s existing fans, but some of those people chose to watch digital content because of limited access to TV (or a general distaste for it), so converting them into cable viewers proved challenging

. Other creators struggled to adapt a certain vibe or sense of humor into a traditional format, leading to poorly reviewed fare. In some cases, a creator’s reputation proved so controversial that it sandbagged attempts to launch a more polished, sanitized type of content.

Long story short: For creator-led TV and film projects of the mid-2010s, there was a gap between hype and critical reception. Back then, it was natural to speculate that internet success stories might not be ready for primetime. Then Casey Neistat showed up and reminded creators that they didn’t have to covet TV airtime. On YouTube, they could unlock a new creative format that evolved the traditional media pipeline rather than chasing after it.

Neistat’s early YouTube videos contain all the hallmarks that would later define his daily vlog. His first upload — a documentary about the emergency brakes in New York City’s subway trains — is stuffed with cheeky establishing shots, handwritten annotations, bold editing choices, and vibey musical cues.

In 2015, he started making those clever, artful videos every day. “I want to make more movies, but there’s so much going on in my life, it makes it tough,” he said in the first of 534 consecutive daily vlogs. “Starting today, my 34th birthday, I’m going to make a movie every day, for a while anyways, or until I get bored.”

The daily vlog wasn’t always a straight line, and its structure was far from linear. Subjects ranged from the adventurous to the mundane. That, more than anything else, was the source of Neistat’s powers. He wasn’t constrained by a studio that would have required him to make a certain amount of content or make it a certain way.

His vlog was something he could have called off at any time, and its messiness as a creative project gave it a raw quality that could never be achieved on cable. Neistat’s videos felt so real that viewers chastised him for not spending enough time with his family, even though he spent more than 23 hours of his days off camera.

Along the way, Neistat dabbled with other content categories, like the virtual travelogue and Red Bull-style extreme sports videos. By turning the humble vlog into a wide-reaching, genre-bending experiment, Neistat paved the way for the next generation of vloggers: Upstarts like Emma Chamberlain, David Dobrik, and Elle Mills, who imbued highly personal videos with sharp style and varied subject matter.

Of course, Neistat’s vlog was never meant to last forever, and by 2016, he was already pivoting to a different form of immediate, on-the-street filmmaking. His app Beme sold to CNN that year, and he later moved on to other projects, such as his Manhattan creator space 368.

For creators who felt pigeonholed by the flawed YouTube-to-TV pipeline, Neistat offered a new way forward. He sensed that viewers were craving deeper, more intimate connections with their favorite internet stars rather than upright, scripted interactions. A decade later, with the rise of streaming culture, Neistat’s ideas have proven to be prophetic. He blazed a path others could follow without leaving the confines of social media — and then he rode his skateboard right through it.