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 2023, many of YouTube’s OG Millennial stars had retired (or had been involuntarily canceled). Several Gen Z icons had gone dormant thanks to self-imposed hiatuses. As a result, the internet became Generation Alpha‘s playground — and the rest of us learned that today’s kids are into some bizarre stuff.
On YouTube, the advent of the Shorts format fueled Gen Alpha’s cultural ascent. The YouTube-branded answer to TikTok launched in 2021, and it hit its stride two years later thanks to the introduction of Shorts ads. Vertical videos became the dominant format in our Tubefilter viewership charts, and you don’t have to be a sigma to know that Gen Alpha slang became a common sight on those chart-topping channels.
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Shorts gave Gen Alpha a short-form hub they could call their own. Millennials account for more than one-third of Instagram’s user base, and Gen Z’s affinity for TikTok is well known. Meanwhile, for as long as the Alphans have had cultural consciousness, they have identified YouTube as their favorite platform. Through Shorts, today’s kids have ensured that their preferred hub is sufficiently strange.
The creator who has come to exemplify that off-the-wall style is named Alexey Gerasimov, but he’s better known by his internet alias Boom. The Russian-Georgian animator appeared on our radar at the end of April 2023, when his profanely-titled DaFuq!?Boom! YouTube channel got 144.8 million weekly views and reached 33rd place in our Global Top 50 ranking.
At the time, Boom’s toilet-bodied, long-necked characters felt like yet another curiosity amidst a vast sea of Gen Alpha slop. But the animator went full speed ahead with what would eventually become known as the Skibidi Saga. By May 2023, DaFuq!?Boom! was on top of our YouTube viewership charts. Boom’s viewership tally for the month of June neared three billion hits, and at the end of 2023, YouTube chose Skibidi Toilet as its biggest trend of the year.
Skibidi’s ascension mystified all the generations that were old enough to have graduated elementary school. Even Gen Z, the contemporaneous arbiter of mainstream pop culture via platforms like TikTok, was perplexed by the youth and their absurdist tendencies.
Trying to make sense of an animated war between toilet-bodied and TV-headed races may be a fool’s errand, but Skibidi Toilet and its deliriously wacky brethren seem to encapsulate the pop culture era during which they flourished. 2023 was arguably the peak year for multiverse-set stories, especially in the world of film. Everything Everywhere All At Once was the reigning Best Picture winner, Doctor Strange had just returned from his trip to the Multiverse of Madness, and Miles Morales topped the box office by traveling Across the Spider-verse.
On the Gen Alpha playground that YouTube Shorts had become, multiversal themes could be seen amidst the chaotic collision of pop culture characters. Shorts became the place to go for bizzare mashups that featured the likes of Skibidi Toilet, MrBeast, and Cristiano Ronaldo — or, at least, animated imitations of them.
The success of Skibidi Toilet is what happens when you take the unvarnished, profane glee of a top YouTube channel (like PewDiePie a decade earlier) and reframe it through the eyes of a generation that has watched their favorite IP get smashed together in the pop culture supercollider. The fact that Boom’s storylines didn’t make sense to older cohorts seemed to be part of the appeal, though you’ll have to ask your local eight-year-old to confirm that for you.
Gen Alpha’s cultural leanings may be inscrutable to Hollywood decision makers, but that hasn’t stopped studios from coveting Skibidi IP. A toy line featuring some of Boom’s characters has brought the short-form meme into the retail universe, and Michael Bay is helming a film and TV franchise inspired by the saga.
In the current cinematic moments, those moves might just pay off. The success of A Minecraft Movie, which featured references to gaming memes like the Chicken Jockey, showed that Gen Alpha’s love of randomness (which might just be a revival of Millennials’ “lol so random” aesthetic) can have legs at the box office. All of a sudden, films inspired by creator culture are being greenlit left and right.
One of those creator-led Hollywood projects, however, reminds us that Gen Alpha’s current cultural experience is inherently transient. Kane Parsons’ The Backrooms, which is set to become an A24 horror flick, is another franchise that had its lore deepened by short-form shitposts that appeal to young YouTube viewers. The titular setting is an example of a liminal space — a transitional environment that appeals to Gen Alpha. A public restroom can be a liminal space, too, and that’s exactly where you’ll find Skibidi’s signature characters.
If Gen Alpha’s understanding of culture is constantly in flux, then Skibidi Toilet might not have as long of a shelf life as the execs betting on it would like. Gen Alpha slang evolves so quickly that parents can’t keep up, and trends can be equally mercurial. Translation: Two years after its peak, Skibidi Toilet may already be yesterday’s news.
Or I’m wrong, and Gen Alpha continues to enjoy the same wacky touchstones it brought to the top of the charts. Ten years from now, if we’re a decade into the Skibidi Cinematic Universe, don’t say I didn’t warn you.
