20 years of YouTube: In 2016, some videos were more important than others
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.
Last week, we told the story of an Elder Millennial who paved the way for a new class of Gen Z vloggers. The next year, that generational swing took hold, and a compendium of silly videos exemplified it better than anything else.
Compared to the other creators we’ve featured in this series, Eddie Jolton is a relative unknown. At the end of 2015, Jolton used his eljolto YouTube channel to host a playlist of short, funny clips. In his words, these were “important videos” — and that description soon took on a life of its own.
A year after its inception, the important videos collection reached 142 million views — and that was just on the main playlist page. Many of the included videos have rolled up massive view counts of their own. The first upload on the list, which bears the simple and self-descriptive title “yee,” has accrued more than 100 million views on its own.
In some ways, the important videos playlist was antiquated from the moment it arrived. By 2016, YouTube’s viral video era was long gone, having been supplanted by an eclectic mix of creator content. The popularity of eljolto’s offbeat, delightful archive suggested that the web video pendulum was swinging back in the direction of short and sweet uploads.
The generational shift occurring online was the driving force behind that shift. Vine, which had exploded onto the scene in the early 2010s, had introduced viewers to a new cohort of creators. Rising stars like Jake Paul (born 1997), Lele Pons (1996), Liza Koshy (1996), and Shawn Mendes (1998) had all been under ten years old when YouTube originally debuted, but the rise of Vine gave them the canvas they needed to usher in a new era of entertainment.
Because Vines could only be six seconds long, Gen Z’s approach to creator content had to be punchy and to the point. Iconic videos earned legendary status thanks to individual moments of brilliance rather than drawn-out storytelling. Within the confines of that truncated format, Gen Z grew up online. Is it any wonder that, nearly ten years later, short-form pithiness still reigns supreme on platforms like TikTok and Instagram Reels?
That wasn’t always a foregone conclusion. Twitter’s shocking decision to shut down Vine rattled the creator community, but YouTube fare like the important videos playlist filled in the gap. With its endless supply of quotable moments (“I didn’t dog the shot!“), eljolto’s playlist formed a bridge between Vine and TikTok.
Videos like “yee” showed us that YouTube content was becoming more efficient and hyperactive to meet the needs of the generation that had grown up on Vine. “‘Yee’ is a masterpiece of minimalist cinema,” reads a contemporaneous review of the important videos playlist. “The three shots set up a scene, deliver a punchline, and show us a reaction. It has the structure of a classic pratfall. We have no idea who these dinosaurs are, or what history has transpired between them, but in the space of just ten seconds the clip introduces us to a new world and new characters, sketches out their relationship, and tells a short story. It is a work of genius.”
Though “important videos” Google search traffic peaked in 2017, the playlist’s cultural legacy can still be felt today. The silly dinosaurs and quippy billiards sharks ushered in a “vibey” era of Gen Z-fueled entertainment. Whereas a video like “Keyboard Cat” offered an overt, slapstick form of comedy, more recent fare like “cats with threatening auras” or “Vines I think about every day” evokes a certain mood or feeling. Those compilations might not make you laugh out loud the way Keyboard Cat did, but they are always good for a knowing, relatable chuckle.
Meanwhile, the overall strangeness of the important videos playlist had its own cultural reverberations. Gen Z culture is generally vibey, but Gen Alpha is taking the conversation in an absurdist direction. You can draw a link between some of the more ridiculous entries in the important videos canon and the current rash of brainrot videos that are dominating YouTube Shorts.
What made important videos so, uh, important is that it served as an archive that didn’t exist in the same way for previous generations. For Gen Z and Gen Alpha short-form creators, some of these important videos have earned a biblical level of reverence. These are the clips that have launched a thousand memes (or should I say a thousand yees?)
That extremely online sense of shared nostalgia came into focus thanks to Millennial relics like End of Ze World and Homestar Runner. With help from resources like the important videos playlist, Gen Z heightened those feelings. Or, in other words, once a communal foundation of meme-able content established itself, the emotions stirred by vibey uploads became more accessible.
The funniest part of important videos isn’t its memorable Vines or its cringiest pieces of user-generated content. What tickles me about the playlist is that it became a cultural touchstone by accident. Eljolto never planned to pass the internet comedy torch from Millennials to Gen Z; he was just trying to laugh.
“I just [put] all of the short videos and memes that I would send my friends in one place,” he told The BBC amidst his 15 minutes of fame. “I didn’t think it was gonna be as big as it was.”
