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YouTube Rewind 2019 Is the Blandest Thing on the Face of the Planet

Last Updated September 23, 2020 1:21 PM
William Worrall
Last Updated September 23, 2020 1:21 PM
  • YouTube has released YouTube Rewind 2019.
  • The video is basically a low-effort clip show with statistics added in.
  • The company really needs to start trying some completely new stuff if they ever want these videos to be good.

YouTube Rewind has become an annual joke. Each year they throw together some of the worst content on the internet. Then the internet roundly laughs at it and turns it into a meme-fest . This year the joke is that they’ve basically just recycled a bunch of clips and added WatchMojo-style statistics.

Obviously this hasn’t gone down all that well online. Twitter is already full of people making fun of it . On YouTube, the video has accrued over 350K dislikes and the comments are full of copy-and-pasted remarks about how bland the whole thing is. They really should have taken some advice and leaned into the cringe.

YouTube’s Lowest Effort Rewind Ever

The latest Rewind video is the YouTube equivalent of a TV show clip episode . They’ve basically just taken a bunch of footage from hundreds of channels and cut it together, adding some text with different statistics. The largest amount of effort put into the video was when they had to figure out which videos were the most liked all year across several different categories.

On the one hand, it’s nice to see that YouTube has recognized that they made a terrible video last year. On the other hand, if they thought that this was going to fix things, then they must be insane. As we said in another article, if they wanted to fix things, they’d have been better off with a self-deprecating video. This is just bland and dull.

How They Could Make Rewind Better

Chances are that YouTube will make another one of these next year. If the trend continues, 2020’s video will either be just a blank screen or a video apologizing for how boring this one was. How exactly they’ll do that is another question entirely. The worst part is that there isĀ a way they could actually make Rewind fun.

YouTube Rewind 2018 - Will Smith
Even if YouTube Rewind 2018 was cringe, it was at least worth turning into a joke. There’s nothing original in 2019’s version at all. | Source: YouTube 

They basically need to take the biggest suitable creator of any given year and give them creative control. Don’t get me wrong, YouTube should retain final say on stuff; otherwise you don’t know what you’ll end up with. But the important factor is that someone deeply involved with the community on the ground level should really be making these things.

Imagine a YouTube Rewind video where an actual content creator had directed and edited it instead of the bland corporate-driven toss we usually get. Even if all the rough edges were carefully sanded down by the company, it’d still feel closer to something content creators and viewers could care about. Maybe that’d distract us all from how broken YouTube really is.