YouTube Rewind 2018 is the most-disliked YouTube video ever made, beating a record that was previously held by Justin Bieber’s “Baby” music video for almost a decade. YouTube has acknowledged that fans weren’t happy about YouTube Rewind 2018, and so it has attempted to make things up to them with the YouTube Rewind 2019 video, showcasing the most-viewed YouTube channels and videos. While this is clearly an attempt by YouTube for YouTube Rewind 2019 to be as objective as possible, it has already been met with some rather severe backlash of its own.
YouTube Rewind 2019 isn’t nearly as controversial as YouTube Rewind 2018, but the video still has a staggering 90,000 dislikes versus just 76,000 likes at the time of this writing. Many fans in the comment section of the video are attacking the video for just showing off “statistics.”
While there seems to be more people who dislike the YouTube Rewind 2019 video than who like it, the video does address one of the biggest complaints from YouTube Rewind 2018. YouTube Rewind 2018 focused mainly on celebrity cameos and famous YouTubers who don’t even use the platform regularly anymore, but YouTube Rewind 2019 does include content creators who are legitimately the most popular people on the video hosting service. This includes PewDiePie, whose absence in the YouTube Rewind 2018 video was widely mocked considering he is the individual content creator with the most subscribers on the site.
After the severe backlash to YouTube Rewind 2018, PewDiePie made his own YouTube Rewind video making fun of it. The YouTube Rewind 2018 PewDiePie video, entitled “YouTube Rewind but it’s actually good,” quickly became one of the biggest videos on the site, becoming the fastest-liked video on YouTube and breaking a number of other records.
It remains to be seen if PewDiePie will create his own version of YouTube Rewind 2019, especially since he is actually featured in YouTube Rewind 2019 a couple of different times. YouTube Rewind 2019 acknowledges both the PewDiePie wedding video, as well as the fact that PewDiePie was the most-viewed content creator on YouTube for the year.
PewDiePie being the most-viewed YouTuber in 2019 makes a lot of sense when one considers the significant mainstream attention he received throughout the year. The PewDiePie vs. T-Series feud likely played a big role in this, as that campaign is what helped propel PewDiePie’s channel across the 100 million subscribers mark. It will be interesting to see what he does to make his channel even more popular in 2020. It will also be interesting to see if YouTube responds to the criticism aimed at the YouTube Rewind 2019 video and does something completely different for next year as well.
