Here's looking at YouTube; video-sharing site turns 10

Psy's video for "Gangnam Style" spread wildly on YouTube

Valentine's Day marks the 10th anniversary of YouTube — that's right, it's a decade old — and in that time, the revolutionary video-sharing site has morphed from a place you'd find slow-loading music videos and blurry clips of snowboarding accidents to the wildly popular central hub of all online video sharing.

And although "viral videos" were nothing new when the site went live (before YouTube, they spread via the now-ancient "email chain"), it became far easier to upload a video and share it with an audience of millions. This led to a fundamental change in how we viewed things online, and created stars that might not have shined otherwise.

Here are five stars who owe some (or all) of their success to YouTube, and five viral videos it helped launch.


The people:

Justin Bieber

Yes, we have YouTube to thank for Justin Bieber — the Canadian-born singer/songwriter was discovered by manager Scooter Braun through his YouTube videos in 2008, and Braun put Bieber in touch with Usher. The rest, as they say, is history. Five chart-topping albums later, and the 20-year-old has sold millions of records, been nominated for two Grammys, and is nearly impossible to avoid. Thanks YouTube. Thanks a lot.

Susan Boyle

The 47-year-old Scottish singer didn't look like much when she took the stage for "Britain's Got Talent" in 2009, but when she sang her heart-stopping rendition of "I Dreamed a Dream" from "Les Misérables," eyes widened and jaws dropped. Tens of millions of viewers on both sides of the pond watched the clip, and although Boyle didn't win the competition (she came in second), her appearance led to a record deal, two Grammy nominations and several tours. To date, the YouTube clip of Boyle singing "I Dreamed a Dream" has nearly 165 million hits.

Psy

Psy was already a pop icon in South Korea when the video for his irresistibly catchy single "Gangnam Style" exploded onto Western computer screens in August 2012. The flashy-yet-humorous video was punctuated by Psy's now-legendary dancing, and it became the first on YouTube to break 1 billion total views. Now, Gangnam Style has more than twice that — it's at 2,235,839,131 — and its success forced YouTube to upgrade its view counter, which previously topped out at around 2.1 billion.

Carly Rae Jepsen

It might not be brilliant — far from it, in fact — but it's hard to deny the poppy, light-hearted appeal of Carly Rae Jepsen's hit "Call Me Maybe." It was released as a single in Canada in September 2011 but didn't get international attention until Justin Bieber and Selena Gomez, who heard it on a Canadian radio station while on vacation, tweeted about it four months later. The song immediately exploded — as did the video — and in the time since, it's gotten 640 million views.

Judy Travis

What started with a 2008 hair tutorial by then-college student Judy Travis on how to get "beachy waves w/ a flat iron" has turned into Its JudyTime, a series in which Travis explains the finer points of such crucial subjects as hair, makeup and skin care in hundreds of easily digestible lessons. Seven years after her first clip, over a million users subscribe to her several YouTube channels, and she has 350 million total views — a bona-fide YouTube celebrity.


The moments:

Miss South Carolina

Maybe it was the wrong thing to ask at a beauty pageant, but watching 2007's Miss South Carolina Teen USA Caitlin Upton stumble through a rambling, cringe-worthy response to the question of why a fifth of Americans can't locate the United States on a world map left many stunned. Her painful soliloquy, which incorporated Iraq, South Africa and something about a lack of maps, has been viewed well over 74 million times and inspired countless parody videos and internet memes.

Charlie Sheen

When Charlie Sheen sat down with ABC's Andrea Canning in 2011, he seemed intent on proving that he had, in fact, given up drugs. By the time the interview was over, his scattered answers and manic demeanor convinced the world of the exact opposite — not to mention giving us new phrases like "bi-winning" and "tiger blood." The YouTube videos (there are several) got millions of views as Sheen's apparent breakdown dominated headlines for months.

'Thriller' in the prison yard

When prison supervisor Byron Garcia uploaded the video of about 1,500 inmates at the maximum-security Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center in the Philippines doing a flawless imitation of the zombie dancing from Michael Jackson's "Thriller," he probably didn't think it would become quite as popular as it has. But at its peak, the 2007 video was one of the most popular on the Internet; it's gotten 54 million total views to date.

'Pants on the Ground'

When "General" Larry Platt sang his song "Pants on the Ground" at a 2010 "American Idol" audition, the eternally surly judge Simon Cowell said he had "a horrible feeling that song could be a hit." Cowell nailed it: Since that audition, the YouTube video has received 9 1/2 million hits, and for a brief while, it seemed everyone was singing Platt's tune, which relied mostly on the simple lyrics of — you guessed it — "pants on the ground."

The Rickroll

It's a classic bait-and-switch prank that began on the Internet bulletin board 4Chan in 2007 but slowly took over the Web: Post a link to a video of something someone might want to see, like a movie preview or news clip, but actually link it to Rick Astley's 1987 single "Never Gonna Give You Up." Known as "Rickrolling," it became so prevalent that on April Fools' Day 2008, YouTube Rickrolled its own users by making all of the videos on its homepage link to the song. The prank breathed new life into a long dead song, and reminded us of just how bad '80s pop really could be.

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