YouTube
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7correct to beat the crowd
This YouTube trivia quiz has 43 free questions with answers and covers the platform from its 2005 founding by three ex-PayPal employees to today. There are questions on the first video, the pizzeria office, the $1.65 billion Google acquisition, the CEOs, and the records: the first video to a billion views, the most-viewed and most-subscribed of all time, and the Rewind that became the most-disliked video ever. Creators get their due too, from Smosh and PewDiePie to Ryan's World and MrBeast, along with features like Shorts, Premium and the Creator Award Play Buttons. About a third of the questions are easy for anyone who watches YouTube, a third are medium, and the rest ask for dates, figures and behind-the-scenes details that will stump casual viewers. Figures are current to 2025-2026 where a source confirms them. Every answer has been checked against a primary or encyclopaedic source, and each question links to the page that confirms it.
30 of 43 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01YouTube's three founders had all been early employees of which company?
PayPal
PayPal employed Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim before YouTube; by the usual telling, the idea for the site was hatched at a dinner party in San Francisco.
Q 02Per Jawed Karim, YouTube's idea partly came from being unable to find clips of which 2004 event?
Janet Jackson's halftime show
Janet Jackson's halftime show and that year's Asian tsunami were both hard to find on video, Karim has said; his co-founders instead trace the idea to a San Francisco dinner party.
Q 03The first video ever uploaded to YouTube, on 23 April 2005, was titled what?
Me at the zoo
Me at the zoo is a brief clip of co-founder Jawed Karim standing in front of the elephants at San Diego Zoo and remarking on how long their trunks are.
Q 04On April Fools' Day 2008, the featured videos on YouTube's homepage all led to which singer's music video?
Rick Astley
Rick Astley's 'Never Gonna Give You Up' was waiting behind every featured link, as YouTube turned the rickroll, the web's favourite bait-and-switch prank, on its own users.
Q 05How much did Google pay to acquire YouTube in November 2006?
$1.65bn
$1.65bn in Google stock bought a company less than two years old whose early headquarters was an office above a pizzeria in San Mateo, California.
Q 06What slogan did YouTube adopt in its early years?
Broadcast Yourself
Broadcast Yourself replaced 'Tune In, Hook Up', the tagline from the site's earliest days, when the founders still imagined it as a video dating service.
Q 07As of 2019, roughly how much new video was being uploaded to YouTube every minute?
500 hours
500 hours a minute was YouTube's own figure in May 2019, which works out to about 82 years of new video arriving every single day.
Q 08Which YouTube scheme, launched in 2007, first gave creators a share of ad money?
Partner Program
The Partner Program began in May 2007 with only the site's most popular creators chosen to share ad revenue, and was later opened to any channel that meets its thresholds.
Q 09Which former Google executive, in whose garage Google was founded, was YouTube's CEO from 2014 to 2023?
Susan Wojcicki
Susan Wojcicki rented her Menlo Park garage to Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1998, joined Google as an early employee, and in 2006 urged the company to buy YouTube.
Q 10Who was named YouTube's CEO in February 2023?
Neal Mohan
Neal Mohan was so valued as an advertising executive that Google reportedly paid him $100 million in 2011 to stop him leaving for Twitter; he later ran YouTube's products.
Q 11Which video became the first on YouTube to reach a billion views, on 21 December 2012?
Gangnam Style
Gangnam Style reached a billion views five months after its release, and by December 2014 Psy's video had outgrown YouTube's 32-bit view counter, forcing an upgrade to 64-bit.
Q 12Which video became YouTube's most-viewed of all time in November 2020?
Baby Shark Dance
Baby Shark Dance, Pinkfong's take on an old children's chant, took off in 2017 when a dance challenge spread from Indonesian television, and in 2022 became the first video to pass 10 billion views.
Q 13Which music video was the first on YouTube to reach six billion views, in February 2019?
Despacito
Q 21In November 2021, YouTube announced it would hide what from viewers?
Dislike counts
Dislike counts vanished from public view in November 2021 because, YouTube said, coordinated 'dislike bombing' was being used to harass creators, who kept private access to the totals.
Q 22A YouTube channel receives the Gold Creator Award, or Gold Play Button, on reaching how many subscribers?
1,000,000
The Gold Creator Award marks 1,000,000 subscribers, but it is not automatic: YouTube reviews each channel first and can withhold the plaque from any that has broken its rules.
Q 23Which energy-drink brand's 2012 skydive from the edge of space drew a then-record eight million live YouTube viewers?
Red Bull
Despacito hit six billion views in February 2019; two summers earlier Malaysia had barred the song from its state radio and television stations over its lyrics.
Q 14'Charlie bit my finger', the 2007 viral clip of two English brothers, was sold in 2021 as what?
An NFT
An NFT of the clip fetched $760,999 in May 2021; the family had said the original would then vanish from YouTube, but the buyer asked for it to stay up.
Q 15Which YouTuber hosted a 2024 Prime Video game show in which 1,000 contestants competed for $5 million?
MrBeast
MrBeast, real name Jimmy Donaldson, hosted Beast Games, and by the finale the advertised $5 million prize had been doubled to $10 million.
Q 16Which music label became the first channel to reach 100 million subscribers, in May 2019?
T-Series
T-Series began with Gulshan Kumar, from a family of Delhi fruit-juice sellers, selling cheap music cassettes; its channel passed 100 million subscribers after a meme-fuelled race with PewDiePie.
Q 17Which YouTube comedy series, begun in 2009, became a Cartoon Network show in 2012?
The Annoying Orange
The Annoying Orange made the jump to Cartoon Network within three years, and in 2013 a North Dakota ad agency sued, claiming the character copied a talking orange from its own campaign.
Q 18What is the real name of PewDiePie, the first individual YouTuber to pass 100 million subscribers?
Felix Kjellberg
Felix Kjellberg quit an engineering degree at Chalmers in 2011 and, with no help from his parents, paid for his early videos by working at a hot-dog stand.
Q 19What was PewDiePie's October 2018 diss track aimed at the music label overtaking him called?
Bitch Lasagna
Bitch Lasagna mocked the label throughout the subscriber race, and in April 2019 the Delhi High Court ordered YouTube to block it and its follow-up at the label's request.
Q 20YouTube Rewind 2018 overtook which music video as the most-disliked video on the site?
Justin Bieber's 'Baby'
Justin Bieber's 'Baby' had held the unwanted record for years before Rewind 2018 took it within a week of release; YouTube skipped Rewind in 2020 and scrapped the series for good in 2021.
Red Bull bankrolled skydiver Baumgartner's Stratos jump over New Mexico, in which he broke the sound barrier in freefall while more than eight million people watched live.
Q 24YouTube Shorts launched as a beta in September 2020 in which country, soon after it banned TikTok?
India
India had banned TikTok and 58 other Chinese apps in June 2020 after a military clash on its Chinese border, and YouTube brought its Shorts beta there within three months.
Q 25In October 2024, YouTube raised the maximum length of a Short to what?
3 minutes
3 minutes became the limit on 15 October 2024, triple the old 60 seconds, after YouTube said longer Shorts were among the features creators requested most.
Q 26Which name did YouTube Premium carry from 2015 to 2018?
YouTube Red
YouTube Red grew out of a music-only beta called Music Key, widening ad-free viewing to every video in 2015, and took the Premium name in 2018 when YouTube Music became a separate service.
Q 27Since 2020, YouTube has switched off which feature on videos marked as made for kids?
Comments
Comments are disabled on made-for-kids videos, as are personalised ads, a change that followed Google's $170 million settlement in 2019 over YouTube collecting data from under-13s.
Q 28The 2017 advertiser exodus over ads beside extremist content became known by which nickname?
The Adpocalypse
The Adpocalypse was a name PewDiePie helped popularise as creators' ad income collapsed; YouTube answered by barring channels with under 10,000 lifetime views from earning ad money.
Q 29Which comedy duo of Ian Hecox and Anthony Padilla had YouTube's most-subscribed channel three times?
Smosh
Smosh broke through lip-syncing the Pokémon theme, briefly the most-viewed video on the site and later pulled over a copyright claim, and went on to top the subscriber table three separate times.
Q 30In 2023, Hecox and Padilla bought back their channel from which company, owned by fellow YouTubers Rhett and Link?
Mythical
Mythical had rescued the channel in 2019 after its previous owner, Defy Media, abruptly shut down; the two founders bought a majority back in June 2023.