YouTubers
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7correct to beat the crowd
This YouTuber trivia quiz has 110 free questions with answers and covers the people and the platform: the three PayPal alumni who founded YouTube and the 19-second zoo clip that started it, the creators who have held the most-subscribed crown from Smosh to PewDiePie to MrBeast, the gaming names (Markiplier, Jacksepticeye), the kids' juggernauts (Ryan's World, Cocomelon), the vloggers and business builders (Casey Neistat, Emma Chamberlain, Michelle Phan, the Paul brothers), and the records, Play Buttons, VidCon and Rewind moments in between. It starts with questions anyone with the app can answer and works up to real names, founding dates and the number that broke the view counter. It suits a game night with mixed ages, a classroom icebreaker, or a solo test of how much of your watch history you actually remember. Every answer has been checked against a reference source, and each question shows its explanation and citation once you have answered. Play the full set for a shareable score, then send it to your group chat.
30 of 110 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What is the title of the first video ever uploaded to YouTube, on April 23, 2005?
Me at the zoo
Me at the zoo shows one of the site's co-founders in front of the elephants at San Diego Zoo, noting that they have really long trunks.
Q 02YouTube's three founders had all previously worked at which company?
PayPal
PayPal. Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim had all worked there, and the tie paid off: PayPal's former finance chief, Roelof Botha, was the Sequoia Capital partner who backed their site in 2005.
Q 03For how much did Google buy YouTube in November 2006?
$1.65B
$1.65B, paid in Google stock: Google's own Google Video had failed to draw much traffic, so it bought the site instead, then kept YouTube running separately rather than merging the two.
Q 04Which squeaky-voiced character, played by teenager Lucas Cruikshank, fronted the first YouTube channel to reach a million subscribers?
Fred Figglehorn
Fred Figglehorn, a hyperactive six-year-old, got his chipmunk squeak because Cruikshank sped up the footage; the channel passed a million subscribers in April 2009.
Q 05Which video was the first on YouTube to reach a billion views, in December 2012?
Gangnam Style by Psy
Gangnam Style by Psy later blew past the 32-bit view counter's limit of 2,147,483,647, forcing YouTube to upgrade its maths.
Q 06Which children's video became the first on YouTube to pass 10 billion views, in January 2022?
Baby Shark Dance
Baby Shark Dance began as a song nobody can trace to a writer, most likely an old campfire chant; Pinkfong's 2016 video of it overtook Despacito as YouTube's most-viewed in 2020.
Q 07Which music video was YouTube's most-viewed for just 25 days in 2017 before Despacito overtook it?
See You Again
See You Again, by Wiz Khalifa and Charlie Puth, was written for Furious 7 as a farewell to the film's star Paul Walker, who had died in a car crash in 2013.
Q 08Which video was YouTube's most-viewed from July 2010 until late 2012?
Baby by Justin Bieber
Baby by Justin Bieber took the top spot from Lady Gaga's Bad Romance in July 2010. Bieber himself owed his career to the site: a talent manager came across his home videos there when he was 13.
Q 09Which upload became YouTube's most-disliked video in December 2018, a week after it was posted?
That year's Rewind
That year's Rewind, YouTube's own recap of 2018, passed 10 million dislikes within a week. The company answered in 2019 with a plain countdown of the year's top videos, then dropped the series.
Q 10How many subscribers does a channel need to earn a Silver Play Button?
100K
100K. Passing 100,000 subscribers is not quite enough on its own: YouTube reviews each channel before it sends out a Silver Play Button, and hands the awards out at its own discretion.
Q 11The Red Diamond Play Button is awarded at what subscriber count?
100M
100M. YouTube added the Red Diamond Play Button only after channels began passing 100 million subscribers in 2019.
Q 12What is MrBeast's real name?
Jimmy Donaldson
Jimmy Donaldson began uploading as MrBeast6000 in 2012 and, soon after starting college, dropped out to chase a full-time career on YouTube.
Q 13MrBeast's breakthrough viral video in January 2017 showed him doing what?
Counting to 100,000
Counting to 100,000. The upload ran close to 24 hours, became his first viral hit and set the pattern for the endurance challenges the channel was built on.
Q 21Which company dropped PewDiePie as a partner in 2017, two years before he lost YouTube's most-subscribed title?
Disney
Disney's Maker Studios cut ties in 2017 after a Wall Street Journal report on antisemitic jokes in his videos.
Q 22Which duo founded Smosh, the channel that was YouTube's most-subscribed as early as 2006?
Ian Hecox and Anthony Padilla
Ian Hecox and Anthony Padilla. Their lip-synced Pokémon theme video was briefly the most-viewed on the whole site in 2006 before a copyright takedown.
Q 23Which fellow YouTubers' company bought Smosh in 2019 after its parent Defy Media collapsed?
Mythical Entertainment
Q 14MrBeast's channel became the most-subscribed on YouTube in June 2024 by overtaking which Indian channel?
T-Series
T-Series, the Bollywood music label, had led since passing PewDiePie in 2019. MrBeast marked the takeover by posting that PewDiePie had finally been avenged.
Q 15What is the name of MrBeast's chocolate bar brand, launched in 2022?
Feastables
Feastables launched in January 2022 with a Willy Wonka-style sweepstakes: ten winners went on to compete in a MrBeast video for a real chocolate factory.
Q 16MrBeast's Amazon Prime competition Beast Games put how many contestants in the running for $5 million?
1,000
1,000 contestants set out after $5 million, but a coin flip in the finale doubled the pot, and winner Jeffrey Allen went home with $10 million.
Q 17MrBeast's 2019 fundraiser Team Trees set out to plant how many trees?
20M
20M. A fan had dared MrBeast to plant a tree for each of his 20 million subscribers, so he and Mark Rober set out to raise a dollar a tree for the Arbor Day Foundation, and hit the target before the year was out.
Q 18What is PewDiePie's real name?
Felix Kjellberg
Felix Kjellberg quit his degree at Chalmers University in 2011, and paid for his early videos by working at a hot dog stand.
Q 19PewDiePie built his early audience with Let's Play videos of which horror game?
Amnesia: The Dark Descent
Amnesia: The Dark Descent gave viewers what they came for, his freak-outs at its monsters, and that audience made him YouTube's most-subscribed creator by August 2013.
Q 20What was PewDiePie's October 2018 diss track during his subscriber race with an Indian music label called?
Bitch Lasagna
Bitch Lasagna, released 5 October 2018, became PewDiePie's most-viewed video; Congratulations followed in March 2019 to concede the race.
Mythical Entertainment, Rhett and Link's company, bought Smosh in February 2019, three months after Defy Media shut down without warning; in 2023 Smosh's two founders bought back a majority stake.
Q 24In which U.S. city was Markiplier raised?
Cincinnati
Cincinnati. Mark Fischbach was born in Honolulu but grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio, where he studied biomedical engineering at the University of Cincinnati before leaving to make videos.
Q 25Markiplier and Ethan Nestor's channel Unus Annus uploaded daily and then did what after exactly one year?
Deleted everything
Deleted everything: Unus Annus is Latin for "one year", and when the year was up the pair wiped the channel at the end of a 12-hour farewell stream that more than a million people watched live.
Q 26Which horror video game did Markiplier adapt into a film he wrote, directed and starred in?
Iron Lung
Iron Lung, from David Szymanski's 2022 submarine horror game, was paid for and released by Markiplier himself; it opened in cinemas in January 2026 and earned back its small budget many times over.
Q 27What is the real name of the YouTuber known as Jacksepticeye?
Seán McLoughlin
Seán McLoughlin. 'Jack' was a childhood nickname and 'Septic Eye' came from an eye injury he picked up in a football match.
Q 28Jacksepticeye became known for opening his videos with which shouted greeting?
"Top of the morning to ya, laddies"
"Top of the morning to ya, laddies" was a stereotype he used on purpose: early viewers kept taking him for an American, so he drove home that he was Irish with the greeting and a flat cap.
Q 29Jenna Mourey, one of YouTube's early stars, took her stage name from what?
Her dog Mr. Marbles
Her dog Mr. Marbles supplied the name after her mother complained that searching 'Mourey' brought up Jenna's videos, which she feared would put off employers.
Q 30Why did Jenna Marbles leave YouTube in June 2020?
Her old videos
Her old videos: after making many of them private and tearfully apologising for sketches that had caused offence, she said she didn't want to put out anything that hurt anyone and was done with the channel "for now or forever".