You can remain in denial as long as you want, but we at Idolator have finally come to grips with the fact that more than a week after the being bought out by Google, the joyous, copyright-free playground that was YouTube is now dead. The music labels are stepping up their threats, videos are being plucked like woah, and the site’s charts look like they’ve been hijacked by the man.
In order to reach some sort of closure, we had our friend Richard Blakeley prepare a commemorative montage of some of our favorite YouTube clips–the megalomaniacal rappers, the emotive Chinese boy-band devotees, and the fighting kitties who helped cut down our on-the-job productivity by half. Enjoy, and remember to send the widow a ham.
Idolator Remembers YouTube: 2005-2006 [YouTube]
Idolator’s previous YouTube coverage
Sergey Brin: Shit. We spent how much on this shitty website?
Larry Page: 1.65 billion.
Sergey: We’re fucked.
Larry: Yup.
They’ve got to have an ace up their sleeve, no? There was all that talk pre-buy about impending lawsuits, and then the enormous sale was announced a few days later. It seems unlikely that such a saavy company would buy such an enormous turd, so what piece of the puzzle are we missing?
Well, Google has more cash than…er…someone with a lot of cash…but!
The only thing I could think of is that they’re buying the technology behind the site. But what’s so complex about a server spewing Flash Video?
Or maybe they were just bored.
So YouTube’s entire history consists of half a dozen videos, three of which were completely forgettable. What an exhaustive retrospective. Yawn.
Boy, that one cat sure knocked the shit out of the other. The multiple Diddy and Durst clips can’t hold a candle to that single moment. Good times.