Nigahiga (Ryan Higa)
A high-school kid from Hilo, Hawaii, teaching you How To Be Ninja, How To Be Gangster and How To Be Emo in a living room with his friends. Ryan Higa's nigahiga channel was the most-subscribed on YouTube for 675 straight days between 2009 and 2011, the first to pass three million, and a template for a decade of YouTubers.
Ryan Higa was born in Hilo, Hawaii, on June 6, 1990, a judo black belt and a high-school wrestler at Waiakea High. In mid-2006 he and his friend Sean Fujiyoshi started posting videos of themselves lip-syncing to songs; the nigahiga channel was created on July 20, 2006, by Higa, Fujiyoshi, Tim Enos and Tarynn Nago, who called themselves the Yabo Crew. (The name, Higa has said, was meant to get people to pronounce his Okinawan surname correctly, a choice he has expressed regret about but refused to change.) The lip-syncs gave way to sketches, and the sketches found a format: deadpan instructional videos, How To Be Ninja, How To Be Gangster, How To Be Emo, How To Be Nerd, with Higa and Fujiyoshi flailing through the steps.
YouTube's copyright machinery kept tripping over its most popular channel. For nine days in September and October 2008, nigahiga was the most-subscribed channel on the site. On Christmas Eve that year How To Be Gangster and How To Be Emo were pulled for copyright violations over their music, and on January 21, 2009, the account was suspended until the lip-sync videos came down; Higa started writing his own music instead. From 2009 to 2011 the channel held the number-one subscriber spot for 675 consecutive days, and on December 21, 2010, it became the first YouTube channel to reach three million subscribers. The How To Be videos themselves were taken down, restored, taken down again, and finally made public once more in the spring of 2010.
The work got bigger: Ninja Melk, a 26-minute ninja short, in August 2009; Agents of Secret Stuff, a 35-minute spy comedy made with Wong Fu Productions, in November 2010; a second channel, HigaTV, in 2011; a production company, RHPC, from 2012. Higa had moved to Las Vegas to study nuclear medicine at UNLV and dropped out to make videos full-time. He published a memoir, Ryan Higa's How to Write Good, and formed a parody K-pop group, Boys Generally Asian, in 2016. In 2020 he stepped away from YouTube for Twitch, where he streams Valorant and reacts to his own old videos, the ones a generation of kids quoted in cafeterias.
Similar items
Smosh
Two teenagers lip-syncing the Pokémon theme in their living room, mouths flapping with total commitment. Ian Hecox and Anthony Padilla were making dumb videos with their friends before "YouTuber" was a word — and for long stretches of YouTube's first decade, nobody on the platform was bigger.
Fred Figglehorn
The squealing, sped-up voice that ruled early YouTube and echoed off every playground. Fred Figglehorn — teenager Lucas Cruikshank's hyperactive six-year-old alter ego — turned pitch-shifted freakouts into the platform's first million-subscriber empire, and kids either quoted him constantly or begged them to stop.
Early YouTube
The video platform that made viral content a daily ritual. YouTube launched in 2005 as low-res, ad-free, and gloriously weird—a space where "Lazy Sunday," "Chocolate Rain," and "Charlie Bit My Finger" became the lingua franca of internet culture.
Nostalgia Critic
A man in a black cap and glasses screams at the movies of your childhood. Doug Walker started posting Nostalgia Critic reviews to YouTube on July 3, 2007, got thrown off the site over copyright, built his own, and became the loudest critic of the Flash-era internet.