Charlie Bit My Finger
A dad filming his toddlers in England. The youngest bites the oldest's finger. "Ouch, Charlie! Charlie, that really hurt!" The giggle that followed became the most-viewed video on all of YouTube — and held the crown into 2011.
#Viral Video
9 items
Chocolate Rain
Tay Zonday's impossibly deep baritone over a looping piano, delivered stone-faced into a home microphone. The joke was the caption: "I move away from the mic to breathe in." Beneath the meme, the lyrics were a metaphor about racism in America — a fact most people quoting it never noticed.
Diet Coke & Mentos
Drop Mentos into Diet Coke and the bottle erupts into a foaming geyser. The science is simple — the candy triggers the release of the soda's dissolved gas — but the magic belonged to 2006, when two performers from Maine turned a backyard trick into one of the internet's first great viral videos. Every kid who saw it begged for a 2-liter and a roll of Mentos.
Dramatic Chipmunk
A prairie dog — not actually a chipmunk — whips its head toward the camera in slow menace, scored with a sinister orchestral sting from a 1974 Mel Brooks film. Five seconds of pure reaction gold that became the internet's shorthand for "something just happened."
Evolution of Dance
One man, a black T-shirt, a spotlight, and a six-minute journey through decades of dance moves. Judson Laipply's "Evolution of Dance" was the video everyone forwarded to everyone else — proof that YouTube could make a star out of anybody with an idea and a camcorder.
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.
Numa Numa
One of the internet's first viral megahits: a webcam clip of a New Jersey teenager lip-syncing and flailing joyfully to a Moldovan pop song. Gary Brolsma's "Numa Numa Dance" spread to hundreds of millions of views — and it happened before YouTube even existed.
Potter Puppet Pals
Snape, Snape, Severus Snape. If your brain just added the next line, you were on YouTube in 2007. Neil Cicierega's felt-puppet Hogwarts reduced the wizarding world to bickering hand puppets — and produced one of early YouTube's most-watched videos ever.
SNL Digital Shorts
"An SNL Digital Short" was the title card that meant Monday's homeroom had material. When "Lazy Sunday" leaked onto a fledgling startup called YouTube in bootleg uploads, it did as much for YouTube as it did for Andy Samberg — and "Dick in a Box" won an actual Emmy.