YouTube Rewind
discontinued annual event on YouTube (2010–2019)
YouTube Rewind (stylized as YouTube ЯEWIND) was an annual year-in-review web series that was produced by YouTube and Portal A Interactive from 2010 to 2019. The videos were summaries of each year's viral videos, events, trends, and music. The series' annual installments were uploaded onto YouTube's official channel.
The series' 2018 and 2019 installments (Everyone Controls Rewind and For the Record) were received poorly, with the former becoming the most-disliked video of all time on the platform. YouTube opted not to produce a Rewind video in 2020, before announcing the series' cancellation the following year. All videos were unlisted in December 2025 and later made private in January 2026.
History
The first Rewind video was created by YouTube in 2010 and featured a list of the 50 most popular YouTube videos of that year. In 2010, YouTube began creating and producing Rewind videos with the help of Seedwell and Portal A Interactive. From 2011 onwards, the Rewind videos have only been uploaded to the YouTube Spotlight channel, now known as just YouTube, with additional behind-the-scenes content.
2010
On December 12–13, 2010, the first YouTube Rewind was uploaded, titled 2010 YouTube Rewind: Year in Review and featured the top ten most popular videos of the year on YouTube.
“YouTube Rewind” enters the record as discontinued annual event on YouTube (2010–2019). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what YouTube, Rewind and discontinued can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“YouTube Rewind” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, YouTube, Rewind and discontinued provides the most credible route into that argument.
Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 26, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q16927905. None of the 2 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2010, 2019, 2018 and 2020.
Later summaries often reconcile disputed chronology or motive more neatly than the contemporary record permits. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Compare institutional narratives with records created by participants and affected communities. Dates and formal titles are useful anchors, but not substitutes for context.
- Event chronology
- Institutional context
- Locating named record creators
Contemporary correspondence, government or organizational records, oral histories and cited historical scholarship.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “YouTube Rewind”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow YouTube Rewind primary sources, YouTube Rewind archive and YouTube research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
- Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “YouTube Rewind”?
- What chronology connects this entry to wider political or social change?
- Which voices are present, absent or mediated by the institution?
Search terms from this dossier
This entry incorporates text from “YouTube Rewind” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.