It can be hard to remember what life was like before YouTube. If you wanted to listen to a pop song, you couldn’t just queue it up online. You’d have to find it on the radio, download an MP3 file from iTunes (or a number of file sharing websites), or wait for MTV to play the video in its never-ending rotation. Celebrities were the only reality TV stars, and the most popular show was American Idol (won in 2006 by Taylor Hicks).

In short, old media still dominated, but culture was at an odd liminal stage. Almost everything that mattered still happened on TV, but much of the talking started happening on the Internet. This is essentially the landscape YouTube entered.

The site started relatively slowly in April 2005, with a video of YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim narrating a visit to San Diego Zoo’s elephant enclosure. In August the same year, the site boasted an impressive 58,000 visitors. By the end of the year, it had a traffic rocket strapped to its back: 20 million unique visitors logged on to YouTube each month by mid-2006. These days, more than 1.3 billion people use the site around the world, and five billion videos are watched daily.

Contest-wise, we’ve come a long way from zoo visits today. Modern YouTube stars can bring in millions of dollars through sponsorship and companies they own and run (often built on the foundation of their videos). Polish and premise on-site can match most of what you’d find on TV or streaming services. Accordingly, someone like Jacob Sartorius is better-known to a generation of young men and women than many mainstream celebrities.

But even in YouTube’s early going, there were people creating videos and growing some kind of community—it’s just their experiences differed quite a bit from the meteoric video star risings of today, plenty of which end in lucrative business partnerships or studio-based opportunities. What happened to those original viral video pioneers who laid the path to success for today’s YouTubers—the innovators who found the first flourish of fame before YouTube became a media juggernaut? Where are they now, and, perhaps more interesting, how do they feel about what their beloved platform has become?

A pair of personalities

Michael Buckley is slowly chugging through traffic at the end of a holiday weekend at his parents’ summer house on Cape Cod. “It’s a good time to talk,” he drawls, his languorous voice playfully rising and falling over his in-car cellphone’s speaker. “I have nothing else distracting me, so you have my full attention.”

For those who weren’t around at the inception of YouTube, Buckley was kind of the Jimmy Fallon of his day: a public access TV talk show host who transferred online and attained a smidgen of fame by starting up a YouTube channel in the summer of 2006. His schtick was simple but effective: Buckley starred as the snarky host of his own program, What The Buck?. In short, snappy videos rarely more than three minutes long, he’d run through (and run down) the celebrity news of the day with a biting and acerbic wit. “My online persona 10 years ago was bitchy, rambling pop-culture-expert talking head,” Buckley says today. And viewers loved it. At one point, he had four of the top 10 most-viewed videos on YouTube.

Looking back at the first of 10 seasons of What The Buck? shows just how different YouTube was back in 2006. Buckley’s initial videos were simply a low-bitrate, slightly more risqué version of what you’d see on late night public access TV. Standing in front of a poorly keyed green screen, Buckley delivered a scripted monologue in a single take with no cuts. Pictures appeared over his shoulder as if he were a news anchor. Though it may share the same bones, it feels a world away from the fast-paced, well-lit jump cut monologues of modern-day YouTubers like Grace Helbig, the Vlog Brothers, or Zoella.

Other early YouTubers, however, bridged the gap between these two seemingly disparate worlds. If Michael Buckley represented the old, nasty side of celebrity culture, another early site personality represented the cuddly, bubbly side. As bitchy and negative as Buckley’s persona was, Olga Kay came across as the exact opposite.

At the time an accomplished juggler with the Ringling Brothers’ Circus, Kay (whose real name is Olga Karavajeva) was trying to break into the broader world of show business. Throughout much of 2006, she auditioned for TV shows, movies, and commercials, but she wasn’t breaking through.

Some of Kay’s friends recommended she open an account on a new website called YouTube. Not only might it help her gain attention and an audience that could propel her into mainstream television, but it’d also help them out. As aspiring YouTubers uploading juggling videos themselves, they were keen to enlist their family and friends to rate their videos and put them up the rankings. “At first I thought they said U2.com and that it was associated with the band,” she recalls. “It took me a while to find out exactly what the site was.”

When Kay did find the website, she created an account and looked beyond her friends’ juggling videos. What she found surprised her. “I remember coming across the original creators like LonelyGirl15 and LisaNova and being so mesmerized by these people looking at me through the screen and telling their stories,” Kay says. “It was the first time I’d experienced that break in the fourth wall, with someone talking to me through the screen.”

Quickly, Kay wanted to be part of it. “I remember thinking, I can do it better—if only I knew how.”

Kay didn’t have a camera or special editing software; she made her first forays onto YouTube by recording videos with her computer’s built-in webcam and iMovie. She taught herself the basics of video editing, observing the tips and tricks that other, more established YouTubers used to give the veneer of professionalism. And for two years between 2006 to 2008, Kay estimates she spent around 12 hours a day working out how to make videos. She’d watch other creators on YouTube, then futz around on her own content. She’d upload it, then comment on her favorite channels, inviting others to watch her videos, too, working hard to bring attention to them.



All work, no pay

Both Buckley and Kay swiftly arrived at the paradox of early YouTube. To become popular on the site required plenty of work—but the payoff was in no way immediate or obvious. “I had 100 videos before anybody knew who I was, and I was working 50 hours a week on this,” Buckley explains. “I had a 40-hour-a-week job, and I was still spending every waking hour writing, editing, and promoting, really working on building my YouTube persona. It was a lot of work, but it was fun. I didn’t know where it was going to lead, but I just saw a great potential.”

Kay’s 12-hour days weren’t earning her explosive growth, either, but through all the research she soon realized some YouTubers had advertising playing before their videos. While Kay couldn’t find any information on how to get that, monetizing her videos would soon become important. Around this time, the YouTube community had begun to branch out slowly into the real world: occasionally there’d be real-life meetups at events like VidCon (which today is a media mammoth). At these get togethers, a handful of creators would meet up in Central Park in New York City or Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles to swap tips, chat, and record videos of the day that they would later upload. When Kay went to one particular event, she was doing well on YouTube, boasting a devoted following of around 1,000 subscribers. But she was caught on some of the videos of more popular creators that day. Her 1,000 subscribers soon became 3,000. Rapidly, it became more.

Kay describes the first check she received from YouTube as a momentous occasion—though the money at this stage, for someone early in a “video” career, was a pittance. Opening the envelope that arrived in the morning mail, she found an invoice for 54 cents. It didn’t matter that she wouldn’t actually get the money into her bank account until she made $100, Kay was excited. “I felt like I had a hobby that was not only fun, but it also made me money,” she says. “It became an interesting race: how can I get more people to watch?”

As Kay and Buckley worked hard to bring new viewers to their videos, sometimes struggling and running up against brick walls, the whole ecosystem of online video slowly changed. Internet speeds got faster; celebrity as a mantle became more easily attainable. As YouTube became more popular and the concept of viral videos became more commonplace, mainstream-type money started flowing onto the platform.

That cash trickled down to the creators. “You start making money, and you think you’ve tricked the world,” says Buckley. “How did this happen? I was doing this for fun, and for free, and now I have thousands of dollars in my Adsense account. This is crazy. It’s nutty.”

In the years since Buckley and Kay made their first paycheck on YouTube, the site has become a much bigger goldmine for creators. Since 2007, YouTube has paid out more than $1.25 billion to rights holders for the ability to screen their content. And many creators—like Lisa “LisaNova” Donovan, one of the most successful YouTubers of this first generation—have swapped a life in front of the camera for one behind the scenes in the larger industry. (After her video starring days, Donovan co-founded Maker Studios, a YouTube multichannel network that was bought out by the Walt Disney Company for half a billion dollars.)

Nowadays many young YouTubers can become flush with cash much more quickly and set up their own companies just to deal with the income from ad sales, marketing tie-ins, and personal appearances at live events. For example, Felix “PewDiePie” Kjellberg, one of the world’s best-known YouTubers, made $8 million in profit in 2015, according to company accounts filed in his native Sweden.

“Some of these YouTube stars have quite an apparatus around them,” explains Alice E. Marwick, a researcher in online identity and celebrity at Fordham University. “There are these influencer marketing companies trying to broker these kids' fame and sponsorship deals.”

Listing image by Michael Buckley via YouTube