YouTube has decided to pull the plug on its annual Rewind videos.
YouTube Rewind was introduced in 2010 to celebrate some of the most popular content published on the platform in the preceding year. The company released nine iterations of this annual wrap-up, but the COVID-19 pandemic led it to cancel the Rewind installment for 2020.
Tubefilter reports (and YouTube confirmed to us) that Rewind’s cancellation is now permanent. The company says this cancellation wasn’t prompted by recent backlash to the wrap-up videos—the 2018 iteration is the site’s most-disliked video—but instead by the size of its platform.
YouTube’s website claims that more than 2 billion monthly active users collectively watch 1 billion hours of video every day and that more than 500 hours worth of videos are uploaded every minute. Effectively summarizing all of that content in a single video would be impossible.
So now it will leave Rewind to its users. “It’ll continue to be inspiring to see the myriad of ways the most creative content producers in the world—our YouTube creators—encapsulate the end of year in their video recaps,” the company says, “as YouTube retires its own Rewind video.”
