YouTube and I grew up together. I was just a kid in the Midwest when it first blew up, but during my teen years, at the peak of my car obsession, it started booming with automotive content. Of course, that used to look a lot different than it does now, and maybe it’s the nostalgia talking, but I miss it. Nowadays, in the oversaturated car media landscape, you need a ton of subscribers and a massive boost from the algorithm to hit seven-figure view totals.
But back then, a sick clip of an Audi 200 Quattro laying rubber was enough to surpass the million mark and keep climbing:
Let’s jump back in time to September 6, 2012, when this video was posted. Data shows that it was the last year YouTube had under one billion active users worldwide (that number now is closer to 2.75 billion). Of the 750 million or so users, only a small fraction of those could have been interested in a 54-second clip of a car taking off without a single word of commentary—and yet, it has 3.5 million views at the time this story was published.
How do you explain that?
Well, the first and most obvious answer is “time.” A lot of people can stumble on a video over the course of 13 years. But I think it has just as much to do with the now-extinct media environment in which this clip once thrived.
The video’s poster, amdisbest, has just under 8,000 YouTube subscribers today. And yet, if you look at his most popular uploads, two of them feature this car and have more than a million views. He has four others with six-figure view totals, which is undeniably solid considering how few people get notifications when he posts something.
I believe you can attribute this success to the fact that, unlike today, the YouTube algorithm wasn’t so darn fussy in 2012. It would feed you just about anything relevant to your interests instead of a select crop of videos from a handpicked bunch of creators.
Additionally, the number of existing videos at the time was such a small, small fraction of what there is now. The upload rate has been climbing ever since this clip was posted, and as of 2022, creators were uploading 82 years’ worth of content every day. I really don’t have a category for how crazy that is.
Our clicking habits also started to shift not long after this video was published. As early as 2016, the Washington Post highlighted a study claiming that six of 10 links shared on social media went unvisited. It didn’t take long for us to become inundated with bite-sized videos, to the point that we no longer started clicking on whatever our friends shared. (For further proof of this, just look at how bottomless scrolling has spread to literally every mobile video platform.) But it’s my hunch that this clip was just cool enough, and posted just early enough, to warrant a click from anybody who was as VW- and Audi-obsessed as I was.
As a person whose job somewhat depends on how many views their work gets, whether that be on YouTube or this very website, I’m left somewhat amazed at how well this video did. It was a different era of Car YouTube, one that didn’t care if your face was in the thumbnail or not. I will never complain about the gig I have, but part of me wonders what it would have been like to talk about cars for a living back then.
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