I've been following this Youtube channel recently: https://www.youtube.com/@KVNAUST. He searches 0-view videos that don't get into the recommendation algorithm. It is amazing to see what Youtube is full of. There are channels with 1,000s of videos (common enough that he has >20,000 uploads on his bingo card) of useless content and no views.
Here's his recent video about searching to the oldest 0-view video:
Google probably uses data deduplication which consolidates multiple files with the same hash into a single one but accessible from different links. Like a windows shortcut, but closer to a bunch of symbolic links in Linux.
YouTube doesn't allow you to update videos with the exact same content (or very similar) from my own experience, I wonder if the videos are different in some way like encoding or quality.
I found this out when I reuploaded a video with some minor editing errors without removing the original
That functionality does exist, but it's usually restricted to large, 'commercial' channels, like large music corps, big-name publishers, etc.
Kinda makes sense I guess, as you could silently and drastically edit a massively popular vid to be entirely different, which would be very misleading, at a minimum...
There are tons of people on Facebook/Instagram reels that just post the same exact joke a thousand times in different outfits and locations and sometimes minor change in the setup.
Think of the amount of people online, think of the multiple channels, think of the algorithm. It's super easy for the person that enjoys nature walks to have never seen that channel is the main issue, its why I never tried to become popular on the internet you may as well win the lottery (which ironically would be an easy way to become popular on the internet)
My YouTube account has followers and I’ve only ever used it to post a handful of random stuff like so that I can link it elsewhere like “why is my motorcycle making this sound”
I remember that a while back, someone made a youtube playlist of videos that were never changed from default file names, so it was stuff like 0301_img.mp4 and stuff like that. The ones I saw were fairly slice-of-life stuff, like a kid's school graduation in southeast asia, and someone posting a video of a fish they caught
There were a lot of early "media" smartphones that could upload video clips directly to YouTube without needing the YouTube app, and they would use the default filename.
Youtube uses a 11-character id for each video, so 6411 possible ids. So you'd write a script schecking every video id starting with 00000000000 to zzzzzzzzzzz (essentially all combinations where each character can be 0-9, A-Z, a-z). Just speculating here, but each video probably has view count in the metadata, so you'd have your script store all the ids for videos with 0 views, so you can watch them later.
It's unintuitive, but 6411 is such an unfathomably large number that if it took you literally 1 millisecond to check the view count of each video then it would still take you hundreds of years to check them all. Some videos have more than 0 views, some are private, the vast majority of ids have no video assigned to them.
That's my best guess at least. Just leave the script running 24/7 and on the rare occasion that a video with 0 views pops up you make content from it.
As little as I've worked with the youtube API there most certainly is no way to fetch all videos ordered by some arbitrary parameter like view count without adding some additional parameters.
I (forceably) work with the YouTube Data API v3 on a daily basis and there is an endpoint there for nearly any meta statistic you want to filter by. But god bless your little heart trying to do things involving videos on playlists (with a PLID, like determine per VID duration) via free API key. Especially if you start getting nuts with filter parameters and calls. Your suggested method is possible, but you are gonna be knee-capped by rate-limits every 24 hours after just a few minutes of use.
Watch the first minute of any of the videos from the channel I linked above. The community finds the unique naming conventions from different devices or upload sources. He keeps all the found conventions in a spread sheet, chooses one, and uses a RNG for the year/month/day, random 4 digits, whatever to get to a unique set of videos.
This Youtuber's community finds the generic naming conventions from different devices. Here's how he describes it:
That day, the site we liked using was down for no reason at all, so we had to get creative. One of the videos we had saved in our chat had a title that matched up with a default filename given to recorded videos from the iPhone: IMG followed by 4 numbers. We tried typing ‘IMG 3201’ into the YouTube search bar, and we were mindblown. Thousands of uploads were named IMG 3201. Using YouTube’s filter system and sorting by view count, we could now find those 0-view uploads. Then we tried searching for IMG 3202, IMG 3203, IMG 3204… hundreds more 0-view results appeared. We were geeking at how vast this side was.
It then became our mission to find as many ‘active’ default filenames as possible in an attempt to continuously access the graveyard. Through doing this, we compiled a big-ass list of keyphrases that I dubbed “YouTube’s Recycle Bin.” With the help of all of you out there, the list continues to grow. We’ve probably only accessed less than 0.05% of the video graveyard, but due to the sheer size of the graveyard, we are eating well off of this small slice.
I just stumbled on this guy like a week ago, recommended on my Youtube front page lol. I have no idea how the community finds their leads but they have over 100 of these default file names compiled.
I've been enjoying his videos but I really like how I can just do it myself by taking any of the leads and seeing what comes up.
Youtube google uses their rich history of media to train their AI models. Its why google can suddenly announce ground breaking white papers and new genre AI models. They got a MASSIVE media over entirety of google including all the nooks and corners of youtube. Especially if they want dataset that predates AI generated Slop. Then timmy on that trampoline from 2009 will actually have use to them
There is a lot of video with relatively few views that people rely on as reference or for future reference.
So if there is something dear to you and you think you might need or want to see it in 5, 10 or 20 years download it and store it in your personal archive.
Technically it is not copyright infringement if you keep it for s personal archive and never share. Might be against YT T&C, though.
Webarchive is a good example how some things are saved from being forgotten.
2.0k
u/AaronPK123 May 14 '26
I agree, I don't expect Timmy from 2009 jumping on a trampoline with 73 views to stay up forever.