Old YouTubers: 15 YouTubers Who Shaped YouTube

Felix Kjellberg started uploading horror game commentary from Sweden in 2010 and spent most of the decade that followed as the most-subscribed person on the platform. The channel now looks nothing like that beginning: chess, oil painting, book reviews, and family life in Japan.

No creator has rebuilt an audience this size this many times and kept it. He takes very few sponsorships now, which makes him more valuable as a lesson in longevity than as a line on a media plan.

The channel began with a basketball trick shot filmed on a Texas ranch in 2009 and became the biggest sports entertainment property on the platform. The format has barely changed in seventeen years, which here counts as a strategy rather than a failure to evolve.

It is also the most family-safe channel at this scale anywhere, which is why the sponsor list reads like a Super Bowl ad break. They sit at the front of every shortlist of YouTube influencers built for mainstream budgets.

Seán McLoughlin opened his account in 2007 and spent years on it before the Let’s Play videos found an audience, which is the part most timelines skip. The volume and the shouting are the brand, and the consistency underneath them is why it lasted.

He has since built a coffee company and a clothing line, and he talks about burnout more openly than almost anyone at this level. Gaming hardware, software, and mental health campaigns all sit naturally against this channel.

Smosh is the oldest account here, opened in November 2005, roughly nine months after YouTube existed at all. Ian Hecox and Anthony Padilla were making lip-sync videos in a bedroom and accidentally worked out what an internet sketch channel should look like.

The channel was sold, passed through two corporate owners, and then bought back by its founders in 2023, which almost never happens. It now runs as a small studio with an ensemble cast and a genuinely renewed audience.

Evan Fong built one of the largest gaming channels on the platform without ever being the main thing on screen. The videos are tightly edited compilations of a group of friends playing badly on purpose, and the timing of the cuts is the entire craft.

Faceless formats age unusually well, because nobody watching has to watch a person get older. The tradeoff for a brand is that the personality is spread across a cast, so integrations work better inside the gameplay than read to a lens.

Michael Stevens took questions nobody says out loud, like what would happen if the Earth stopped spinning, and answered them at length and in order. Vsauce made dense explanation feel like entertainment years before the algorithm started rewarding it.

Uploads are rare now, which limits the channel as a campaign vehicle, but the back catalog still pulls enormous traffic every month. It remains the reference point every educational creator on YouTube gets measured against.

Marques Brownlee reviewed a cheap laptop in his bedroom in 2008 and has covered nearly every significant consumer device since. The production improved beyond recognition over eighteen years while the editorial voice stayed almost exactly the same.

He is one of very few reviewers whose verdict moves a share price, and he has been blunt about products made by companies that advertise on his channel. That independence is what makes him expensive, and our list of tech brands looking for influencers shows the queue he sits at the front of.

Derek Muller started Veritasium in 2010 while finishing a doctorate in physics education, and the thesis is visible in every video: show the misconception first, then take it apart. That structure has since been copied across the entire science side of the platform.

The channel takes sponsorship from technical and education brands and discloses it plainly at the top of the video. Anything that needs a real explanation rather than a slogan gets far more out of this format than out of a feed post.

Rhett McLaughlin and Link Neal have been filming a daily show in the same two chairs since 2012, on a channel opened in 2008, and have published well over two thousand episodes. Output at that rate is closer to broadcast television than to online video.

The pair own their studio, their staff, and a production company that now makes shows for other creators. Food and consumer brands get placed inside a daily habit here, which is worth considerably more than a single large moment.

Equals Three was the most-subscribed channel on the whole platform in 2011, built on reacting to viral clips before reaction was a recognized genre. Ray William Johnson then left it, tried animation and film, and eventually came back to commentary.

The channel now posts daily short-form takes on news and culture to an audience that mostly predates it. It is a useful measure of how much reach actually survives a decade away, which turns out to be more than most people assume.

Linus Sebastian began filming hardware segments for a computer retailer in 2008 and now runs a company of well over a hundred people with a purpose-built testing laboratory attached. The channel outgrew the store that paid for it within a few years.

The lab is the whole point. Very few creators anywhere can produce measurements a manufacturer is unable to dispute, and that capability turns a sponsorship conversation into something much closer to a supplier relationship.

Epic Rap Battles of History puts two figures who never met in a room and has them insult each other in verse. Peter Shukoff and Lloyd Ahlquist have been making them since 2010, on an account that dates back to February 2006.

Episodes arrive rarely and each one is an event with costumes, choreography, and a real production budget behind it. That scarcity is the model, which makes the channel a poor fit for volume campaigns and an unusually good one for a single launch.

Casey Neistat published a daily vlog for six hundred consecutive days and in the process settled what one looks like: a wide lens, a moving camera, and a story that actually resolves. Almost every travel creator working now borrowed that grammar from him.

He ended the daily run, sold a company to CNN, and now posts only when there is something worth saying. Camera, luggage, and airline brands fit him honestly, and our roundup of travel vloggers traces the lineage he started.

Destin Sandlin is an engineer who films what is normally too fast or too small to see, from a cat righting itself in midair to the working parts of a rocket motor. The curiosity is real and the access he gets is genuinely unusual.

His audience is older, more technical, and far more likely to buy tools than merchandise. Industrial, aerospace, and education partners get a kind of credibility here that consumer creators cannot manufacture at any price.

Justine Ezarik has been on camera since 2006, back when there was no accepted word for what she was doing. She was among the first people anywhere to make a full living as an internet personality, and she still uploads most days, usually about Apple hardware.

Twenty years of continuity is itself the asset. An audience that has followed one person that long treats a recommendation differently, and consumer technology, gaming, and lifestyle brands reach a viewer here who has been listening since before the first iPhone shipped.