There's a secret side of YouTube, just beyond the guiding hand of the algorithm – and it’s nothing like what you know. The vast majority of YouTube's estimated 14.8 billion videos have almost never been seen. Until now.

This year marks YouTube's 20th birthday. From its humble beginnings as a venue for amateurs, today YouTube is such a behemoth that the company calls itself the new Hollywood. YouTube is the world's number one TV streaming service, where users clock billions of hours of watching every day. Leading YouTubers regularly outperform big-name studios. For comparison, an estimated 823 million cinema tickets were sold across all of the US and Canada in 2024. Meanwhile, MrBeast's most successful video alone racked up 762 million views, about one watch for every 10 people on earth.

That's the vision of YouTube the company promotes – slick, professional, entertaining and loud – but from one perspective, it's all a façade.

Through another lens, the essence of YouTube is more like this video from 2020. Before I watched, it had only been seen twice. A man points the camera out of his bedroom window as a flurry breaks out in the dead of winter. "Here it is," he says. "The falling snow." The sound of a TV plays in the background. A bird lands on a nearby fence. 19 minutes go by. Nothing happens.

"The conversations we're having about YouTube are based on an impoverished view of what the platform really is," says Ryan McGrady, the senior researcher in the Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in the US. "When we just focus on what's popular, we miss how the vast majority of people actually use YouTube as uploaders, and overlooking the role it plays in our society."

I spent the last month dipping into one of the first truly random samples of YouTube ever collected outside the company. I saw a side of the internet that sometimes feels lost, one full of pure, unvarnished self-expression. It's an entire world that YouTube's all-seeing algorithm won't show you.

"YouTube isn't just a vehicle for professionals," McGrady says. "We rely on it as the default video arm of the internet. YouTube is infrastructure. It's a critical tool that regular people use to communicate."

YouTube turns 20

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To unveil this side of YouTube, McGrady and his colleagues built a tool that dials videos at random. The scraper tried more than 18 trillion potential URLs before it collected a big enough sample for real scientific analysis. Among the findings the researchers estimate that the median video has been watched just 41 times; posts with more than 130 views are actually in the top third of the service's most popular content. In other words, the vast majority of YouTube is practically invisible.

Most of these videos aren't meant for us to see. They exist because people need a digital attic to store their memories. It's an internet unshaped by the pressures of clicks and algorithms – a glimpse into a place where content doesn't have to perform, where it can simply exist.

Twelve years ago, a woman from the US named Emily posted a YouTube video called "sw33t tats". I learned it's even older than that, recorded around 2008. In the video, Emily, who asked to withhold her full name, sits in her college dorm room. She pries her mouth open as her younger sister brings a marker to the inside of Emily's lower lip.

"Stop moving!", her sister yells as she starts to write, the girls barely able to control their laughter. Emily holds her lip open to the camera, and her sister does the same, revealing a sweet tat of her own. But the footage is blurry; whatever these fake tattoos said is lost to time.

Emily, now 34 and living in New York City, forgot this video existed until I asked her about it. "I don't even remember why I uploaded this," she says. "I think wanted to send it to my sister, but I also I had to free up space on my hard drive. I just needed a place to put it. I don't know, it's funny and weird. I'm glad it's still here."

"We tend to assume the reason to use social media is to try to be an influencer, either you're Joe Rogan or you're a failure. But that's the wrong way to think about it," says Ethan Zuckerman, who leads the........

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