Fred/YouTube; NigaHiga/YouTube; VenetianPrincess/YouTube
From left: YouTubers Fred, NigaHiga, and Venetian Princess in 2010.
- YouTube has dramatically grown in the last decade, turning into a place where creators can earn money, launch their careers, and become viral stars.
- While YouTube is now dominated by names like PewDiePie and Dude Perfect, the platform's most popular creators 10 years ago featured names like NigaHiga, Fred, and KevJumba.
- These were the 10 most subscribed-to creators at the start of the decade, and where these 2010 stars are now.
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At the beginning of the decade, a whopping 24 hours of video was being uploaded to video-sharing platform YouTube every minute. Now, that number has skyrocketed to more than 500 hours per minute.
Since YouTube made it possible for video creators to make money off their content in 2007, the platform has become a place where people can become celebrities and well-known names outside the traditional path to fame. Today, names like PewDiePie, Logan and Jake Paul, and David Dobrik each have tens of millions of subscribers eating up their content across social media.
But 10 years ago, when YouTube was still relatively new, the most popular stars were different. Some creators are still around on YouTube today, like Shane Dawson and Philip DeFranco, while others have since moved on from the platform where they first rose to notoriety.
Here are the 10 most popular YouTubers at the beginning of the decade, and what those stars are up to now: