The company confirmed to TubeFilter today that YouTube Rewind, the company's annual year-end round-up of trends, creators, memes, and the most popular videos on the site, has been canceled for good.
Instead, YouTube will "refocus our energies on celebrating you and the trends that make YouTube [fire emoji] with a different and updated kind of experience," though it did not say what it will replace Rewind with.
YouTube will rely on its platform's creators to fill the void, with a spokesperson telling TubeFilter that it will "continue to be inspiring to see the myriad of ways the world's most creative content producers — our YouTube creators — encapsulate the end of year in their video recaps, as YouTube retires its own Rewind video.”
Thank you to all the creators involved in Rewind - we’ll be 👀 for your Rewinds as we refocus our energies on celebrating you and the trends that make YouTube 🔥 with a different and updated kind of experience - stay tuned! → https://t.co/kI69C24eL0
— YouTube Creators (@YouTubeCreators) October 7, 2021
The news that YouTube is permanently canceling Rewind comes as no surprise. The company has already begun planning for 2020, citing the year's challenges: "2020 has been different. And pretending that it isn't doesn't feel right.”
Rewind, on the other hand, had been struggling long before the pandemic. The YouTube community slammed the video from last year (to this day, it remains the most disliked video ever posted to the platform). Creators claimed that the company was shifting its focus away from the "real community" — which included controversial creators such as Logan Paul and PewDiePie — and toward more advertiser-friendly options.
And the video for 2019 tried to avoid all controversy by switching from a big-budget mashup of YouTubers from previous years to a more ordinary (and boring) list of clips from the most-watched creators, videos, and trends.
Rewind videos have been a big part of YouTube culture for the past decade, whether well-received or endlessly dunked on. Hopefully, whatever YouTube does to replace its big year-end celebration in the future is a little less contentious.