This YouTuber trivia quiz has 60 free questions with answers and covers the people and the platform: the three PayPal alumni who founded YouTube and the 19-second zoo clip that started it, the creators who have held the most-subscribed crown from Smosh to PewDiePie to MrBeast, the gaming names (Markiplier, Jacksepticeye), the kids' juggernauts (Ryan's World, Cocomelon), the vloggers and business builders (Casey Neistat, Emma Chamberlain, Michelle Phan, the Paul brothers), and the records, Play Buttons, VidCon and Rewind moments in between. It starts with questions anyone with the app can answer and works up to real names, founding dates and the number that broke the view counter. It suits a game night with mixed ages, a classroom icebreaker, or a solo test of how much of your watch history you actually remember. Every answer has been checked against a reference source, and each question shows its explanation and citation once you have answered. Play the full set for a shareable score, then send it to your group chat.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What is the title of the first video ever uploaded to YouTube?
Me at the zoo
The 19-second clip shows co-founder Jawed Karim in front of the elephants at San Diego Zoo, noting that they have really long trunks.
Q 02YouTube's three founders had all previously worked at which company?
PayPal
Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim registered the site on Valentine's Day 2005.
Q 03For how much did Google buy YouTube in November 2006?
$1.65B
It was paid in stock, and YouTube is now the second-most-visited website on Earth behind Google itself.
Q 04What YouTube record does the San Diego Zoo's 2020 reply under "Me at the zoo" hold?
Most-liked comment
The zoo wrote that it was honoured the first-ever YouTube video was filmed there, and picked up around 4.5 million likes for it.
Q 05Which video was the first on YouTube to reach a billion views, in December 2012?
Gangnam Style by Psy
It later blew past the 32-bit view counter's limit of 2,147,483,647, forcing YouTube to upgrade its maths.
Q 06Which children's video became the first to pass 10 billion views, in January 2022?
Baby Shark Dance
Pinkfong's earworm remains the most-viewed video on the site by a distance, at more than 17 billion.
Q 07Which music video ended Psy's reign at the top of the most-viewed list in July 2017?
See You Again
The Wiz Khalifa and Charlie Puth tribute from Furious 7 held the top spot only briefly before Despacito took over later that year.
Q 08Before Psy took over in 2012, which video had been the site's most-viewed since 2010?
Baby by Justin Bieber
The Bieber video also spent seven years as the most-disliked upload on the site.
Q 09Which upload overtook Justin Bieber's "Baby" as the site's most-disliked video in December 2018?
That year's Rewind
The year-in-review series ran from 2010 and was quietly cancelled in 2021 after the backlash.
Q 10How many subscribers does a channel need to earn a Silver Play Button?
100K
Gold is a million, Diamond ten million, and the Red Diamond marks 100 million.
Q 11The Red Diamond Play Button is awarded at what subscriber count?
100M
T-Series received the first one on May 29, 2019, and PewDiePie the second that August.
Q 12What is MrBeast's real name?
Jimmy Donaldson
He was born in Wichita, Kansas, raised in Greenville, North Carolina, and first uploaded as MrBeast6000 in 2012.
Q 13MrBeast's breakthrough viral video in January 2017 showed him doing what?
Counting to 100,000
It took him about 40 hours and marked the shift from Let's Plays to the stunt format he built an empire on.
Q 21Which company dropped PewDiePie as a partner in 2017, two years before he lost YouTube's most-subscribed title?
Disney
Disney's Maker Studios cut ties in 2017 after a Wall Street Journal report on antisemitic jokes in his videos.
Q 22Which duo founded Smosh, the channel that was YouTube's most-subscribed as early as 2006?
Ian Hecox and Anthony Padilla
Their lip-synced Pokémon theme video was once the most-viewed on the whole site before a copyright takedown.
Q 23Which company bought Smosh in 2019 after its parent Defy Media collapsed?
Mythical Entertainment
Q 14MrBeast's channel became the most-subscribed on YouTube in June 2024 by overtaking which Indian channel?
T-Series
The music label founded by Gulshan Kumar had held the crown since beating PewDiePie in 2019.
Q 15What is the name of MrBeast's chocolate bar brand, launched in 2022?
Feastables
MrBeast Burger came first as a virtual restaurant in 2020, and Lunchly (a lunch kit) followed in 2024.
Q 16MrBeast's Amazon Prime competition Beast Games put how many contestants in the running for $5 million?
1,000
The prize was billed as the largest in television history when the show debuted in December 2024.
Q 17MrBeast's 2019 fundraiser Team Trees set out to plant how many trees?
20M
The follow-up, Team Seas, raised more than $34 million to pull rubbish out of the ocean.
Q 18What is PewDiePie's real name?
Felix Kjellberg
He was born in Gothenburg in 1989 and moved to Japan in 2022 with his wife Marzia.
Q 19PewDiePie built his early audience with Let's Play videos of which horror game?
Amnesia: The Dark Descent
By August 2013 he was YouTube's most-subscribed individual creator, passing Smosh.
Q 20What was PewDiePie's October 2018 diss track during his subscriber race with an Indian music label called?
Bitch Lasagna
It became his most-viewed video; "Congratulations" was the follow-up conceding the race in 2019.
Rhett and Link's company owned it until Hecox and Padilla bought back majority control in June 2023.
Q 24Markiplier's channel name combines his first name with which word?
Multiplier
Mark Fischbach was born in Honolulu and started the channel in 2012 planning to make sketch comedy.
Q 25Markiplier and Ethan Nestor's channel Unus Annus uploaded daily and then did what after exactly one year?
Deleted everything
The name is Latin for "one year", and the November 2020 deletion was the point of the project.
Q 26Which horror video game did Markiplier adapt into a film he wrote, directed and starred in?
Iron Lung
His clothing brand Cloak and the Distractible podcast round out a business that started with Let's Plays.
Q 27Ireland's most-subscribed YouTuber, Jacksepticeye, is really called what?
Seán McLoughlin
"Jack" was a childhood nickname and "Septic Eye" came from an eye injury in a football match.
Q 28With which greeting does Jacksepticeye open his videos?
"Top of the morning to ya, laddies"
His annual Thankmas charity streams have raised more than $25 million, and he had a cameo in Free Guy.
Q 29Jenna Mourey took her YouTube stage name from what?
Her dog Mr. Marbles
Her 2010 video "How to Trick People into Thinking You're Good Looking" pulled 5.3 million views in its first week.
Q 30In what year did YouTuber Jenna Mourey (Jenna Marbles) announce her indefinite hiatus?
2020
She left after apologising for older videos, having been one of the first YouTubers to get a Madame Tussauds wax figure.