YouTubers
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7correct to beat the crowd
This YouTuber trivia quiz has 110 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 110 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What is the title of the first video ever uploaded to YouTube, on April 23, 2005?
Me at the zoo
Me at the zoo 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
PayPal. Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim were all early PayPal employees before they registered the YouTube domain on 14 February 2005.
Q 03For how much did Google buy YouTube in November 2006?
$1.65B
$1.65B, paid entirely in Google stock; the deal was announced on 9 October 2006 and completed on 13 November 2006.
Q 04What record did the San Diego Zoo's 2020 reply under "Me at the zoo" set?
Most-liked comment
Most-liked comment. The zoo wrote that it was honoured the first-ever YouTube video was filmed there, and the reply collected more than four million likes.
Q 05Which video was the first on YouTube to reach a billion views, in December 2012?
Gangnam Style by Psy
Gangnam Style by Psy 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 on YouTube to pass 10 billion views, in January 2022?
Baby Shark Dance
Baby Shark Dance, Pinkfong's children's song, passed 10 billion views on 13 January 2022, the first video on the site to reach that mark.
Q 07Which music video ended Psy's reign at the top of the most-viewed list in July 2017?
See You Again
See You Again, Wiz Khalifa and Charlie Puth's Furious 7 tribute, passed Gangnam Style on 10 July 2017 and was itself overtaken by Despacito that August.
Q 08Before Psy took over in 2012, which video had been the site's most-viewed since 2010?
Baby by Justin Bieber
Baby by Justin Bieber passed Lady Gaga's Bad Romance in July 2010 and stayed the most-viewed video until Gangnam Style overtook it in November 2012.
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
100K. The Silver Play Button marks 100,000 subscribers; the next tier, the Gold Play Button, arrives at one million.
Q 11The Red Diamond Play Button is awarded at what subscriber count?
100M
100M. The Red Diamond Play Button marks 100 million subscribers and was first awarded in May 2019.
Q 12What is MrBeast's real name?
Jimmy Donaldson
Jimmy Donaldson, raised in Greenville, North Carolina, first uploaded as MrBeast6000 in 2012.
Q 13MrBeast's breakthrough viral video in January 2017 showed him doing what?
Counting to 100,000
Counting to 100,000. The stunt took him roughly 40 hours and marked his shift from Let's Plays to the challenge format the channel was built 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
Ian Hecox and Anthony Padilla. Their lip-synced Pokémon theme video was briefly the most-viewed on the whole site in 2006 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
Feastables launched in January 2022 with a line of chocolate bars; MrBeast Burger preceded it as a virtual restaurant in 2020, and the Lunchly 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
1,000 contestants competed for the $5 million prize, billed as the largest in television history when Beast Games debuted on Prime Video in December 2024.
Q 17MrBeast's 2019 fundraiser Team Trees set out to plant how many trees?
20M
20M. Team Trees, launched with Mark Rober in October 2019, raised $20 million for the Arbor Day Foundation to plant 20 million trees, reaching the goal that December.
Q 18What is PewDiePie's real name?
Felix Kjellberg
Felix Kjellberg 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
Amnesia: The Dark Descent playthroughs did it; 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
Bitch Lasagna, released 5 October 2018, became PewDiePie's most-viewed video; Congratulations followed in March 2019 to concede the race.
Mythical Entertainment, Rhett and Link's company, bought Smosh in February 2019 and owned it until Hecox and Padilla bought back majority control in June 2023.
Q 24In which U.S. city was Markiplier raised?
Cincinnati
Cincinnati. Mark Fischbach was born in Honolulu but grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio, where he studied biomedical engineering at the University of Cincinnati before leaving to make videos.
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
Iron Lung, adapted from David Szymanski's 2022 submarine horror game, was Markiplier's feature debut as writer, director and lead actor.
Q 27What is the real name of Irish YouTuber Jacksepticeye?
Seán McLoughlin
Seán McLoughlin. 'Jack' was a childhood nickname and 'Septic Eye' came from an eye injury he picked up in a football match.
Q 28With which greeting does Jacksepticeye open his videos?
"Top of the morning to ya, laddies"
"Top of the morning to ya, laddies" is the shouted intro that opens his videos; the Irish creator also had a cameo as himself in 2021's Free Guy.
Q 29Jenna Mourey, one of YouTube's early stars, took her stage name from what?
Her dog Mr. Marbles
Her dog Mr. Marbles inspired the name; 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
2020. She announced the indefinite hiatus in June 2020 after apologising for older videos; in 2015 she had been among the first YouTubers given a Madame Tussauds wax figure.