Watching Unseen YouTube Videos Is One of the Internet's Weirdest Pleasures

For every YouTube video that goes viral, there are countless others inoculated from relevance that garner exactly zero views. These are the Tube’s forgotten works and seeing them — now you’re alone in having had that pleasure — is weirdly intimate and, more often than not, just plain weird. Zero Views, a new app devoted to the world’s least popular genre, has simplified the process of finding the poorly named and irrelevant, creating a pipeline full of things that couldn’t be forgotten because they were never remembered.

It’s strange fun.

When I started it up, the first video I got was some kids playing basketball in a peewee league. They sucked. Next up was some Russian parents with strollers taking their children out for a jaunt in the woods. Okay whatever.

My third video though….

I don’t know what language they’re screaming. I don’t know where that heavy bass is coming from. I don’t know why the fire. But the world is full of intriguing shit!

Okay, so that video itself isn’t totally impressive, but viewing it is a kind of interesting experience. In an age when algorithms on social media and advertisements and memes and everything else we produce are designed to be passed around, it’s cool to feel lonely on the internet. It’s cool to not have to ask that one dumb question: “Did you see?” Because, no, you didn’t.

On the other hand, you quickly start to realize why these videos have zero views. I slogged through several dozen of them and saw so much uninteresting stuff. A six-year-old Chinese kid playing mediocre piano; a bunch of runners sprinting up a hill while carrying weights; some guy’s video of a pool party from a far distance which makes me 99 percent sure he was not supposed to be there; old men bowling; the list goes on.

You also start to realize one of the big reasons these videos have no views is because they haven’t been titled or labeled with tags. There is no way to actually search for them, so you can’t describe them to Google. The only way to find them is by accident.

The man behind Zero Views is Daniel Storm, a developers who’s already responsible for tons of other iPhone and iPad apps, from the CIA Finger Scanner (a prank app), to Fling The Arrows (a game involving, well, flinging arrows of course), to the Love Test Pro Compatibility Rating Calculator (for finding “accurate” compatibility ratings between two people). He seems like my kind of guy, the sort of guy who wants to see more strangeness in the world and a guy who wants that strangeness to get the attention it deserves, which is about one click.

And, ridiculousness aside, there’s some stuff worth sharing. When you share it, just remember to remind people you saw it first. There’s evidence and everything.

Here’s the best of my batch.

If only because it’s maybe the first time I’ve seen bull fighting not result in someone’s torso or arm getting gorged into pieces.

I actually found this to be a pleasant surprise.

Honestly, this is here because the inner-nerd in me would like to know if any readers out there know what this is and where it’s from.

Want to hold your audience’s attention? Wear masks.

You know how this ends. Go ahead and laugh, because I sure did.

Anyone else think this guy just ruined pirates for everyone? No? Okay, nevermind then.

I saw it first.