What happens to YouTube videos that have never been viewed? What about videos that not even those who have uploaded them have watched? Well, they end up on Petit Tube, a site selecting the most unloved videos for your viewing pleasure.
Petit Tube is one of those weird places on the web that answers questions that many of us have often wondered about: Are there videos on YouTube that nobody has ever watched? The answer is yes, and this website has rescued them from absolute oblivion. Petit Tube doesn’t distinguish between dates, durations, content, etc. The only condition for a video to appear on this sleep-inducing page is that is has a total view count of zero – meaning not even those who made the video have watched it on YouTube.
Its search engine is simple, each time you click on the viewing window, it randomly loads another video consigned to oblivion. When it finishes, or there’s some technical problem, it automatically moves on to the next one and just keeps on going for as long as you’re prepared to stay watching. As you can imagine, with YouTube receiving almost 500,000 hours of video each day it’s impossible that everyone makes it to celebrity YouTuber status. In fact, many have been given such strange names that it seems they’re doing their best not to be found by anyone who actually might be interested in them.
What kind of videos can I find on Petit Tube? Someone sleeping for hours on end, a nondescript helicopter flight, promotional videos of second-hand vans for sale, people swimming in a public swimming pool, kids showing their parents the drawings they did at school, a blurry and out of focus shot of a minor league Canadian hockey game. Or maybe a ticking clock, fixed shots of signage with lettering that’s impossible to identify, how to pronounce 2164 correctly in French and a never-ending ludicrous, etc.
Basically, it’s a completely decontextualized audiovisual journey through the world of video, whose creators have abandoned them forever and left them to rot in dust-filled crevices online. It has a certain obscure and wacky talent and is definitely an unusual site.
There’s also a similar site for songs that have never been listened to on Spotify. It’s called Forgotify and taps into about 20% of the songs available on the popular music platform that have never been listened to, due to the enormous volume of material that it soaks up every day. You can find interesting songs and artists with remarkable quality, so think of it as a second chance for songs forgotten by the public at large…
