YouTube Rewind 2019 ditches old format; PewDiePie makes a return after controversy

YouTube Rewind, the online video sharing platform's year-in-review, has come back with a completely new format on Thursday after a trail of negative reviews last year. YouTube is now looking to unwind its failures from 2019 and not end up in a yet another 'most downvoted video of all time' situation or with the need to prompt a statement from the CEO of YouTube. In 2018, the video had featured a monologue by Hollywood actor Will Smith and attracted widespread criticism for the slogan, "Everyone Controls Rewind." This had brought in over 17 million downvotes, making it the most disliked video in the history of YouTube.

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PewDiePie makes a comeback to YouTube Rewind 2019 after a long absence

The platform's 2019 annual highlight reel features the controversial artist PewDiePie, who has made a return to the video-sharing platform after being away for the last two years. Also, for this year, YouTube ditched the original production format where it would use some of the most popular artists and chose to simply make a collage of the most popular YouTube content from this year. This features a breakdown of the most-liked creator, most-searched trends, dance, music, beauty related videos, the most-viewed games, creators, breakout artists, and so on.

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Watch the YouTube Rewind 2019:

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PewDiePie is one of the few creators that had made it to more than one of the popular categories. PewDiePie had earlier been involved in a lot of controversies, but according to the head of YouTube’s culture and trends team, he helped bring back the Minecraft craze amongst other creators. He also added that they tried creating something that was super accurate to the superfans, the people who care about the concept and come for YouTube Rewind every year. Unfortunately, for YouTube, the video has again received negative response garnering just 947K likes over 1.7M dislikes as of now. As for PewDiePie, it is yet to be seen if he will be able to reclaim the kind of mainstream marketing appeal that he once brought.

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