A 19-second video of a man admiring the elephants at San Diego Zoo has been viewed more than 360 million times. That means that almost 220 years of collective human history have been spent watching YouTube’s first-ever video, Me at the Zoo, posted by one of the company’s co-founders, Jawed Karim, 20 years ago.

Since then, more than 20 billion videos have been uploaded, making the video-sharing platform truly disruptive. YouTube made it possible for anyone with a camera and a passion to produce, market and monetise their content. It democratised video and kickstarted a thriving creator economy that Goldman Sachs forecasts could be worth $0.5tn (about £375bn) by 2027.

Creators have now become the “centre of gravity”, in the words of media universe cartographer and analyst Evan Shapiro, for any brand, celebrity or studio seeking cultural relevance. Hollywood stars on their promotional tours are skipping traditional chat shows in favour of an awkward flirt with Amelia Dimoldenberg on Chicken Shop Date or a spicy wings challenge with Sean Evans on Hot Ones.

The unstoppable rise of YouTube creators was crystallised in November, says Shapiro. In the political sphere, Donald Trump’s election success was “pretty much determined by the brosphere podcasting realm”, which is largely driven by YouTube: Joe Rogan’s interview with Trump has garnered 58m views to date. Two weeks later, Netflix was crashed by the colossal 65 million-strong audience tuning in to watch YouTube prankster Jake Paul fight boxing legend Mike Tyson.

Creators are now the driving force in the media ecosystem, Shapiro says, and fans are speaking not just with their attention but also their money, buying up everything from paid subscriptions to merchandise and product lines. Led by Alison Lomax, managing director of YouTube UK and Ireland, the platform contributed more than £2bn to Britain’s GDP in 2023, according to its most recent impact report. Children now say they want to be YouTubers when they grow up, and it’s not a pipe-dream: in the UK alone, the platform’s creative ecosystem supports more than 45,000 full-time equivalent jobs.

YouTubers have evolved from bedroom creators to fully fledged production companies. The London-based collective The Sidemen, whose wildly popular videos range from challenges to comedy skits, hires a team of more than 100 people. Dimoldenberg, whose sharply crafted brand has taken her from London chicken shops to the Oscars red carpet, has launched her own production company, Dimz Inc.

British-South African creator Caspar Lee was one of the first to build a career on YouTube. Alongside his YouTuber friends Joe Sugg, Zoella and Alfie Deyes – dubbed the “Brit Crew” – Lee entertained a generation of young viewers in a pioneering new medium. He launched his channel in 2010, aged 16. By 2012, he had 100,000 subscribers and could fund himself solely through ad revenues from his videos.

A gap year before university to focus on his channel turned into a gap decade, and the now 31-year-old has amassed 6.5m subscribers, even though he stepped away from YouTube in 2019. “It was a unique experience, growing up in that time with that opportunity,” Lee says.

His channel was one of the first to host celebrities promoting their projects, and his videos featured collaborations with Ed Sheeran, James Corden, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and Kevin Hart, among others. “I always wanted to think about what I was going to do next, because – as much as I love being a YouTuber, it is a bit of a treadmill sometimes,” Lee says.

He has now launched multiple business ventures, including Influencer, a marketing company matching brands with creators. His company has grown to around 150 employees with offices in London, New York and Riyadh.

YouTube creators offer a more human approach to marketing, Lee says, and this can be as effective as big-budget ad campaigns. Take Brandon Baum, aka Brandon B, the young VFX creator with 15.8 million subscribers, who collaborated with Netflix to create promotional content for Squid Game. “It’s not overtly promotional. Instead, it tells the story in a way my audience is familiar with,” he wrote online of the successful campaign that saw his videos gaining more than 175 million views.

Shapiro agrees: “It’s not about reach, it’s about community. It’s about love. When that emotion gets generated, in addition to a piece of intellectual property – whether it’s directly from a creator or from a studio – it’s about much more than simply tuning in, it’s about being included.”

The streamers are taking note of the wealth of talent thriving on YouTube. Amazon Prime recently announced two more series of Beast Games, the gameshow from the world’s most popular YouTuber, Jimmy “MrBeast” Donaldson, which boasts a prize fund of $10m. Netflix is following suit, striking huge deals with The Sidemen for the second series of their reality show, Inside, as well as with the educational content creator Ms Rachel in the US.

With more of us watching YouTube content on our TVs than on phones or computers, the platform has conquered the living room. “For more and more people, watching TV means watching YouTube,” the company’s CEO, Neal Mohan, said in February.

In the UK, YouTube is second only to the BBC in terms of watch time. But for audiences aged 16 to 35, the time spent watching YouTube staggeringly exceeds that of all the public broadcasters combined, a report by Shapiro and Barb confirmed last year.

Now wrestling with the existential threat of younger generations on linear being wiped out completely, public service broadcasters are looking to YouTube not just as a place to market their content to new audiences, but to distribute it too. In the UK broadcast space, the BBC has more than 300 YouTube channels.

YouTube’s UK chief notes that native creators don’t just bring audiences, but creative development ideas and agile production skills too. Lomax recently appeared alongside Channel 4’s Matt Risley and true crime creator Eleanor Neale at the Creative Cities Convention in Bradford to discuss how broadcasters can maximise their IP on YouTube.

Channel 4 has been working closely with YouTube for years. The broadcaster launched its digital-first brand, Channel 4.0, on YouTube in 2022, before expanding to TikTok and Instagram the following year. Aimed at entertaining 13 to 24-year-olds, the channel features digitally native stars such as Nella Rose and Harry Pinero.

C4’s’s innovative digital strategy has already seen tangible results, with a trebling of UK viewing figures in the first quarter of 2024 to 25m views.

Across the Atlantic, Canada’s CBC gave new life to its old library content by uploading it to watch for free on YouTube, reaching previously untapped audiences. Viewership on YouTube rocketed with an audience two generations younger than broadcast, and a whole generation younger than its streaming app, Shapiro explains. As well as generating revenue through YouTube, these new viewers also sought more episodes of the shows on CBC’s streaming platform.

While audience figures on Netflix, the world’s biggest streamer, show signs of plateauing, YouTube is charging ahead with its unique offer of radically personalised content. In 20 years, it has gone from a 19-second zoo video to more than 3 million creators earning revenue through the YouTube Partner Program. Predicting the platform’s next 20 years feels almost impossible, but one thing is clear: YouTube, and its attendant creator economy, have already triumphed.