I was scared of youtube for a long time because my first experiences with it were SCREAMERS!!!
Otherwise, I remember Charlie the Unicorn*, some song about making pancakes (lost to time), and this zelda video 



*I actually really, really hated charlie the unicorn, but I felt like I had to watch it because my friends thought it was funny.. it unsettled me 

OOOGh screamers and those really old *spooky ooky* ghost videos that went and made you look super close into the background to jumpscare you AUGH! They were so much X\

My most early online memory besides pivot animations (channels like Hopdiddy, prolly shouldn't share that here though cuz it has a lot of crude 2000s jokes) has to be my copious rewatchings of chihuahua videos and DJ Bobo's Chihuahua! Best song ever!

i remember there was this guy i used to watch religiously as a little kid who played thru SMW rom hacks... dont remember the name of the channel

i remember not going on youtube dot com on my own for the LONGEST time. i was there for its near-infancy but any website that wasn't specifically made for kids, or solely about cartoon characters and their flash games, sort of just freaked me out to even peer at unsupervised. the only times i ever really got shown any videos on it in those super early years, were a few things from my folks. stuff like the original animator vs animation video, the battle at kruger wildlife chase, and the ever iconic lion sleeps tonight video from an animated series that i'm only just learning the name of now (pat & stanley).

once i learned that youtube wasn't as intimidating as i'd made it out in my head to be, i ended up looking for sailor moon stuff to see what i was missing out on. from not catching every episode that aired on cartoon network here. finding out about characters i hadn't seen in the series that way, and then looking up fan videos to see more footage of them, was how i got more familiar with anime and the amv scene. i specifically have this memory of seeing a chibiusa and helios/pegasus video that feels like a distant dream, but blew my little mind because i'd been obsessed with pegasi-like creatures growing up. i have a feeling it could be this amv, and if it's not, then at least the fuzzy quality and editing more than makes up for it to represent the time anyway. i think most of my searches that came after that were pretty hyper-focused on music videos, reviews, how-to-draw x thing, amv's (esp. of game cutscenes), machinima, nightcore edits, and toys. specifically music videos and a few misc. high school drama series made with littlest pet shop, which were my absolute favorite thing in the world, and i think this one encapsulates that era so well lol
it wasn't until i was a little bit older that the landscape of youtube was overran with those early flash series that everyone knows about now, but i only really got to experience them when i was visiting friend's houses and had no adult supervision. incredibly formative and wild to visit others if just to experience "the internet" together, and watch happy tree friends, charlie the unicorn, and salad fingers for the first time that way.

I think one of my first youtube experiences was watching smash bros ipod, it was based off of those ipod commercials from back in the day. The video itself was pretty basic, it was just an image edit of a smash bros fighter blacked out with them holding an ipod with a song that would "fit" the fighter... fit being in airquotes here because I remember op made some... very interesting choices?? I don't think its up anymore but here were the songs I remember most vividly from it.

Luigi - White & Nerdy by Weird Al
Wario - Fat by Weird Al
Peach - Please don't stop the music by Rhianna
Kirby - Nobody's Perfect by Hannah Montanna (Huh?)
Pikachu - Teenager by My Chemical Romance (What???)
Solid Snake - The theme for Pirates of the Caribbean??????

Since its not up anymore I attached a video of the ipod commercial they were based on, there were a lot of videos like these for different fandoms back in the mid 2000s... I distinctly remember a naruto ipod vid my sister made me watch with her lol

 

I learned about Youtube when I was visiting my cousins during the summer of 2007. They were using it to watch lyric videos of Soulja Boy songs.
I wasn't able to use the computer so I forced myself to remember Youtube's name until I got home lol