YouTube used to be a fun and exciting place to find new videos unlike anything on TV or in theaters. Okay, it still is, but to get to any decent video now you have to wade through piles of unviewable garbage. While the music videos and talk-to-your-webcam shows make up most of the crud, those will never stop. At least there are a few identifiable clichés that we can refuse to watch (after peeking just this once) in honor of National Cliché Day, celebrated today.

1. Fake Viral Videos
At first, fake virals were fun. By "at first" I mean "In the Guy Catches Glasses With Face" video posted on YouTube in 2007. It didn't take long for people to figure out how the tricks were done, and the username of the poster (neverhidefilms) quoted the slogan for Ray-Ban, so this "viral" video was pretty easily explained. At the time, this was a fresh new idea, and after 4.5 million views it's still fun to re-watch:

Of course, the success of the Ray-Ban video inspired other brilliant video makers to... do pretty much the same thing with their products. Except, of course, non-brilliantly. For example, here are some guys jumping into pants!


This yawner was made for Levi and promoted by the same agency that worked for Ray-Ban – and released a year minus one day after the sunglasses vid. I guess it takes a long time to do the exact same project twice. My favorite bit is how the guys go extra far to sound chummy and casual. "Hey dudes, this is just a streetwise gang of ruffians like yourselves! BUY OUR PANTS." I debunked this video the week it came out, after seeing too many bloggers post it as a viral. Not that it's evil to spread a viral ad, it's just embarrassing to see people fall for it. The Levi series continued with "Guys fill their jeans with helium" and "Runaway jeans cause car crash." The only thing keeping these "hip" and "viral" was the lack of a logo at the end. While the jeans were just an innocent ripoff, the "Pop corn with cell phones" viral ad was a devious little hoax. The video shows some people circling their phones around some kernels to pop corn with the phones' radiation:


Not only is this completely fake, it was made by a company called Cardo Systems, who make bluetooth headsets. They're basically spreading FUD to scare people into buying their products. Gross. The company has since pulled the video from YouTube, but many parodies survive, including this cute but disturbing one from the guys who made the famous "David Blaine Street Magic" sketch:

Fake virals are old. They show that your company still sees the public as a bunch of goofs waiting to be tricked into liking you. There's only one good kind of fake viral left, and that's the nod-and-a-wink kind made for the Mini Cooper:


2. Sexy Anything
The original title of this post was "Sexy Boob Hot Model Butt Sex." I really don't know why I had to change it. There are two ways to get popular on YouTube. One is to offer compelling content that gets linked from blogs and news aggregators. The other is to trick people into watching. And the easiest way to trick at least half the population into clicking is to flash some hot girls. Maybe you can think of a different reason that Marina Orlova's podcast about word history has gotten a total of over 100 million views:

The absolute worst example of selling with sex is AtheneWins, a show by some Belgian dudes and the one girl in their group. YouTube employees have told me how frustrating these guys are, because they stretch or break every part of the site's terms of service to crank up their view count. They have 42 videos that broke one million views. Guess which member of the group appears on the thumbnail for each of those clips!


It's Tania, or as she's known on the show, "Hot Girl." As seen in their titles, "Hot Girl likes anime sex?" or "Hot Girl's seduction tips." Years ago, it was easy to sex up a clip's thumbnail, as YouTube always used the middle frame of the film. AtheneWins would splice in an irrelevant frame showing off Tania's cleavage. Once YouTube made them stop, they started actually inserting clips of Tania juuuuust long enough to claim they were relevant, while filling the rest of the video with some obnoxious guy insulting his fellow Warcraft players:

The only good thing these kids have done for the world is when Tania promised to sleep with anyone who supports net neutrality. Spoiler alert: I don't think she's gonna deliver. Even the blow job she "performed" on YouTube (for those who voted for her in a Belgian parliamentary election) was taken down. And that's why sex on YouTube is such a weak trick: YouTube doesn't allow nudity.


3. Stop-motion
Nah, just kidding. These are awesome and will never get old. For example, "Western Spaghetti," "Her Morning Elegance," "Iron Man vs. Bruce Lee," "Human Tetris," or the ultimate fight in "Tony vs. Paul":

The real cliché is stop-motion's cousin, the time-lapse. While a few of these, like the two-minute clip of a baby playing with toys for four hours, are cool –

– the vast majority of time-lapse videos are just video of a long boring event turned into a short boring event. Wouldn't it be ideal to just compress this whole freeway trip down to zero seconds?

Or this time-lapse of a family painting a wall blue:

For an encore, let's watch it dry!


4. Annoying Young Men
I have a secret hobby. I like to watch the first five seconds of every Smosh video, where a guy says "Shut up!" Then I close the video before the skit starts. That way I don't have to watch this:

"Shout! Shout! Weird face! Somebody dies and it's awkward! LAUGH NOW." The weird thing is that they've been doing this long enough to get good production value, so it's like there's an actually good sketch in there crying to get out. But nope! It's still pretty much a high school class skit. At least around 6:30 they watch the time-lapse paint video. For more loud young men, try Philip DeFranco, who thinks he's the heir to classic vlogger Ze Frank. (He's not.) Or try Fred, a teenager who speeds up his voice to prove that there is something more annoying than a loud teenage boy, which is another loud teenage boy:
You just watched a video that has over 34 million views and earned a little more money for Fred.


5. Miley Cyrus

OMG, Miley's quitting that site about celebrity worship and attention-whoring! Oh look she made a rap video about it. END SCENE.


Want to honor more clichés on this fateful day? Our bros at Asylum have compiled the top blogging clichés, StreetLevel found the most clichéd hip-hop cover poses, Comics Alliance reviews their favorite comic book clichés and Spinner delves into music's biggest offenders.