Petit Tube: YouTube Videos That Almost Nobody Has Seen

Petit Tube plays only YouTube videos that nobody has watched. Not obscure videos. Not underrated videos. Videos with a view count somewhere around zero, which as of this moment includes an enormous, continuously replenished quantity of footage.

Press play and it runs like a channel. A shaky clip of a road. Ninety seconds of a ceiling fan. A child’s birthday party in a language you do not speak. Then the next one.

What is Petit Tube?

The name is French and so is the project, and there is something appropriately Gallic about the premise: an art piece disguised as a video player. The whole site is one embedded video, a next button, and nothing else.

Everything you have ever seen on YouTube passed through some filter. A recommendation, a search, a link somebody sent you, a thumbnail engineered to be clicked. All of those select for the same thing, which is video made to be watched. Petit Tube inverts the filter entirely. Its only criterion is that nobody selected it.

What that surfaces is not bad video. It is unperformed video. Footage shot for a reason that made sense to one person and was never intended to travel: a test upload to check whether the camera worked, a phone recording a pocket, a clip of a garden sent to a relative, forty minutes of a static shop interior. There are no thumbnails, no titles designed to hook you, frequently no title at all beyond a camera’s default filename.

Watched for ten minutes it is funny. Watched for thirty it becomes something else. You are looking at an accurate sample of what the world actually uploads, as opposed to what the world actually watches, and those two things turn out to have almost nothing to do with each other.

There is one lovely structural flaw. By showing a video, Petit Tube gives it views. Anything the site features is slowly disqualified from the category it was chosen for. The channel eats its own source material, and the pool refills only because people keep uploading things nobody will ever look for.

What can you do with Petit Tube?

• Just let it play. It runs continuously with no input needed, one video into the next.
• Skip. One button moves you on, which you will use often and without guilt.
• Watch the counters. Many clips sit in single digits, and the number is part of the experience.
• Follow a video back to YouTube. If something is genuinely remarkable you can open it on YouTube, where you may be the first comment it has ever received.
• Use it as ambient video. It works surprisingly well playing silently in a corner of a screen.
• Collect the accidents. Pocket recordings, upside-down footage and thirty-second files that were clearly meant to be deleted are the reliable pleasures here.

Tips to get the most out of it

Turn the sound on. Half of what makes these clips work is incidental audio: conversation that has nothing to do with what is being filmed, a television in another room, wind. Muted, they are just footage.

Sit through the boring ones. The instinct to skip immediately is strong and it costs you the best moments, which usually arrive when nothing has happened for a while and then something does.

Do not go looking for a story. Almost none of these have one. The interest is textural, not narrative, and expecting a payoff will make you impatient.

Remember these are real people. Everything here was uploaded publicly, but almost none of it was uploaded to be found by strangers. Watch accordingly, and think twice before sharing anything identifiable.

Give it a full session once. Twenty or thirty minutes in a row does something a few random clicks cannot. The scale of ordinary, unwatched life on the platform only registers cumulatively.

If you like Petit Tube, also try…

• Nobody.live: the same premise applied live, dropping you into Twitch streams with zero viewers.
• IMG_0001: videos uploaded straight from old iPhones with their default filenames intact.
• Forgotify: Spotify tracks that have never been played by anyone.
• The Useless Web: a button that throws you at a random pointless website.

More aimless browsing in Entertainment & Fun, and stranger corners still in Weird & Wonderful.