The Greatest App of All Time Day 26: YouTube vs. Venmo

If you’re just tuning in, you can read all about our selection criteria for this historic contest right here. Check out the full bracket of contestants embedded below. And as always, if you think we missed your personal favorite app of all time, yell at us in the comments. Now, let’s get into today’s contestants.

With 2.5 billion monthly active users and a lot of goodwill, YouTube is likely one of the most formidable nominees in our bracket. In 2005, the company arguably invented online video as we know it. The first video that was uploaded to the platform, Me at the Zoo, depicted YouTube’s co-founder Jawed Karim standing in front of some elephants while making some basic comments about elephants for 19 seconds. It signaled a new world in which people could broadcast even the most banal clips to billions of people.

And to this day, there is no shortage of useless, unnotable footage to be found on YouTube. But with its revenue share program, YouTube practically defined what it means to be an online influencer and users like Mr. Beast create videos that cost millions of dollars. People use YouTube as their only music streamer (and the platform probably gets away with more piracy than any other). It’s also become a paid broadcast television platform and a babysitter for millions of kids with an iPad. And for better or worse, it has become a place where many people get the majority of their news, resulting in the unfortunate spread of misinformation time and time again.

Most of the criticisms of YouTube’s existence could be said of other social platforms, but few of them feel as essential to the infrastructure of the internet. It is simply the video platform. If you’re watching an embedded video, it is probably hosted on YouTube. TikTok is making a lot of progress, but if you want to quickly lookup a new movie trailer, YouTube is the place to be.

Our bracket wouldn’t be complete without an app for sending money but it was tough to choose between Cash App and Venmo. The former has more viral name recognition and has been name-dropped in hip hop lyrics for years. But Venmo has been in the game longer and has more users so it ultimately triumphed.

There isn’t a whole lot to say about Venmo, it lets you send money to people you know and that turned out to be very convenient. Its biggest innovation was turning the act of sending money into content for its social feed. Anyone who’s used it knows it can be fascinating to snoop on what payments your friends are sending although that has gotten them into trouble with the FTC over privacy concerns in the past.