Follow The Leader / Web Videos

• The success and popularity of Yu-Gi-Oh! The Abridged Series inspired a number of imitators, making Gag Dubs for other popular series, such as Naruto, Avatar, Pokémon, Sailor Moon, YuYu Hakusho, Higurashi, and Tokyo Mew Mew. Related to that is the rise of the "MENT" style of abridging, which involves a ton of rapid-fire, non-sequitur humor, base off of the success of Code MENT.
• "Lazy Sunday" has a number of responses, from "Lazy Monday" by two dudes on the West coast, to "Lazy Ramadi" made by US soldiers stationed in Iraq.
• Stories based on The Slender Man Mythos have become increasingly popular due to the success of Just Another Fool (blog) and Marble Hornets (video series). Some recent cases have abandoned the idea of the characters going in blind and actually mention the existing blogs, with the protagonists assuming (wrongly) that they're just an urban legend.
• The Angry Video Game Nerd and The Nostalgia Critic started the trend of Caustic Critic online videos in which a host, usually playing an over-the-top character, would go through the plot of a work while making snide comments and reacting to footage from the work. The reviews would often include in-character skits. For many years, Channel Awesome was the host of these critics and their imitators, though many other imitators proliferated throughout the internet. While the internet remains replete with video reviews, Channel Awesome's particular style has generally fallen out of favor. France has Le Joueur du Grenier, who's still going strong since 2009.
• Brows Held High has often been accused of being a rip-off of The Cinema Snob, despite the fact that Kyle reviews arthouse films without being snobbish while the Cinema Snob reviews exploitation movies while pretending to be a snobbish critic.
• After Franchesca Ramsey made the "Shit White Girls Say... to Black Girls" video, many others followed up with videos following a similar format of a marginalized person performing as a privileged person saying ignorant and bigoted remarks to a person of their marginalization. That video was in turn inspired by the video "Shit Girls Say", based on a Twitter page, which also had various imitators with black girls, Spanish girls, etc.
• After Chuggaaconroy put Let's Play-ing into the mainstream with his wacky Manchild antics, loud moments, and Epic Fails, a spat of other YouTubers trying to find the same success imitating this style without any of the approachable personality or passion Chuggaa puts into his videos. If anything, this following also led to Retsupurae poking fun at these pale imitations. Ironically, Chuggaa himself has stated that his videos were inspired by fellow Runaway Guy and Friendly Rival ProtonJon.
• Ben Drowned. It is the most famous gaming Creepypasta that was filled with horror, great effects, and a great story. It was so popular, that we got many other gaming horror stories like Sonic.exe, Megaman's Ladder, Blood Whistle, I HATE YOU, and many more stories that don't even come close to capturing the atmosphere nor the creep factor that Ben Drowned had. Blank cartridges or discs with handwritten titles on them (which were free, of course. Even at brick and mortar stores.), friends who mysteriously disappeared in the context of the story, spooky save file shenanigans, and simplistic romhack footage on YouTube are some of the elements that label them as derivative.
• The popularity and critical acclaim of The Lizzie Bennet Diaries inspired a wave of video blog adaptations of other classic literature including The Autobiography of Jane Eyre, Classic Alice, and Nothing Much to Do.
• Markiplier seems to follow the PewDiePie formula of ADVERTISING VIDEOS IN ALL CAPS, photoshopped title cards, and OTT panicking at survival horror games. Over time, he's even adopted Pewd's charity work, haircut and five o'clock stubble, as well. Amazing.
• CinemaSins has seen dozens of imitators on YouTube, from single videos to long-running channels reviewing different kinds of visual media. Two of the earliest examples — Game Care Network and Dartigan, both video game reviewers — now have their own pages.
• The runaway success of both Game Theory and V Sauce have inspired many other YouTube channels to create their own scientific analysis and Wild Mass Guessing of pop culture works be it video games, movies, TV shows, or even internet stars. Some like the Super Carlin Brothers have taken it even further combining the pop-culture hypothesizing of Game Theory with the vlog format of the VlogBrothers.
• While doing Alex Reads Twilight, Alex repeatedly insisted he would not be doing the rest of the Twilight series. This spawned a host of imitators that picked up with the second book in the series, New Moon, copying his general man-in-front-of-a-camera-summarises-and-snarkes-about-a-book style.
• Stop Skeletons From Fighting: So relentlessly, cheerfully lampshaded that he seems to have escaped the wrath of even AVGN's fervent fanbase. (As pointed out above, AVGN even subscribes to his YouTube account.) Note that he used to be known as the "Happy Video Game Nerd".
• Youth & Consequences: The show is often described as a digital era version of Mean Girls.
• Invoked throughout Missing Reel, which traces the rise and fall of different Exploitation Film genres, since, once one film succeeded, others tried to capitalize on its success.
• In H.Bomberguy's "Here's Three Stories About YouTube Plagiarism", he describes three cases of well-made, intelligent, and helpful video content - two from "a lesser-known YouTuber named soulbrothanumbuh3", whom he admires greatly, and then H's own video, "Bloodborne Is Genius, And Here's Why" - being the subjects of shoddy, oversimplified knockoff videos.
• The popularity of the ＬＯＣＡＬ５８ videos led to numerous imitators (creating the Analog Horror genre), such as the Tempest Universe's Channel 7, each copying the "Found Footage of a cryptic haunted television channel broadcast" format of them to varying degrees of success.
• Many music reviewers from the 2010s, such as The Double Agent, admit to being inspired by Todd in the Shadows, and both quote his episodes and jargon he created such as "White Guy with an Acoustic Guitar song"
• Dream's Minecraft Manhunt series have influenced a new genre of videos. People all over YouTube made their own versions of Minecraft Manhunt thanks to Dream.
• The video "8-Bit Gratuity" inspired a slew of similar videos like "Kirby is a fucking monster" (though most of them leave the original game audio intact instead of giving it a spooky echoing effect like in the original video).
• ChipCheezum and General Ironicus' retsupuraes, although Slowbeef and Diabetus have also made guest appearances in their videos. Chip has also done the inverse, Let's Recommend.
• Top 60 Ghetto Names has spawned a slew of imitators, all with the same twist at the end.
• After brentalfloss got popular making "X with lyrics" videos (videos of him singing a song in sync with video game music), many others have attempted to follow in his footsteps with their own video game lyrics videos.
• The Critical Drinker is clearly very much inspired by Mr. Plinkett Reviews. Both feature a Caustic Critic who tears into fantasy and sci-fi franchises while speaking in a bleary voice over footage from the works and making occasional aside references to being a drunken murderer. Critical Drinker differs in that he reviews a wider span of media, will sometimes emphasize the "identity politics" of the work, and sometimes does videos purely on storytelling tropes. He's referenced RedLetterMedia's work in at least one video, so it's clear that he's aware of them.
• Rap Battles. First, there was Epic Rap Battles of History. Then, Epic Rap Battle Parodies. Then, Video Game Rap Battles, HarryPotter2875, Epic Rap Battles of Cartoons, Princess Rap Battles, Infinite Source Rap Battles, Epic Crap Battles of History, ad nauseum.
• The code for Twitch Plays Pokémon becoming open-source led to plenty of "Twitch Plays [X]" streams being created in its wake. Eventually, the site would classify "Twitch Plays" as its own separate genre.
• The webseries AI Builds^note AI here stands for "Animal Investigator" intentionally uses this in service of a Metafiction narrative about mental illness and originality in art. The series follows Nicholas, the developer of an upcoming in-universe game known as Animal Investigator which was inspired by another in-universe game known as Animal Police. Nicholas' brother, Josh, previously created a knock-off of Animal Police and then uploaded a webseries of it to screw with Nicholas in his development of Animal Investigator. Out-of-universe, this webseries actually exists and was made by the real-life creator of AI Builds as an Affectionate Parody of Petscop, with the name "Animal Police" (And by extension "Animal Investigator") even being a direct spin on "Pets Cop." In-universe, Nicholas, who had a fragile mental state to begin with, deeply struggles with the perceived inadequacy of Animal Investigator and frequently criticizes himself for not being original enough. His game in-universe is scathingly mocked online for being a ripoff of Animal Police. Nicholas, already pressured to be original, is unable to keep up with the constant criticism. Consequentially the series progressively spirals into a full-on Creator Breakdown, becoming less about the game itself and more about Nicholas and his struggles with trauma, anxiety, depression, domestic abuse, and suicidal ideation as gameplay footage gradually devolves into Nicholas' own traumatic hallucinations. All that is to say, AI Builds is a character study that exists as a Stealth Sequel to an Affectionate Parody of Petscop and is intentionally similar to Petscop as a form of Reality Subtext to reflect the protagonist's insecurity over his work's perceived lack of originality and the self-loathing that comes from being so critical of his own work.
• Primitive Technology series features a man who, without speaking, constructs various structures and contraptions using only local materials. This channel spawned various others who which featured people constructing various structures with (advertised) local materials, although usually with less authenticity.
• Dark Simpsons has inspired a Dark King of the Hill channel in summer 2021 as well as a Dark Arthur series (made by YouTube channel ItsOwlRight) in November 25, 2022.
• Algorithms on video websites tend to encourage and enforce this trope by recommending to use traits that have proven successful in the recent past and rewarding those who do with increased visibility.
• Cocomelon has spawned numerous imitators and channels with similar premises after its' popularity. The most noteworthy one is Bebefinn by Pinkfong, which features a very similar family to the one seen in Cocomelon and also has a toddler as its' protagonist. On the other hand, some channels copy the "Yes Yes/No No" format of the video titles, even on videos that aren't similar to Cocomelon at all (a few English-dubbed Shima Shima Tora no Shimajirō videos have used this title format, for instance).

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