51 Things in My Room

About

51 Things in my Room is a YouTube video fad in which people display their collection of personal items and possessions in the style of “show-and-tell.” The videos are often edited with quick cuts for each item and accompanied by music playing in the background.

Origin

On November 11th 2008, YouTube user HurricaneAubrey^[1] posted a video titled “51 things i found around my house”. The video shows close-up shots of Aubrey and her various possessions from a Nintendo DS collection to New York City metro cards. The music playing in the background is by artist Kevin Macleod.

YouTube officially featured the video on its homepage on the same day of its upload.

The original video has received a total of 2,336,772 views and 756 video responses as of August 22nd, 2011.

Spread

The first derivative was uploaded by YouTuber AmazingPhil on November 12th, 2011, the day after it was featured by YouTube.

Other users began making responses as well, prompting Aubrey to add the following description to the original video:

wow. thanks to youtube for the feature on this. thank you to everyone who watched, subscribed, and left nice comments. JUST SO EVERYONE KNOWS this video does not have a point, it does not have a message, there is nothing more to this video than me showing 51 items. and this video has so many views because it was featured on the front page. and just in case if you don’t know youtube chooses what videos get featured. i had nothing to do with it. but thank you anyway.

While the fad started with showing 51 randoms items, others have made variations with different quantities. As of August 2011, there are 4,980 results for the search “things in my room” with numbers ranging from 5 to 1000 on YouTube.^[2]

Derivatives

External Links