This 2011 Vsauce video has a solid white thumbnail, no description, and most strikingly, a blank title (2 consecutive "zero-width non-joiners", Unicode character U+200C)
It was the first video I'd ever seen with an empty title (I think it's still the most famous one), but I've recently found other videos and even channels with no names. This is interesting because YouTube doesn't allow video titles or channel names to be left blank or to have only regular space characters (Unicode U+0020).
This channel, whose owner goes by Angel, specializes in "2000s/early 2010s nostalgia videos, and weird stuff during the night". With a grayscale shiba inu icon, all grayscale thumbnails, and a solid black channel banner, they're clearly going for an eerie, nocturnal aesthetic. While I find the content to be unremarkable, low effort nostalgia bait, it's found success in the recommended algorithm (how I came across it) since 2019. It was created in 2016, but its earliest Wayback Machine archive is from April 2019. At this time, the channel's name was :( and it had a colored, red background version of its current icon.
By sometime later in 2019, the channel's name was changed to the empty space it is today, which is actually Unicode character U+1160, called "Hangul Jungseong filler" (Hangul being the Korean alphabet). I can't confirm if this change happened by November 15, but that was when the channel reached 100,000 subscribers and Angel should have received a Silver Play Button (which would be amusing to see if the name was blank). While most of Angel's videos have a title (some just being a single emoji), several have this same blank character. The most popular of these is the channel's 2nd most viewed video (just over 4 million). Uploaded December 8, 2019 (below), it's a retrospective montage of pop culture and memes of the 2010's.
A similar channel, whose proper username is esfelectra, also appears to have no username on video pages, search pages, and sidebars. However, when viewed on the channel itself, you can just see something (you may initially think it's a speck of dust like I did).
Closer inspection reveals a strange period-looking character that's actually a Hiriq, a Hebrew diacritical mark (Unicode U+05B4). His icon, Furude Rika from When They Cry, and channel name have been the same since at least November 28, 2018, the channel's earliest Wayback Machine capture (aside from one in 2009 before he had any videos). The channel was created in October 2007, but his earliest video, Explaining The Ending of Monster, is from November 6, 2016. He's continued making videos since then, but only has 18 as most of them are lengthy video essays, often about anime. I'll present the following 2 thumbnails without comment.
His longest and most viewed video is The Philosophy of Kreia: A Critical Examination of Star Wars at just under 2 hours and just over 5 million views. I can't vouch for his critical skills or editing as I've only watched the loli video (I had to know his take), but his content seems to be far more substantial than Angel's.
Another channel I've just found in the process of writing this has a single "zero-width non-joiner" (Unicode U+200C) for a name, a purple default icon with a Santa hat added, and a subscriber count set to private. It was created September 6, 2018 and has 7 videos showcasing music with an anime aesthetic. The most recent 3 videos have no title (#1 from November 1, 2019, All Saints' Day, #2 from December 25, Christmas, and #3 from February 29, Leap Day). They don't appear to be all that different to the other 4 videos except the first 2 are mostly black save for a pixel art square in the middle.
The description of the first video links to another video and deepens the rabbit hole. It's the very same video. In fact, the channel, another with an empty name and private sub count, has only 3 videos, the exact same as the other's last 3, all posted on the same day and linking back to the corresponding other video. (I haven't watched through to see if they're the same videos, but it looks that way.)
It's probably the same person, but why they decided to make another channel to post these videos is beyond me. I also don't know if the holiday upload dates are planned or coincidental. They all have less views on the 2nd channel, but still a significant amount. On both channels, each of these non-titled videos seem to have gained traction in the recommended algorithm.
These are all the unnamed channels I've found, but there are several other untitled videos on YouTube. This one is the 2nd I'd ever seen after Vsauce's. Uploaded May 24, 2014 by Saucy Postal of It's Sodium Chloride fame, the title is a "right-to-left mark" (Unicode U+200F) and shows a Seinfeld scene with no characters.
Commentary YouTuber I've never heard of JT has uploaded 2 videos whose titles are 2 consecutive "Hangul Jungseong fillers" (Unicode U+1160, Hangul being the Korean alphabet). The first one from August 17, 2019 has over a million views and is about a false copyright claim he received from Turkish YouTuber/actor Enes Batur (who he doesn't mention by name so he wouldn't do it again). The 2nd one (below) from November 22, 2019 has nothing to do with the first and only 250,000 views. It's actually about what I'm talking about in this post and even mentions the anime music channel (which only had the first of its 3 untitled ones at the time).
Cowbelly Studios, proprietor of such low-effort text-to-speech meme compilations as "Daily Dose of Memes" and "Comment Awards", uploaded a streak of 24 consecutive untitled videos, each with 2 "zero width non-joiners" (Unicode U+200C). The first was on November 15, 2019, and the last was on December 8, 2019 (it would add up that they were uploaded daily, but I didn't check each one).
You get a good glimpse at his content with this wall of thumbnails. Since his channel's epic creation date of 4/20/2017, he's uploaded roughly daily with over 1,000 videos and about 600K average views per video. There's obviously a great demand for having your typical social media dank meme feed robotically read out to you.
There are other untitled videos and playlists of them you can find by searching one of the characters I've mentioned, but this is approaching the 10K character limit and I think I've shown plenty anyway for something few of you probably care about.
