Ehh... I'd say Youtube initially wasn't a super popular pirating option. The 10 minute limits meant you had to put everything up in chunks and at the time there

Ehh... I'd say Youtube initially wasn't a super popular pirating option. The 10 minute limits meant you had to put everything up in chunks and at the time there weren't many super user friendly options to download them as a batch. You'd often enough have things where one part would eventually be missing and that'd ruin the whole thing. For tv shows it could be okay but for films once you're dealing with 10+ parts, often without knowledge of playlists, it'd get grating fast. Youtube first broke through for me as the main form of sharing embedded music videos on forums and myspace so I always assume that's how most encountered it. A lot of these were probably pirated content too but pirated promotional content so a bit blurrier imo than Megaupload/megavideo