Cara Cunningham is an American internet personality, songwriter, recording artist, YouTuber, and former pornographic film actress. As of October 2010, Cunningham's videos had received a combined 50 million plays on MySpace, and her vlog channel on YouTube was the 100th-most viewed of all time in all categories, with over 205 million video views, before Cunningham closed her YouTube account in September 2015. Her work consists mainly of short-form, self-directed monologues shot in her grandparents' home.

The YouTube Awards was a promotion run by the American video-sharing website YouTube to recognize the best user-generated videos of the year. The awards were presented twice, in 2007 and 2008, with winners being voted for by the site's users from shortlists compiled by YouTube staff. YouTube was launched on February 14, 2005, and quickly began to grow – by July 2006, traffic to the site had increased by 297 percent. As a result of this success, YouTube launched their own awards promotion in March 2007 to honor some of the site's best videos. Seven shortlists were compiled, with ten videos per shortlist. Users were invited to vote for the winners over a five-day period at a dedicated web page. Singer Damian Kulash, whose band OK Go won in the Most Creative category for their music video Here It Goes Again, said that receiving a YouTube Award was a surreal honor and that the site was changing culture "quickly and completely".