Obscurity, much?/Internet

The Internet is a hit-and-miss when it comes to this trope. Either something on there can be popular, or it can be obscure. Despite this, the Golden Rule of the Internet is "once it's there, it's there forever", usually thanks to the likes of archive.org. And despite *that*, some stuff on the web are *still* obscure.

A few criteria for documenting things off the Internet:

* YouTube videos must have at least 5K views, but less than 1 million.
	+ Likewise, the number of subscribers to a YouTube channel must be at least 5K, but no more than 1M for gaming channels and channels hosting officially-licensed content, or 250K for other channels. Every YouTube channel starts off playing this trope straight, and even the biggest names in all of YouTube are no exception.
		- Videos *talking* about obscure things can still be documented as long as you say "not the video/channel itself".
		- And for clarity's sake, YouTubers whose fanbase was small a few years ago don't qualify for the trope as they usually avert this nowadays. Let's just say the entirety of YouTube ran on this trope around the time Fred got 1 million subscribers.
* If it's from the deep web, please do not document it. Much of the deep web is home to illegal stuff, and Tropes Fanon does not condone talking about those.
* It must still be found on the internet (or existed on the Internet at the time the example was documented, as *Unus Annus* was) in order to be documented.
* Abridged series, fanimations, etc. also should not be documented, especially if they're based off a popular work.
* Memes are also best not documented. Every single meme ever popularized started out in obscurity before they became popular, after all.

Flash games are best documented on the videogames subpage.

* The Children's Books Wiki as a whole may or may not play this straight, but it has information on obscure children's books as well as well-known ones.
* Ralph Kard doesn't have a Wikipedia page, and isn't mentioned on Wikipedia at all. This being from Mondo Media (specifically SpindoTV), this is quite surprising. Too bad it also ended at episode 7.
* Vocaloids, which are listed here since they are available on the internet:
	+ If a Vocaloid isn't Hatsune Miku, Kasane Teto (which isn't even a Vocaloid but was used in at least one Vocaloid song), or pretty much any Vocaloid that has appeared in at least one Hatsune Miku song, chances are that said Vocaloid is classified to be this.
	+ Every Vocaloid designed for Vocaloid 1, save for a few that did well in Japan. It wasn't until Hatsune Miku came out that Vocaloids became popular.
* Contrasted to many other shows from Rooster Teeth, X-Ray and Vav has become this and is mostly only remembered as a gag in RWBY.
* The Gawker website fell into this after its parent company was bought up by Univision. The fact that Gawker Media is more known for being sued by Hulk Hogan over career-destroying comments nowadays didn't help this, either.
* As mentioned on anime and manga's own page, buying a specific anime or manga off of eBay or Amazon, especially if it's completely obscure and only the once-true fans who have their out-of-print Region 1 DVDs are selling them, will cost you a fortune. The impact is slightly less if it's a smaller series or an individual volume, but more often than not, you'll probably spend at least $10 just to get the whole series or the entirety of the dub.
* Blackpills is an obscure web TV-hosting app, to the point where no one saw *Purgatony* when it was still exclusive to the site.
	+ Now being averted for *Purgatony*, since Explosm (one of the studios involved in the project) are uploading the 8-episode series to YouTube. Episode 3 alone got over a million views within a week of it coming out on YouTube.
* *Cans Without Labels* outside of a review by The Mysterious Mr. Enter. Why? Despite this project pulling in around $130,000, John K. ended up not finishing it as promised, which means no one talked about it. By the time it eventually got released, John K. was caught up in controversy (that's all we'll say about that for obvious reasons).
* Two words: *Unus Annus*. Not obscure enough to get zero viewership (Markiplier and his friend Ethan co-operating the channel helps), but still somewhat more so than Markiplier's main channel (which is at 24M subscribers as of this writing and counting; *Unus Annus* meanwhile is close to the 2M mark).
	+ This also doesn't help that the two deleted the entire channel on November 13th-14th, 2020- exactly one year after it began. Memento mori, indeed.
	+ Despite this, over a million views caused a certain girls' toy to escape this, particularly among those who watch the videos of *Unus Annus*.
* Not the channel itself (over 500K subscribers and counting will avert this for YouTube storytime animators), but YouTube animator Chipflake once talked about obscure British children's TV, specifically those from Chip's childhood.
* Canadian rock/metal musician Stevie T once listened to a once-obscure song called "In Managua". The keywords being "once-obscure"; so much so, his cover version *actually has a different title from the original*.
* In the midst of PewDiePie vs. T-Series, another channel- *Cocomelon*- started to gain traction. But the main part of this was the fact that it's been obscure in its early years, and was only really noticed by PewDiePie in *2020*, after T-Series became the most-subscribed YouTube channel.