Last week, I turned 30 years old.

In digital media time, this means I’ve been alive roughly twenty years longer than online video has been around. I was there when Flash animations were the big thing across sites like Albino Blacksheep and Homestar Runner. I was there when Google Videos was still a thing, and I was there when that morphed into what we now know as YouTube.

Of course, I’m not the only one who was alive when YouTube launched, or when all these other sites got up and running. But these online video pillars played a crucial role in my young adult development, and so they’re very close to my heart. (Really, it’s little surprise I write about video today as my career; I should’ve seen it coming.)

Like most people who’ve been around or followed a particular industry for a decade, I’ve seen online video develop, change, and adapt to consumer demands, industry standards, a changing media landscape, and more. But there are still some tenets that hold true now about the industry just as much as they did when the “Badger song” was all the rage.

I’ve noticed three fundamental principles of online video remain steadfast over the last ten years:

Online video is entertainment.

No matter how much advertising agencies or marketing gurus want to turn online video into a sales medium, video is, at its core, an entertainment-based experience.

Remember those ads that recently ran across your Snapchat or Facebook screen yesterday? No? That’s okay — either you’re one of the millions who uses an ad blocker, or you just weren’t impressed enough by the ad for it to resonate with you on any level.

But I bet you do remember some of the most popular viral videos around, no matter if they were supposed to be an ad or not. For example, who could forget Volkswagen’s 2011 Super Bowl commercial starring a little kid dressed as Darth Vader, or this year’s insanely weird — but still hilariously engrossing — “PPAP (Pen-Pineapple-Apple-Pen)”?