The channel ascended to the top position through auto-suggesting and pre-selecting itself as a subscription option upon new user registration for YouTube.

The Ultimate 2016 Challenge became YouTube's fastest video to reach 100 million views, doing so in just 3.2 days.

On December 14, 2016, shortly after The Ultimate 2016 Challenge was released, the Spotlight channel surpassed 1 billion total video views.

YouTube Rewind 2019: For the Record quickly garnered a notably negative like/dislike ratio as well, amassing 3.9 million dislikes in under 24 hours since its release on December 5, 2019.

[10] The series was nominated for the fourth annual Streamy Award under Best News and Current Events but lost to SourceFed.

[17] The event was met with mixed critical reception, with the particular mixture of new and traditional media personalities, as well as technical difficulties being specifically scrutinized.

[19][20] The week was composed of themed days, which included Blockbuster Sunday, Global Geekery Monday, Brainiac Tuesday, Super Wednesday, Gaming Thursday, and Fan Friday.

Announcing its nominations in the previous month, the award show aimed to create traffic through its social media voting format.

[26] The event was streamed onto the Spotlight channel, and has earned over 4.5 million views as of September 2014.