
.jpg)
“My producer and I worked with fact-checkers, medical professionals, scientists, and lawyers on drafts of the video and its script to ensure there were no obvious holes in our research or conclusions. “That particular video took a long time to research properly,” Brewis tells me. It has garnered three million views in just six months. Running 104 minutes, it examines the story of disgraced former doctor Andrew Wakefield and the fraud that linked autism to MMR jabs. Hbomberguy – real name Harry Brewis – goes for films the length of documentaries, his most recent, Vaccines: A Measured Response, being a case in point. Though a fraction of the millions earned by celebrity vloggers such as Logan Paul, this significant income has allowed some creators to match the ambition and depth normally found in mainstream documentaries.


For instance, Hbomberguy, one of the most prominent video essayists, has almost 11,000 Patreon patrons, each contributing between £2 and £8 a month, giving him an estimated monthly income in the tens of thousands. This ad revenue can then be augmented by money crowdfunded on Patreon. Longer videos also have more space for adverts, profiting both YouTube and the person making the videos. So, apart from their clever content, what else is behind the growing profile of these show? In 2012, YouTube adjusted its algorithm to a system that rewarded and promoted videos based on how long they were watched (“dwell time”) rather than simply their view count. His – and Foreman’s – videos have even been used by school teachers while politics and culture YouTuber Tom Nicholas’s videos have been shown by university professors. Music is a sensory and interactive experience, and on YouTube you can play clips, you can show images.”īennett’s more abstruse videos, for example those on the Locrian mode (which requires keeping to a limited set of musical notes related to the white keys of a piano) and 5/4 time signatures, rank among his most popular. “I could spend an hour trying to explain what chord I to chord IV sounds like, or I could just play it to you, and you’d understand. And the style clearly connects with people, as evidenced by his 12-minute exploration of town planning entitled Why does London have 32 boroughs? clocking up almost four million views.ĭavid Bennett, who analyses popular and classical music through the lens of music theory on his channel, agrees that the form offers something otherwise impossible in written criticism. Some creators simply speak over the top of images or video clips much like lecturers, while others have developed an idiosyncratic visual style.įoreman says he draws inspiration from a mixture of Monty Python, Vic and Bob, and the BBC’s Mark Steel Lectures to make videos that are “too geographic to be straightforward comedy shows and vice versa”, meaning “they could only exist on YouTube”. Beyond that, the form is utterly various, videos ranging from ten minutes to two hours in length. Video essays are generally scripted and advance an argument through a mixture of research, criticism and jokes.
#HBOMBERGUY YOUTUBE BLOCKER TV#
“You can be more personal and opinionated than a traditional TV presenter, and you can illustrate your point with video clips or graphics or sketches or even songs in a way that you can’t in a simple written article.” “The video essay is the best of all worlds when it comes to expressing yourself,” says Jay Foreman, who publishes educational geography videos which mix in elements of absurdist comedy. These educational and frequently erudite videos can explore everything from politics to music theory, and have won their creators an audience of millions. Their hunger for a touch more seriousness to their YouTube consumption, has given rise to a new form, the “video essay”. This is particularly true for 16-24-year-olds, who spend 73 minutes on YouTube a day. While much of the above is true, YouTube has come a long way in the last ten years, evolving into one of the principal ways that people exchange information and ideas online.
#HBOMBERGUY YOUTUBE BLOCKER FULL#
Twitter has debased our public discourse, Instagram has poisoned teenagers’ mental health and, as for YouTube, isn’t it full of pouting make-up tutorials, obnoxious vloggers and people filming themselves playing video games? Techno-pessimism is, at this point, received wisdom among most thinking people.
