Thirty eight million people and counting have watched Hbomberguy’s near four-hour video Plagiarism and You(Tube), in which the YouTuber – real name Harry Brewis – forensically dissects intellectual theft across the platform in a work of investigative journalism worthy of a Pulitzer. To put that into perspective, 32 million people in the UK tuned in to watch Princess Diana’s funeral broadcast live on the BBC. If you’re not familiar with the work, video essays may just be the biggest cultural phenomenon you’ve never heard of.
Early versions of video essays – thoughtful deep dives that filter cultural analysis through the distinct personality of the creator – emerged in the early 2000s, but it was the converging currents of the “online left” and the creativity that flourished under lockdowns that saw the number of creators rise and the format swell in popularity. For the past eight years, the British Film Institute has put out a yearly ranking of video essays of the year. BBC auteur Adam Curtis has said if he were starting out again, he would become a YouTuber, calling it “the last wild west” of online creativity.
Prevailing common sense in the boardrooms of streaming services and broadcasting corporations is that attention, both in terms of quality and quantity, is dwindling. Research from the psychologist Gloria Mark has shown that attention times are declining, now averaging 47 seconds on a given task while using an electronic device. This creates an issue for the commissioning of factual entertainment, which by its nature requires viewers to engage with ideas. To get round this problem, streaming services have turned to easily digestible output – reality TV, nature documentaries or grisly true-crime miniseries. Public service broadcasters such as the BBC, whose mission is to “inform, educate and entertain”, have mimicked streamers, not wanting to be left behind.
On smaller phone screens, TikTok and Instagram Reels range between 30 seconds and 10 minutes. The bold, the catchy and, in some cases, the extreme, travel far. Other platforms, such as Facebook or X, where ideas might once have been exchanged and discussed in good faith have become wastelands of misinformation, posturing, hot takes and conflict.
In contrast, video essays are thought-provoking, nuanced and self-reflexive. They mix philosophical theory, cultural studies and internet subcultures. Even if a streaming service wanted to, they wouldn’t be able to generate a tag for this type of content. The couple behind Leftist Cooks, former academic Sarah Oeffler and creative Neilly Farrell, are emblematic of the mixture of education and entertainment. Their video When Your Hero Is a Monster inspired by the unsavoury allegations against Neil Gaiman, went viral at the end of last year; it sees them literally donning a number of different hats in order to represent the struggle many have in reconciling their attachments to cancelled celebrities.
“We’ll be talking about Foucault or something and then, yeah, it’s like: Oh, there’s that episode of BoJack Horseman that does that,” says Oeffler.
Video essays can also be very, very long. The final product takes months, and in some cases, years worth of research, writing, planning, costume and set designing, filming and editing. ContraPoints’ magisterial 2hr 40min video Conspiracy, about the allure of this thinking and its impact on democracy, has no fewer than six costume changes, including one Eyes Wide Shut-inspired scene with eight different Venetian masks. In another scene, the channel’s creator, Natalie Wynn, “built this giant trope of a conspiracy wall with yarn … a week was spent making hundreds of photo prints … I went through three canisters of ink printing out declassified CIA documents and pinning them all over the wall. It’s probably eight feet.”
José María Luna’s latest essay, Searching for God in Film, explores faith through cinema by referencing 50 films, including The Seventh Seal and The Sound of Music. It also features the creator dressed as St Sebastian (arrows and all), a cardinal and a layperson confessing his sins. When mood-boarding the essay, he thought: “‘What if I fake a confessional [booth]?’ So I faked [it] with some black poster board and the back of my bed in my bedroom, which was very fun.”
By the metrics of bigger organisations, video essays shouldn’t work, and yet they do. In fact, these videos are mainly watched on larger TV screens, much like regular movies or shows. Canadian documentarian Dan Olsen, also known as Folding Ideas, has covered topics as wide-ranging as media criticism and online conspiracy and finance culture. He believes that YouTubers have reached a point of maturation where they are able to make ambitious, educational, entertaining content on a par with previous broadcast educators such as Carl Sagan, who popularised astronomy in the 1980s with his landmark documentaries. He believes that video essayists are a “filling a hole in documentary production, in educational content, in science communication, at a wide swath of budget and production levels that I think people are thirsty for and [that] broadcast TV has been unable or unwilling to fill for a very long time.” Line Goes Up, his definitive and acerbic two-hour breakdown and takedown of cryptocurrencies and NFTs, through direct to camera monologue, graphics, images, and screen recordings has more than 17m views.
The first creator to make videos in 2004 specifically for an internet audience was James Rolfe, the Angry Video Game Nerd, who posted scrappy gaming reviews and skits in character. This was followed by Channel Awesome posting comedic film reviews. After leaving the channel, creator Lindsay Ellis would go on to be one of the original YouTube essayists, posting long-form critiques of animation and fantasy films, among other things.
The political strand of video essays emerged between 2014 and 2016 as progressive creators found themselves sharing YouTube with the emerging “alt-right”. Things came to a head over GamerGate, a misogynistic online harassment campaign against women in the gaming industry. Hbomberguy’s first video was the The Sarkeesian Effect: A Measured Response, mocking the men who were taking aim at the woman at the centre of the outrage. The term “Bread Tube” (a reference to anarcho-communist Peter Kropotkin’s book, The Conquest of Bread) was coined to describe a loose collection of creators, including the above as well as other channels such as Philosophy Tube, though many creators rejected it.
The videos are in no small part successful because they represent political points of view, identities and creators – including trans people, queer people and people of colour – who have been marginalised by the mainstream. “People who are traditionally excluded from more formal publishing opportunities can have a voice on YouTube,” says Wynn. “And often there is an audience that is not being catered to elsewhere that does exist and is there on YouTube. There were creators and there was an audience. They were not being connected with each other until the gatekeeping was eliminated.”
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Over time, the format expanded to encompass theoretical perspectives on culture (and vice versa – culture was used to explain theory). Wynn’s Twilight video, in which she sits at an overflowing banquet table replete with candelabras and skulls, uses feminist and queer theory to explore themes of sex, sexuality, desire and power dynamics between genders as evoked in Stephenie Meyer’s vampire novels.
Fashion and lifestyle trends have also become a subject for creators such as Mina Le. Her first video was about the historical accuracy of the costume design in the film Atonement. “It’s OK to think seriously about things that are otherwise considered mundane or irrelevant,” says Zandile Powell, AKA Kidology, who documents in real-time the excesses and extremities of internet culture.
“This corner of the internet is a surprisingly pleasant place to be,” says Oeffler. “There’s genuinely a bunch of solidarity between creators. We try to boost people all the time, we recommend people to our audience who might not natively get as many views. We know based on research that people are less likely to click on the thumbnail of somebody if they’re Black, for example.” Although the parasocial relationship between creators and audiences, combined with the high standards of the left, has meant that audiences have at times pushed back against creators for not being radical enough.
What next? “Right now we are in a golden age because there are a lot of channels that are able to access business-level budgets,” says Olsen. Thanks to Patreon, the most popular creators are able to hire teams and/or work full-time on their videos – although many smaller YouTubers rely on revenue made from hosting adverts in their videos, making them vulnerable to brands pulling advertising budgets as they did during the pandemic. Some video essayists are already moving away from YouTube to the creator-owned platform Nebula.
For now, things are exciting. When I ask José María Luna what video essay concepts he is working on next, he pulls out his phone: “I have a Notes app full of ideas like ‘Donald Duck and cultural imperialism’ or ‘Musicals and mental illness’. I don’t even know what I meant by that.”