YouTube pages that need your viewership: part 1

I’ve been meaning to do this for some time, simply because I am a devourer of YouTube content. It is, outside of some of my favorite podcasts (which I’ll save for another post) the reason why I get excited every time I need to do some terrible, tedious chore like mowing the lawn or the dishes.

I love setting my phone up somewhere, popping my headphones in, and just being swept away on some video essay or someone’s ramblings about this or that. It’s wonderful. It’s comforting. It’s like spending time with your favorite, knowledgeable friend on some niche topic, and not being forced to partake in the conversation unless you feel like it. It’s perfect for a socially awkward, introvert like myself. It’s a nice little treat at the end of a long day, or in the middle of it.

So, with that in mind, I wanted to point out and shed some light on some of my favorite YouTube creators who I think need more praise than they get. Outside of one creator on here, these are all YouTubers with under 5 million subscribers. It’s not that I dislike successful creators. I watch plenty of YouTubers who have millions of subscribers (Johnny Harris, Nerdwriter1, Wisecrack, etc.), it’s not that I think success ultimately means you’re not worthy of praise. It’s just that, well, being the little guy is hard, and if these pages ever stopped posting content I would be devastated, so I’ll do whatever I can to help them out. So, without further interruption, I’ll just get on with the list.

In Praise of Shadows

Perhaps my favorite thing about In Praise of Shadows’s YouTube page is that he never makes a video without wringing out EVERYTHING he has to say on said topic. Whether he’s covering a horror franchise, a filmmaker’s insane unreleased film, some obscure vampire movie you’ve never heard of, the history of horror comics, or a supposed “witch” from his hometown, Zane from In Praise of Shadows always says anything and everything about that topic that could be said, and in an engaging way that explores the content’s entirety, from its place in history, to its implications on it, as well as all of the politics and culture surrounding it.

He does all this with the loving care and presentation of someone who isn’t merely rambling about his favorite things, but with the careful care of a professional essayist, delivering the content, whether it’s a 2 hr long video or a 7-minute one, with an aim at explaining it logically and in the right order, never veering needlessly off course, and always from as many angles as he can muster.

You can tell that Zane deeply loves the things that he’s talking about, even when he’s criticizing them, and that deep down he’d do this if nobody was there to listen. But seriously, if his page up and disappeared, he’d be at the top of the list of creators I’d be very sad about not having their take on things moving forward. It’s like spending a night with a horror-loving friend who has an exhaustive and ever-entertaining knowledge on all things creepy.

I watched this entire video about a supposed “witch” in his small North Carolina town all in one go. It’s a loving, and exhaustive look at the mythologies of small towns, worlds in which the absurdity of stupidity is inexhaustible. It’s perhaps one of the only docs I’ve ever seen that captures the allure of urban legends and the frightening conservatism of small towns.

The Links:

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@InPraiseofShadows/videos

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/praiseofshadows

Twitter: https://x.com/praise_shadows?lang=en

Mr. Beat

Speaking of Mr. Beat, who I namechecked in my tagline. Mr. Beat, otherwise known as former Kansas school teacher, Matthew Alan Beat, is a YouTuber who delivers history and social studies content with the flair of your weird, but lovable high school Government teacher whom you’re still friends with on social media as an adult because they post lame, but great content.

His main content revolves around history and government-related issues, such as Supreme Court Briefs — short, concise videos about Supreme Court Cases and all the parties, lead-up, and effect of the ruling — and videos about American presidents.

If you’re looking for Vox or Johnny Harris-style infographics and editing, look somewhere else. But if you’re looking for someone who has a lot of first-hand knowledge and as a former teacher, understands how to research and present his content with a fair, balanced take, then there are few better than Mr. Beat.

Whether he’s talking about all of the presidents' favorite media or what pets they had, or delivering content about logical fallacies or The Great Replacement Theory, he’s always delivering it with the lovely cringe-inducing care of a former educator who simply wants to engage his audience with great, well-researched content on important and less-important topics.

Not only is it impressive that he has enough knowledge of the presidents’ ideologies to accurately place them on the political compass, but it’s pretty rad that he starts the video by pointing out how this compass was created to make people think they’re Libertarians.

The Links:

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@iammrbeat

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/iammrbeat

Twitter: https://x.com/beatmastermatt

The Leftist Cooks

Neil Farrell and Sarah Oeffler are two Irish and American YouTubers who are somewhat new and WILDLY underappreciated. They typically create content about politics and culture, in long-form video essays that take on said topic from a wide variety of angles, but also provide a great deal of content and outlook from LGBTQIA viewpoints.

I’ll be honest, I discovered them somewhat recently while working on my English degree, and I’ve yet to watch all of their content, but after having watched just a few of them, I knew I needed to see all of their videos.

As a straight, cis-gendered, white male, I appreciate their content because it’s from a viewpoint that I only know of tangentially, having friends and family in the community, but knowing that it, like most ideologies on sex and gender and the politics and the culture behind it, is an ongoing and ever-changing entity that requires watering to stay up-to-date.

Beyond that, they present their content with fun, PBS-style interludes featuring lo-fi but nostalgic cinematography and mix that up with experimental, artistic, often emotionally naked, and vulnerable monologues on complex topics that tackle everything from gender, sexuality, death, life, mental health, housing crises, and various other complex topics, all of which they address with care and with artistic flare.

They only have 60,000 subscribers as of May 2024, and that’s a darn shame because they’re easily doing one of the best things you could do with a platform like YouTube: providing entertaining and informative content on complex and important topics. They need your patronage, and they seem to be great members of the community, shouting out other like-minded creators like themselves in their videos consistently. And unlike a lot of bigger creators within the YouTube sphere, they seem to be creating content not to feed some sort of algorithm, but rather to create informative and honest art, and create community in something that seems to have been missing from a medium that once felt much more communal.

Links:

YouTube Page: https://www.youtube.com/@TheLeftistCooks

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TheLeftistCooks

Twitter: https://x.com/SariboCook

Jacob Geller

Of all of the creators on here, I have some of the best memories of watching YouTube videos while watching Jacob Geller’s mosaics of art, literature, film/TV, and video games. Most of his videos lean heavily on video games, but you don’t have to be a “gamer” or even a person interested in video games to enjoy his content, because the gamey-ness of his content is never really the point. Well, not always. Of course, he loves and talks at length about the more gamey aspects of video games, but often it’s to serve a bigger point entirely.

For instance, in a video released in 2020, at the height of the COVID lockdown, Gellar released a video that tackled the game Red Dead Redemption 2 and how a huge swath of the map, a part that isn’t even open to the player until very late in the game is mostly empty — some barren western landscape that, like the real west of early America, was mostly open and devoid of civilization — a vast, inescapable post-apocalyptic terrain with nothing but a sole traveler and the calls of the coyotes under a starlit sky.

He then goes on to explain the work of a visual artist whose art uses hundreds and thousands of photos taken of empty cities to create mosaics of cities emptier than they’ve ever been. It is, taken at the height of COVID, when dolphins appeared in the canals of Venice after supposedly not having been there for time unremembered, and we all sat at home, alone, more alone probably than most of us ever felt, looking on a world that seemed to be edging ever closer to apocalypse, was kind of harrowing and beautiful and affirming. And he does videos like this regularly.

His content, for lack of a better term, is often poignant and tackles through various forms of media, large, heavy, and daunting topics. Like a video he made comparing how schools have been trying to combat shootings through architecture, comparing it to the way first-person shooters create levels designed to optimize the fun of their gameplay. Or a video he made about the false history of executions, or how he attempted to “fix his brain” with automated therapy.

Geller has over 1 million subscribers, sure. Most likely because he wraps his existential art and deep, meditative meanderings on culture and literature in videos about video games, but he doesn’t do this cynically. Not something you could say for the vast majority of creators on YouTube who create videos about video games and other forms of popular art. Geller actually cares and actually tries to untangle the point, intentional or not, in the most minute of details found in popular art and what said things mean in a larger conversation about the overarching topics. Geller does the thing that is representative of so much of the content on the internet — he talks about popular culture and creates a video essay on it, but instead of simply dissecting the single piece, he looks at what it says from a more macro viewpoint. Geller makes nerd content for sad boys and girls who are afraid of the daunting world they wake up to.

The Links:

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@JacobGeller/videos

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/JacobGeller

Twitter: https://x.com/yacobg42

And that’s it…for now. Seriously, there are actually several other pages that I wanted to include — seven in total — of mostly small or underappreciated creators (I think only one has more than a million subscribers) that I think deserve more attention for the content and art that they create on YouTube. Undoubtedly, there are hundreds of thousands more that I don’t know about or who are making amazing stuff that only a handful of people are regularly engaging with.

Listen, like I said, I have nothing against big creators. There’s always a reason why somebody’s stuff is getting attention, no matter how cynical their reasons for it. And even I love a lot of creators with millions of regular subscribers. But YouTube and the content-sphere are made up of a lot of people making stuff simply because it makes money. I get it, I just graduated from college and am in the middle of trying to find a job to pay for my lifetime of college loans. We live in a capitalist economy, we gotta eat, we gotta pay rent, pay for insurance (oh that’s a whole other story), and exist. But, we could be engaging with stuff that’s arguably better for us, and made without cynicism. Maybe that makes me seem like an elitist, but really, I’m not. I absolutely love dumb shit. There is nothing better than getting high, devouring a pizza, and watching some trash TV. But, in moderation, right?

That’s all I’m arguing. So, here has been the first part in what will possibly be a trilogy of articles highlighting YouTube creators that aren’t just fun, but also made by people that I genuinely think care about their work, and often view what they’re doing as genuine art.