YouTubers are the future of culture
By: Matthew Mckeever
Tags: Ideas, YouTube, Economics, Culture, Philosophy

For a start, ‘ideas’ is vague, so I am going to concentrate mostly on one area that I know well, namely popular philosophy and cultural criticism.

Because academic philosophy, like most of academia, is pretty much unreadable to those not trained in it, many have tried to popularize it for the general public. Philosophy Bites is (or was, it might be on hiatus) a podcast that interviews working analytic philosophers about their research for the general listener. Aeon publishes long-form on philosophy and related topics, while The New Philosopher is a print magazine featuring professional philosophers popularizing their work.

You’re probably familiar with this genre. Its articles are titled things like ‘What would Plato say about Brexit? or ‘what Montaigne can teach us about our post-truth era’, and they present elementary exposition of some thinker’s ideas and use them as a lens to understand some feature of life today.

How popular are these popularizers? In the absence of any better data, I took a look at their Twitter accounts. In particular, I looked at how many followers they have and, using this useful tool their most popular recent (last two weeks) tweet, as measured by number of retweets:

Aeon. Followers: 138k. Most retweets/last two weeks: 58.

PhilosophyBites. Followers: 72k. Most retweets: 56

The New Philosopher. Followers: 15.8k. Most retweets: 36.

Let me emphasise something: Nigel Warburton, the Philosophy Bites person, would, if one were to ask for an example of a public-facing philosopher, be the first name that would occur to many professional philosophers. Aeon has a massive editorial team and is widely seen as one of the best venues for popular philosophy; the New Philosopher publishes loads of respected professional philosophers. As far as analytic philosophy goes, this is as popular as it gets.

However, this is only really to tell part of the story. Philosophy is a wide field, and analytic philosophy is only part of it. So let’s look further.

Slavoj Žižek is a paradigm and very influential continental philosopher. In case you don’t know, while analytic philosophy tends to hew close to contemporary, precise, Anglophone work, continental philosophy is more about the big things, and references figures from the history of philosophy as well as those much hated postmodern French theorists.

The importance of Žižek is that he was one of the people who popularized blending high and low culture in analyzing features of contemporary life, art, or politics using fancy theorizing. He would use, for example, the film Psycho to explain features of the work of Jacques Lacan, or old detective novels to get a handle on Hegel.

This sort of work tends to be called ‘cultural criticism’ and is, undeniably, an important medium in which people communicate ideas about the world. And there are venues for it, in the form of typically left-leaning (philosophy in general has a left-leaning orientation) publishing houses and online publications. So it’ll be helpful to look at them to round out our picture a bit. Consider The Outline, searching in the domain of which reveals articles about the philosophy of climate change and stories about French theorist Felix Guattari, or The Baffler, a google search for which brought up articles about Sartre and Elon Musk and the simulation hypothesis, or n+1, one of the first pages of results for which are two occurrences of contemporary French Lacan-cum-set-theory guy Alain Badiou. Here is the data:

The Outline. Followers: 43.6k. Most retweets/last two weeks:15.

The Baffler. Followers: 47.6k. Most retweets: 78

n+1. Followers: 90k. Most retweets: 11.

(One point: For each of these magazines, retweets of theirs of their writers (i.e. Outline has x write something, x tweets ‘I wrote this for @theoutline’) do better numbers than this, but we’re still talking at most low hundreds. Also, both The Baffler and the n+1 are also print magazines, which might skew things somewhat. But I’m confident these trends would hold for other venues.)

These venues, then, don’t appear to be churning out viral content on the reg. Of course, maybe that’s just what we would expect: philosophy, either in its nerdy analytic or cultural criticism vein, is a niche pursuit, for people either on top of their symbolic logic or their postmodern NeoMarxism. And that would, of course, fit in with the dearly held belief that ideas don’t pay. People just don’t care too much about these things.

Wrong

Nope. People care a lot, and people will pay for what they’ll care about. The idea producers above just don’t know how to sell their ideas.

But some do: podcasters and YouTubers are out there, presenting ideas, getting loads of viewers and loads of money. You might have heard of Chapo Trap House, the ‘dirtbag left’ podcast set up by some hipster friends in Brooklyn who met on twitter. Although I haven’t listened to it, I’ve read the book (I reviewed it here) and from what I’ve read, it’s acerbic leftist scatological commentary (a neat and quick way to get a sense of what I’m talking about is to note that one of their main rival is called ‘Cum Town’.) They discuss politics, inviting often serious thinkers for, I assume, serious discussions alongside fart jokes. Their book, at least, contains words like ‘Gramsci’ and ‘hegemony’ and their humour is informed by a decent knowledge of American politics old and new.

So: they’re selling ideas. But the difference is, they are selling them. The Outline, for its 43k followers and under one hundred retweets, raises a lot of money — it recently raised $5.5 million in funding. And while its stated business model is based on quality and not quantity of readers, it’s probably not a reach to say that it’s going to have trouble showing it’s worth it (a sign of which, perhaps, is that it recently fired a bunch of employees, and even more recently has been acquired by a bigger media conglomerate).

But Chapo? Chapo, a podcast, which is a few guys in a room, earns over $120,000 … a month. Taking into consideration the low costs, the profit margin of these guys must be the sort to make any businessperson salivate.

Of course, maybe that’s a fluke. Except, it isn’t. YouTuber ContraPoints, aka Natalie Wynn, has around 10,000 patrons, and since her minimum tier is $2, at the minimum she is getting $20k a month. Another leftist YouTuber, PhilosophyTube, aka Oliver Thorn, doesn’t have exact numbers but a reasonable estimate is that he is making between $5k and 25 a month (per this). Both of these people studied philosophy at graduate level, and make videos on philosophy and culture wars issue more generally — the videos I watched contained expositions of Hegel and a role call of Eastern European Marxist theorists.

This financial data is reflected, more or less, in the social media engagement (the Chapo figure here obviously doesn’t support my view; not sure why). Here it is:

PhilosophyTube. Followers: 65k. Most retweets/last two weeks: 2449.

ContraPoints. Followers: 188k. Most retweets: 11467.

ChapoTrapHouse. Followers: 97k. Most retweets: 12

Needless to say, the money and the social media activity correspond to actually consuming the content. Chapo, per its wiki, gets 120,000–150,000 downloads per podcast. ContraPoints’s last video, published a month ago, has 1,000,000 viewers, while PhilosophyTube’s latest video has 500k. For contrast, The Outline, last year, posting pieces many days a week and employing a handful of staff, was reported as having 3,000,000 viewers a month. Of course, that’s not bad, but when you consider that there’s next to no money behind ContraPoints 1,000,000 views, it puts things in perspective.

What this shows, I think quite clearly, is that there is both an appetite for ideas, and, even more surprisingly, there’s money to be made from them. This is a fact deserving of explanation, and I want to provide one shortly. But first, I need to rebut an important objection.

But … are they any good?

Of course, these numbers don’t show much. After all, in a sense we know there’s a market for ideas — Jordan Peterson’s book is a multi-million copy best seller. The more important question, of course, is whether there is a market for good ideas, whether all the money is going towards things of cultural value.

Pretty much, I think the answer is. The Chapo gang, at least as far as their book seems to suggest, are about as interesting as any cultural commentator you read on the hipster platforms mentioned above. PhilosophyTube’s expositions — at least those I’ve watched, which aren’t many — are typically pretty solid, and ContraPoint is pretty good at dismissing alt-right opponents. Moreover, she is funny, like laugh out loud funny. And both of them produce videos that really ought to qualify as a sort of art — well shot, acted, edited, generally enjoyable to watch. It is, I think, all round good intellectual entertainment.

Indeed, I would say comparing these three with Žižek who, as I say, is certainly one of the most famous living philosophers, they compare favourably. Žižek has read more, and, no doubt, understands more, perhaps much more, than these people, and is perhaps somewhat more insightful. But they all are in the business of using philosophical ideas, often loosely enough, to cast light on contemporary phenomena (Trump, Brexit, trans issues) in a stylish and entertaining way. And at least the YouTubers don’t seem to hover as close to milkshakeducking themselves as Slajov.