Skip to content

Are We Still YouTubers?

2026-10-01 · letter vlog · Hank · 8:01 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Internet & YouTube (also: Nerdfighteria) · mode: Personal essay · tags: calendar ritual

Replying to John's video saying the brothers aren't the best YouTubers, Hank argues they are good at it but no longer really YouTubers: there is no word for what Vlogbrothers does because few do it and the internet lets weird, unboxed things exist; 'content' is just the default label, and his art is the channel, the brotherhood and what the community builds.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — Are we YouTubers? Reply to John; creator classes named after platforms; Mike Rugnetta's 'content' video

  • ★★★ Answering John's video yesterday saying they weren't the best YouTubers, Hank thinks they are good YouTubers but doubts they still are YouTubers, though they used to be. — 00:00:00 · Vlogbrothers, YouTuber, YouTube
  • ★★ Hank finds it weird that classes of creators are named after the company owning their platform (YouTuber, TikToker, Instagram influencer); YouTuber is at least better than Instagram influencer. — 00:00:00 · YouTuber, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram
  • ★★ Hank has long thought about Mike Rugnetta's nine-year-old video on the word content and the phrase content creator, partly because Hank is fine with them and Mike was not. — 00:00:00 · content creator

00:00:42 — Mild beef with Rugnetta: 'content' implies a commodity, but the name matters little and new forms lack names

  • ★★ Mike Rugnetta (quoted): As Hank summarises it, Mike Rugnetta's case is that content implies a commodity, so content creators produce a thing to be consumed with little interest in what it is made of. — 00:00:42 · content creator
  • ★★ Hank agrees that, unlike novelist, essayist, entrepreneur or philanthropist, content creator says nothing about the work, carries less prestige and sounds like making things to be consumed; not ideal. — 00:01:11 · content creator
  • ★★★ Hank says the label does not much matter: the people watching his work do not feel they are unthinkingly shoveling sensations into their brains, and he cares about what he does, not what he is called. — 00:01:40 · content creator
  • ★★★ Hank thinks we lack good words for these new kinds of work mostly not because we don't value them but because they are all very new. — 00:01:40
  • ★ Hank grants the words might have come faster if boomers cared about YouTube, but they mostly don't, and that does not bother him. (playful) — 00:02:09 · YouTube
  • ★★ Hank admits he sometimes does unthinkingly consume, and there are words for that kind of content: slop or brain rot. — 00:02:09
  • ★★ Hank says long-established creative careers get distinct names for similar work: cartoonist, political cartoonist, comic strip artist, storyboard artist, animator, graphic novelist. — 00:02:09

00:02:39 — Names come slowly; no word for Vlogbrothers because few do it; the internet creates genres faster than legacy media

  • ★★ Hank says storyboard artists did not get their name at once; he imagines they long had to explain their work at parties until listeners were bored. (hedged) — 00:02:39
  • ★★ For about ten years Hank told people at parties he made educational videos for high school and college students and ended up explaining what CPM stands for. (playful) — 00:03:08 · online advertising
  • ★★ Hank sees names differentiating: video essayists, storytime animators, streamers, and explainers or communicators, work he sometimes does on Vlogbrothers and often on Hank's channel and TikTok. — 00:03:08 · Vlogbrothers, hankschannel, TikTok
  • ★★★ Hank says there is no good word for what the brothers do on this channel, and not because it is new: they have done it for almost 20 years. — 00:03:37 · Vlogbrothers
  • ★ Hank says the channel does many different things, and labels like 'Ze Frank-y' or 'secular homilist' are not working for anybody. — 00:03:37
  • ★★★ Hank thinks the real reason there is no word is that few channels do anything like Vlogbrothers; if there were many, there would be a word. — 00:03:37 · Vlogbrothers, YouTube
  • ★★★ Hank thinks the lack of a word has a good reason: weird things can exist now, where before everything fitted specific pockets (flautist, violinist, ballerina, jazz dancer). — 00:04:17

  • ★★★ Hank says the internet creates genres faster than legacy media created individual episodes; the categories fracture nearly infinitely and culture lacks the bandwidth to name them. — 00:04:17

    “the Internet creates genres faster than legacy media used to create individual episodes”

00:04:57 — Smosh, Angela Collier, Alexis Nikole Nelson; content as default label; YouTube as a place; Hank no longer a YouTuber here

  • ★★ Hank asks what Smosh, Angela Collier and Alexis Nikole Nelson each do and who does likewise: there is no word because they are all doing their own things. — 00:04:57
  • ★★★ Hank thinks we call it content not because we think it is not valuable but because we have no other choice, and to be more specific we name it after where it is uploaded. — 00:04:57 · content creator
  • ★★★ Hank grants it is weird that the place is owned by a CEO and corporate board, but he will defend his perception that, to his brain, YouTube is a place. — 00:05:26 · YouTube
  • ★★★ Hank thinks the platform has moved past where the brothers still are: on Hank's channel he still feels a YouTuber, but here the word's meaning has changed and it no longer fits; that is no loss to him. — 00:05:26 · YouTube, hankschannel, YouTuber
  • ★★★ Hank says he is not doing a YouTuber's job here but something without a good name, which hundreds and thousands of creative people are also doing. — 00:05:57 · YouTuber, YouTube
  • ★★★ Hank says that if nobody is put into a box, things are hard to label; it always would have been so had it been possible, and now it is, which he thinks is good. — 00:06:24
  • ★★★ Hank understands and supports friends who resent online creators not being recognised as impactful or as artists, but it does not bother him: he cares that his work is interesting, not what people call it. — 00:06:24

00:06:57 — Hank's art is not video but the channel, the brotherhood and what the community makes

  • ★★ Hank does not think any individual video on this channel is art, or that any individual video matters. — 00:06:57 · Vlogbrothers

  • ★★★ Hank says his artwork is not video but the channel, the brotherhood, the whole thing: from people unsure which brother is which to people making Hollywood, Ending cakes, fonts and hospitals in Sierra Leone. — 00:06:57 · Vlogbrothers, Hollywood, Ending, Maternal Center of Excellence, Sierra Leone

    “It's not video. It's the channel. It's the brotherhood. It's the whole thing.”

00:07:26 — Sign-off; Rachel's Pizza John font; lounging in his office

  • ★★ Hank says the art spreads out beyond him yet is still being made, and it never occurs to him to question its legitimacy. — 00:07:26
  • ★★ Hank says the on-screen font is a real font by a nerdfighter named Rachel, linked in the description; it is technically free, he suggests paying three to five dollars, and he will probably pay $500. (playful) — 00:07:26 · Nerdfighteria

In the description and comments

  • ★★ The description points viewers to Pizzamas at pizzamas.com. — video description · Pizzamas
  • ★ In a channel comment, Hank says the word vlogger long came to mean day-in-the-life creators filming themselves and their families, so the brothers mostly stopped using it. — creator comment

Threads in this video

Mentioned

Central: content creator · YouTuber

Also: People: Alexis Nikole · Angela Collier · Mike Rugnetta · Ze Frank

Projects: hankschannel

Works: Hollywood, Ending · Mike Rugnetta's video on 'Content'

Organizations: Instagram · Maternal Center of Excellence · TikTok · YouTube

Groups: Smosh

Concepts: categorization · commodity · legacy media · online advertising

Places: Sierra Leone

Only in the description or credits: Pizza John · Pizzamas · Rachel

Replies to

  • continues · The Point of Life — “You said in your video yesterday that we weren't the best YouTubers”

Later videos replying to this one

Part of an exchange of 4 videos, 2026-09-29 – 2026-10-02.