I’m young. In a scale of elderness going from zero to a hundred you could say I’m twenty-two. Because I am. I am twenty-two years old.
Being twenty-two, I still remember a time when there was no internet. I also remember the time YouTube showed up, and I remember I only logged in to watch Naruto compilations and short sketches. Maybe even some not-yet-deleted leaked episodes of a tv series. YouTube was a different place then: Google was still only a search engine, the now very popular art of vlogging had not yet quite taken off and most of the videos on the site could still infringe copyright laws in some ways. It was here that some vloggers started to really make a name for themselves, providing new, original content.
One of these vloggers was Phillip DeFranco, and the first time I saw one of his videos, he had used a picture of boobs as a thumbnail. This was a common practice to get more views (Stay classy DeFranco). DeFranco’s show (whose channel name was and still is sxephil) consisted on him, talking to his camera, recapping recent news that mattered to him. It was DeFranco’s unavoidable charisma and his sense of humor that ultimately made you subscribe to his channel instead of just clicking on his videos to see a lady’s breasts (not talking from personal experience).
However, the Phillip DeFranco show had something no one else had. In his show, Phil discussed sex, politics and celebrity gossip with no shame. He stood by his opinions and he was always in contact with his audience. If he found out he had offended someone in a previous video, he was quick to apologize, but not without stating his point firmly. He gave his subscribers a dose of everything we wanted, in less-than-10-minute-long videos. Jump forward six years, and we have SourceFed.
SourceFed emerges as part of the YouTube $100 million dollar original channel initiative. An initiative with a very self-descriptive name, it was aimed at creating new channels that would eventually form Google TV. Created by Phillip DeFranco, it was designed to be an evolution of his own channel. Now SourceFed has more than seven hundred thousand subscribers.
But why, why oh why, you must be asking yourself, are you so adamantly ordering me to watch SourceFed? Because it’s the future of news. 20 minutes or less, which is the main course of SourceFed, presents a daily video about a news story. The hosts (which include vlogging veterans like Elliot Morgan and sketch comedy geniuses like Joe Bereta) always go out of their way to make the video as enjoyable as possible. They seem genuinely happy to be sharing this video with you and THAT’S IMPORTANT (note to self: using all caps makes me loose a bit of credibility).
You see, in a world where attention spans are getting increasingly shorter and standards for good videos keep rising, it’s good to have a team of people that really want you to be informed and also want you to be entertained. True, they’re not really talking about EVERY news story there is, but they are talking about news that matter to them and to us, because those are the news we actually want to hear about. We don’t really want 24-hour news networks with unending commentary about the social situation in Botswana. Or maybe we do, but not really. buy 4000 hours youtube watch time