Loading...On January 1st, 2007, John and Hank Green started a project which they called “Brotherhood 2.0”. Brotherhood 2.0 was a pretty impressive undertaking; the idea was that John and Hank would make videos for each other every day for a year, and that was their only means of communication. Although these videos were meant for each other, John and Hank put them on YouTube for everyone to watch anyway. They ended up completing this year-long quest, and then just kept on doing it, although ratcheting it down to twice a week. Fast forward to today, 8 years later, and they are still keeping up this routine, except under the name Vlogbrothers and having an audience of over 2.6 million subscribers. Along with growing their audience, John and Hank have become big figures in online video culture, and even just Internet culture in general.
John is most famous for his books The Fault In Our Stars and Paper Towns, both of which have been on the New York Times’ Bestseller list for a while now, and both having been made into blockbuster films recently. Hank, on the other hand, doesn’t have the incredible fame from books and movies like John does, but rather spends more of his time on YouTube, running and hosting a bunch of shows that John and Hank have helped produce, including Crash Course, SciShow, The Art Assignment, and more. But besides for all that, Vlogbrothers is the one channel that John and Hank have stayed true to since the beginning, and is the channel is, over everything else, about them and what they want to share.
Of course, this whole thing wouldn’t work if John and Hank happened to not be so interesting, easy to listen to, good at explaining thing, funny, good at making videos, and just nice guys. Luckily they are all of those things, so you can always count on their videos to be interesting and enjoyable. As I said before, the way the channel works is that John and Hank make 1 video every week each; John on Tuesday, Hank on Friday. The topics of the videos range from science to politics to social culture to jokes to the occasional update by John on all his book tours, movie premiers, etc. Whether or not you think you like vlogging, basically the style of film where the camera is point at your face and you are talking the majority of the time, you will like if not all a lot of Vlogbrothers videos. Plus, they’ve been doing this for 8 years. If you have any free time, binge watching their past videos is always a fun thing to do.
When I do Channel Showcases I usually try to pick 1 or 2 videos from the channel that I think represents the channel well. When researching for this Channel Showcase, I just couldn’t find one or even two individual videos that represent their whole channel. After all, they make so many and all of them are unique, on different topics, and always enjoyable. So, listed below are a bunch of my favorite of their videos that in total I hope can reprise not their channel reasonably well.
Hank Vs. Hank: The Net Neutrality Debate In 3 Minutes
GOOD NEWS: 2014 May Be The Best Year Ever (made back in 2014)
How To Name Your Baby Properly
Overall, Vlogbrothers has been, since the beginning, a community. Even though John and Hank are making these videos for each other, they are really making them for the community as well. Called Nerdfighteria, this community has been built around the challenge and their videos, and has been not only rallying around the brothers’ videos but also doing good things for the world. John and Hank have started a charity called Foundation To Decrease World Suck, most famous for it’s annual Project For Awesome fundraiser. The charity raises money and then gives it out to other charities they deem fit, and last year they raised 1.72 million dollars, and the year before that $869,000. Also, Hank started VidCon a couple years back, which I was lucky enough to go to this year, which has been a great success and is now the best place for online video fans and creators to meet and celebrate the medium.
Not only are the videos educational, interesting, and fun to watch, but the community is also by itself amazing. The channel is good for everyone. Maybe you only watch the science or politics videos, or maybe you only follow John, or maybe you watch every video and every video in every of the channels that they produce. Altogether John and Hank have created an amazing little piece of Internet culture over on Youtube, and I hope they continue to create videos weekly for a long, long time.