Loading...If you’ve been on the Internet for more than 6 months, there a good chance you’ve watched an AsapScience video. Started by Mitchell Moffit and Gregory Brown back in 2012, AsapScience has grown to become one of the Internet’s largest source of fun, interesting, and useful information relating to anything from Internet trolls, HIV, studying, diets, really anything; as long as it’s related to science and it’s many subcategories. The channel has almost 5 million subscribers and over 517 million total views, quite a feat for a strictly educational channel, only beat out by Vsauce with 9 million subs for the most subscribed educational channel on the whole platform.
So how have Greg and Mitch gained such a following? (not to mention another 600,000 subs from their second channel, Asap Thought) Well, it’s most likely that the channel first attracted so many viewers back in 2012 because of their novel style of making videos, pioneered by AsapScience and another science channel run by Henry Reich, MinutePhysics. The style involved a mixture of animation, timelapse drawing on white boards, and voiceovers, creating a fun, visual, and easy-to-understand aesthetic that the whole channel adheres to, even to this day. Their style, along with interesting and informative videos on topics even people not that interested in science would find fascinating, was their key to success.
You can see their style, as I mentioned above, in effect in today’s featured video. Their second most viewed video with 17 million views, the video above answers (or at least addresses) the age-old question that stumped philosophers in every era: which came first, the chicken or the egg? (I don’t actually know if philosophers have pondered this question for millennia, but let’s just go with that) This question is almost a paradox in itself, and takes the most inquisitive and logical minds to decipher. Luckily we have Mitch and Greg to do it for us, which they do in a fun and interesting way. They even give their own answer to the question, and although I don’t necessarily agree with them, the video does help clarify the situation enough so we can all make our own informed opinions. In case you’re wondering, I’m on Team Chicken, but you can decide for yourself after you watch the video.
Just as the video Which Came First – The Chicken or the Egg? answers a fun question with fascinating science, that’s the tactic that many other AsapScience videos take as well. Starting with a topic that everyone finds interesting, such as the question “What If Humans Disappeared”, lucid dreaming, the science behind sleep and how much you need, and many more topics, AsapScience hooks you in and then gives you your “daily dose of science”, as they say in the about page of their channel. If you like learning new information in a fun and interesting way, AsapScience is the channel for you.