Loading...Vox is a general interest blogging site, started back in 2006 (at least, that’s what it’s Wikipedia page describes it as). It’s grown to be a pretty large source of news and opinion articles, its Alexa ranking, basically a ranking of popularity against every other website on the Internet, at around 1,000. In 2014, Vox created a YouTube channel on which to put it’s original video content on a very wide range of subjects, just like the articles on Vox’s website. That channel has since grown to have 131 million views in total, with more than 600,000 subscribers.
While on topics as diverse as ISIS and cracking your knuckles, Vox’s videos all have the same news/educational aesthetic, and are all very well edited, filmed, and put together. Vox’s channel may not have as many subscriptions as larger website’s channels, but their videos are of perhaps the highest quality and enjoyment level for the viewer of any website I know of that has branched out into video. To be concise, their videos are interesting and enjoyable, and that’s what you want out of a YouTube video.
Take, for example, the video above. Made in 2013, the video has racked up 3 million views, and talks about something that you probably knew all along but didn’t have any evidence for: claw machines are rigged. You may have loved to spend quarter after quarter on claw machines in your youth, but by taking one look at the manual for a popular claw machine game you’ll learn some disturbing facts about how they are set up. For instance, you can input the average cost of the prizes, along with your desired revenue from the machine, and the machine will calculate how often it will give its players full power to the claw. Vox did some calculations, and it’s probably not more than one game in 21 for any given machine. Pretty sad, huh.
That and more is talked about in the great video above. Along with being very well animated and just well made in general, the video does a good job of showing how Vox can take seemingly boring topics like claw machines and find interesting stories behind them to tell, such as how they are rigged. To be honest, I don’t usually like video content made by a news website, as it often feels too much like a news article and not like a natively made video. But Vox does a great job of avoiding this, all of their content interesting, informative, enjoyable. But above all that, if you just want to know why I like Vox’s channel in one sentence, it’s this: their videos are fun to watch, and not fun to watch in a stupid cat-in-a-teacup way, but an educational, learn-something-new way.