Lindsay Ellis, a California-based filmmaker and mother of two, has been making videos for YouTube since 2007. But even she was surprised by the response to her most recent release on the platform. In her 142-minute video “The Unforgivable Sin of Ms. Rachel,” Ellis explains how the children’s entertainer figures into debates about “woke” children’s media before pivoting to conversations about genocide, the war in Gaza, and the roots of antisemitism. The video ends by saying that charitable donations can make a difference in situations that otherwise seem intractable, and provides a link to the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund. As of September 12, the video has over 2 million views and has raised more than $750,000 for the charity.
In a call one week after she posted the Ms. Rachel video, Ellis tells Vanity Fair that she put extra care into it. “If you are releasing something to YouTube, you are making a pact with the algorithm,” she says. “If someone already got to the topic, you had better have a good take. You had better have something new and refreshing, or people are going to be so annoying about it.”
Ellis’s approach is more Ken Burns than Mr. Beast—a style that’s increasingly successful on a website once associated mostly with short, disposable clips. Though video essays, which intercut narration and footage—both self-recorded and stock—with occasional textual references, have had a home on YouTube since the site’s early years, they’re having a moment right now thanks to a generation of creators who have leveled up both their technical skills and their marketing abilities.
Ellis’s opus on Ms. Rachel is only one of several slickly produced video essays that have racked up millions of viewers this summer, feature-length YouTube videos that feel more like documentaries than the prank wars or makeup tutorials of yore. On March 24, ContraPoints—a Peabody Award–winning channel with 1.9 million subscribers that counts Ezra Klein, Jameela Jamil, and Chris Hayes as fans—released “Conspiracy,” an almost three-hour deep dive into Jeffrey Epstein, Alex Jones, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that’s been watched 4.1 million times and counting. In August, Elephant Graveyard, an anonymous creator who makes videos about comedy, released a 90-minute video about Joe Rogan’s influence on the medium, both in Austin and globally, as part three of a bigger series on the famous podcaster. In typical YouTube fashion, its title captures the argument well: “How Comedy Was Destroyed by an Anti-Reality Doomsday Cult.” The trilogy has attracted almost 9 million views.
Clearly, these videos are responsive to news headlines—but they analyze issues in a different way than news channels or topical comedians like Josh Johnson, whose viral stand-up sets launched him into a hosting role on The Daily Show this July. Video essayists rely on a balance of deep research and on-the-fly adjustments, taking a long view of what is driving the news cycle and continuing to tweak their videos until the very last minute—which adds an urgency that might not come through via scripted narration alone. Ellis said she improvised her latest video’s emotional conclusion soon before she posted it to YouTube. “I don’t know if you could tell, but my hair is dirty. That’s why it’s pulled back,” she says. “I filmed it basically the day before the video went up—like fuck it, conclusion.”
These creators are deeply indebted not only to Burns, but to the personality-driven work of other star documentarians like Adam Curtis, Errol Morris, and Michael Moore. Once you get used to the persistent formal tics of online media—costume changes, the occasional jump cut to a meme—the videos are every bit as thrilling as something that might be shown in a theater. But they’re also cerebral, dropping highbrow references without apology. Natalie Wynn, the creator behind ContraPoints, traveled to the Watergate Hotel in Washington, DC to film a segment about political conspiracies and the supposed mystery behind the death of John F. Kennedy. Throughout “Conspiracy,” she comments on the works of Jean-Paul Sartre, Karl Popper, and Richard Hofstadter—but she introduces this segment with blunt colloquialism. “America has a weird obsession with JFK. I feel like it’s because of two things,” she says. “One, he’s hot. Two, he’s dead.”
Once upon a time, YouTube’s scrappiness was part of its charm. These days, technological advances (and hours of practice) make a professional sheen easier to achieve—and Ellis, like many creators, also works with a production staff to make sure she is “obsessing over quality.” For her, making a video isn’t only about the product itself: She’s also adopting the mindset of a film distributor, thinking from the start about how early viewers will respond to her work. “It has to be tailored around ‘How do I get people to click on it this first round?’” she says. “It almost has to be an event, because otherwise everything on your channel becomes disposable.”
YouTube has always been a self-referential place, and for the last decade or so, gaining an audience has required creators to jump into the fray either by posting videos constantly or by capitalizing on drama between creators. But as YouTube becomes a bigger part of real life—85% of American adults say they use it at least occasionally, according to a 2024 Pew survey—the people who have built followings there are opening up their repertoires to more sweeping commentary.
Though the trend toward feature-length documentaries has been brewing for a while, it may have been turbocharged last spring, when YouTuber Jenny Nicholson released a four-hour-long review of her underwhelming stay at Disney World’s Star Wars–themed hotel. By the time Nicholson’s epic was released, the hotel was already closed—but the video nevertheless netted 14 million views and a New York Times review calling it one of the year’s “most captivating pieces of entertainment.” (VF also named it one of the “22 Undersung TV Gems” of the year.)
It’s clear that there’s increasing audience demand for the deep dive–style fare these filmmakers are providing. According to Kevin Munger, a social scientist who studies online behavior, the pivot toward lengthier clips could also be financially motivated. “In terms of mapping between the audience preferences and the actual money that the creators get, the platform has total control,” he says. “It does seem that they have changed the monetization scheme in favor of higher quality long-form content.”
In 2019, frustrated by the pressure of producing videos at YouTube’s pace, Ellis joined a group of 75 creators to start Nebula, their own streaming service, which is owned by Standard, the company that manages the creators. On Nebula, videos play without ads—and without a view-maximizing algorithm. But even years later, she can’t afford to post her work only on that platform. “The problem with Nebula, at least as it stands right now, is it is restricted to the audience you already have,” she says. “It’s really hard to grow an audience on Nebula, which is not a social-media platform. How do you find people on the outside and bring them in? They have to already know who you are.”
Munger’s research shows that the metrics themselves can be a powerful tool for attracting audiences on YouTube. “It is incredibly important for audiences that their preferred creators have the high score, in terms of their numbers of views,” he says. “If a creator decides not to follow their audience’s lead, then other creators who do prioritize their audience’s preferences are going to end up taking more and more of the overall audience share.”
Ellis agrees that the trend toward longer, splashier features on YouTube reflects specific changes on the platform—namely, that the algorithm determines how far to spread a new video based on the engagement of a creator’s most committed subscribers. Still, she points out that most of the people behind these features have left-leaning politics—and have learned what works on YouTube in part by watching their right-wing competitors.
While Ellis was working on the Ms. Rachel video, the contrast occasionally depressed her. “The whole time I was making this video—and obviously it took months—I am watching Ben Shapiro just shart out hours and hours of garbage every day. It doesn’t matter if he’s fact-checked, and it doesn’t matter if he’s wrong. He doesn’t care,” she says. “We are held to a higher standard, and that’s not a bad thing in and of itself. But it does make it difficult to compete in an ecosystem where sometimes volume is the same as quality.”
She’s trying to take the long view. “This is not a new problem. Forty years ago, you’d have Ken Burns on one side and Rush Limbaugh on the other, though they weren’t necessarily in direct competition. They have very different audiences, but one inevitably is going to have more volume than the other and therefore more influence,” she says. “I do genuinely think people are hungry for new and different things, and they want to be exposed to new ideas. They want to learn new things and be educated, but it’s very hard to get that to them.” Unless you know how to keep audiences watching for hours at a time.
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The post Where the “Woke” Debate Burns Hottest: In Incredibly Long YouTube Essays on the Likes of RFK Jr. and Ms. Rachel appeared first on Vanity Fair.
