Short. Sweet. Popular

For those of you frequent YouTube watchers, I'm sure you have heard of or watched Vsauce. Vsauce is a YouTube channel run by Internet personality Michael Stevens. Vsauce produces short, 5-10 minute videos about various interesting science, cultural, and technological topics. These videos range from titles like :What if everyone JUMPED at once? to Will we ever run out of new music? to Is your red the same as my red?. Although I'm sure these titles do sound interesting, do they sound 5-million-views interesting? That's right, many of Vsauce's videos have 5 million plus views. How does he get so many views on his short videos?

That question is what I have been asking myself ever since my friend Ian showed me these videos. My initial reaction was there are just A LOT of science geeks out there, and Vsauce is just one of the many suppliers of this demand. I decided to compare his YouTube page to National Geographic, the best science magazine of 2013 voted by peer editors according to Allyoucanread.com. I was shocked to find that Vsauce has well over 3 times the total YouTube subscribers that National Geographic does. So once again, I'm left wondering: "What is so appealing about Vsauce videos".

My second and final assumption goes back to an earlier blog I wrote. This post was about how Americans need to have their video games instantly, and how game manufacturers have taken advantage of that. Maybe just like our need for immediate game gratification, we as Americans need immediate knowledge gratification. It may be possible that the reason Vsauce has 11+ million subscribers and is one or two videos shy of having one billion total views is because he has kept his videos short. People see a question like Why do we kiss? as a video title and want to hear the answer within 5 or so minutes. Vsauce provides them with that. This is just a hypothesis of mine, and I'd love to hear any and all reasons for popularity you all can come up with.