There’s a wealth of intriguing, interesting and best of all free content out there on Youtube. So much so, that it’s nearly impossible to traverse through the “definitely not sponsored by Avon” make-up tutorials and Minecraft how tos for children who’ve never played outside. So we’ve put our heads together and come up with five of our favourite Youtube channels to keep your brain ticking away while you destroy parts of it by binge-watching videos.
Kurzgesagt (don’t even try and pronounce it) is German for ‘in a nutshell’, and also the name of a Munich-based animation and design team that produce cute, informative videos about all sorts of high-concept ideas that are rapidly becoming realities in our modern world. If you want to learn more about genetically modified food, or genetically modified humans, without having to do something mad like go to university or read a book, then this is the channel for you.
Subscribe to the channel here, and check out some of their best work here.
You know those people who negatively comment about every video that Vice put up and moan how they “used to be good”, but never manage to unsubscribe from the page? Nobody likes them – but they do sort of have a point. Great Big Story makes videos just as niche and professional as Vice used to, without any of the edgy irony or faux cool they’re absorbed in. Just decent storytelling from perspectives you never knew existed.
What’s more, they make a lot of videos: over 100 each month. And these are based all over the world, in a wide variety of topics, all informative as hell. If you’re interested in bite-sized documentaries and hearing stories from people who are hardly ever given a platform, subscribe to them here.
Do you ever feel uninspired? Do you ever think you could be doing more with your life? That other people are more interesting and talented than you? Well Blank on Blank takes interviews with those people and then animates the conversation.
Legends like Bob Dylan, Tupac Shakur, Kurt Cobain, and many others at their most candid and honest, speaking on the kind of topics you only get to when you’re a few pints in and starting to open up (yikes). The animation provides a fun visual flair to each video to make it feel like you’re not just listening to a podcast. They say it best themselves, “the future of journalism is remixing the past”.
Vox are a media company that make professional, informative videos that at worst could be described as overtly left-wing (but anyone who uses a term like that negatively is the type of person to spend an entire afternoon arguing with someone else on the internet).
They’ve got different series of videos that inform on varying topics; Almanac digs deep into overlooked subjects like fonts, coincidences, and grammar; Observatory looks into science and engineering that effects our world; and Strikethrough examines how the current political climate in the US is reported in traditional media.
You can learn a lot from their videos, and at the very least you can look like you’re educated on a subject when really you’ve just watched a 4 minute clip on Youtube.
I’m not a fan of the video format where someone stands in front of a camera and spouts diatribe for five to fifteen minutes, because they’re usually just trying to get the most views by being the most wacky/obnoxious/likeable/unlikeable they can be. But as much as I want to dislike the guy who presents Today I Found Out, he just keeps delivering interesting facts into my subscription box, day in day out. I can’t fault him for that.
These videos are addictive, and often leave you with the thought that “Oh yeah, that’s fairly obvious” – but yet you always need to find out more about the subject.
There are plenty of these info-taining Youtube channels out there, and we can’t get enough of them. If there’s any in particular that you’re a fan of be sure to leave a comment on our Facebook or Twitter, and happy bingeing.