The 2025 "YouTube Studies" Awards
YouTube is a website that allows anybody with a Google account to upload videos; as such it has become the number one video streaming platform in terms of hours streamed (beating out Netflix, HBO, Disney+, and all of the others). It is no secret that the biggest channels on YouTube have an outsized gravitational pull. There is a symbiotic but contentious relationship between them and YouTube itself. Being an advertising company, Google-by-way-of-YouTube's money scales upwards (to infinity?) with time watched. On that, their goals align with the biggest channels. However, while it is broadly in YouTube's best interests to play nicely with its biggest channels, fundamentally as long as viewing hours go up, YouTube's finance department is happy, and capital is king. All of this combined--the low barrier to entry, laissez-faire competition for viewing hours between channels, YouTube's hunger for infinite growth--means that YouTube is an incredible platform for cultural production. Some of the worst brain-hijacking anti-social engagement juicing right next to the most evil person you know right next to profound genius right next to someone ranting about a bad movie for 20 minutes to an audience of nobody; it is a remarkable website.
In other words: I love to watch YouTube (videos on YouTube) and also to watch YouTube (the platform in a macro sense, its subcultures, its niches, the way people process their own lives and thoughts and try to find human connection on a platform that worships Metrics as the one true God).
With that said, here are a few channels that defined my 2025 in #YouTubeStudies.
1. "YouTuber with a Wikipedia Page Award" ("Latest to the Party Award")
Technology Connections (link) is a channel that friends have been recommending I watch for longer than I've been self-describedly "watching YouTube". Closer to the beginning of the year, a friend shared his "Algorithms are breaking how we think" video, and for no particular reason this became my wedge in. I watched it and liked it, and shortly after that watched a bunch of his previous work in rapid succession. And I've been keeping up since then.
Most of what he does is quite good, but what I especially like are his videos deeply digging into ubiquitous, invisible, magic technology. His video "Your dishwasher is better than you think (tips, tricks, and how they work)" was more illuminating than I ever expected a video about dishwashers to be. It made me, retroactively, realize that I had never in my life actually thought about how dishwashers work, and it completely changed how I think about and use them. "Catalytic converters are simple, but getting them to work is not" not only helped me understand the difficult-to-overstate-the-effects-of radical transformation in car technology that have helped de-smog urban air, but also what "that thing with the name that people steal from Priuses and other cars" is.
There are many gems like this in his channel's archive. It has really taught me the joy of realizing that I never really knew how something worked, and then learning how it works. You'll never look at light bulbs or washing machines or cars or heat pumps or Christmas lights the same way ever again.
2. "Gamer of the Year"
Memoria (link) first showed up in my recommended videos with the video "testing the vibes of the playstation 2". I love her punchy editing style, quick wit, and novel approach to "Video Game YouTube video" subjects. Video games are neat, and are inarguably a powerful force in culture and the economy, but within "video games culture" it can sometimes be hard to find anything interesting over the din of the boom and bust of marketing cycles and commodity fandom. Memoria resists this completely by being a self-described bad gamer who likes bad games.
Her video "i made the perfect roblox game " is how I learned that Roblox isn't just a combination Las Vegas/Child Exploitation Factory, but it's built on the bones of 00's Flash Games culture fast-forwarded two decades. "i played every avatar movie game" is both how I learned what Avatar is about, but also it's a fun exploration of a weird slice in time at the tail end of an era of "movie tie-in games" that would subsequently disappear or be completely transformed (or, eventually, become Fortnite skins). "day-old steam games" is both an incredible video framing device and also takes seriously as a site of investigation that there are dozens of games coming out on Steam every day and most of them leave zero footprint on culture.
Memoria is keeping alive the idea that video games might actually be interesting artistic objects that are products of time and culture. And with a different, more jovial and exploratory and wider perspective than the crop of New Games Journalism websites all founded and shuttered in the 2010s. She's also really funny and good at making videos.
3. "Nuovo Award"
Dev Limes (link) is the side channel of musician Dev Lemons. Months ago, I wrote about how her videos recreating songs without being able to hear her computer (example: "I Made Gnarly by Katseye Without Hearing It") are incredibly funny. I stand by that. However, this award is for a different series: her... dating... adventure game... horror...? series.
The series began in her Shorts, but the first long-form video is "POV you’re on a date with me". There are a handful more mixed across her Shorts & Videos, they proceed roughly in chronological order, although it's less of a strict narrative chronology and more of a scope-widening production-improving chronology.
I really don't think it's worth it for me to try and unpack them here; I just recommend checking it out. I've never seen anything else that feels quite like it. The way it draws on point-and-click aesthetics and creepypasta logic is sublime. The video game aesthetics afford a(n exaggerated) sense of embodying the perspective that simple first-person camera does not. The juddering camera affords low-budget disorienting dreamlike logic with characters seemingly teleporting and duplicating and behaving unnaturally. Her bizarre sense of humor means they're all full of jokes and scenarios beyond my wildest expectations.
A couple of these videos have some of the most "this was approved??" native sponsorships that I have ever seen in a YouTube video. Dev Lemons is truly pushing the boundaries of internet video.
Thanks for reading!