For this week’s Infinite Scroll column, Cal Newport is filling in for Kyle Chayka.
James Hobson began publishing videos on YouTube in 2006, when he was still a high-school student in Ontario, Canada. His early uploads were crude by today’s standards—some gymnastics tricks, some parkour, and some mildly anarchic silliness (for example, a 2009 clip of Hobson drinking raw eggs). “It was just the easiest way of sharing videos with my friends,” Hobson told me recently. “I would upload on YouTube and then share a link using MSN messenger.”
Hobson’s relationship with YouTube began to evolve in 2013, when he crafted a pair of metal claws to help him dress up as Wolverine, the Marvel superhero, for Halloween. The resulting video, which he titled “Make It Real: The Wolverine’s Claws!,” was so popular that photographers asked him to star in photo shoots; a follow-up video in which he electrified the claws earned him a writeup in a tech publication. “That’s kind of cool,’ ” Hobson remembers thinking. A year later, another installment of “Make It Real” showed him building a mechanical exoskeleton of the kind used in “Elysium,” a science-fiction film starring Matt Damon, out of perforated square tubing and compact hydraulic actuators. The exoskeleton attracted even more viewers than the Wolverine claws, and Hobson—a systems mechanical engineer—began to reconsider his line of work.
In 2015, Hobson quit his job to become a professional YouTuber, funding the transition by taking money out of his fledgling retirement account and selling laser-engraved goods on Etsy. “I had, like, six months to make it happen,” he recalled. Fortunately for him, his next project, a real-life version of Captain America’s electromagnetic shield, drew millions of views and pushed his subscriber count past five hundred thousand. He began attracting sponsorships and soon was earning enough sponsorships to make his channel financially stable.
Hobson then followed a well-worn playbook in the world of creative capitalism, one deployed by numerous startups and scrappy media companies: get as large as you can as fast as you can. “Once we started growing, I was, like, ‘I want a really big property. I want a warehouse and outdoor space and room to do really big projects,’ ” Hobson told me. When he quit his job, he’d been making videos in his garage, but by 2019 he was leasing a thirteen-thousand-square-foot warehouse. In the twenty-twenties, he took out a multimillion-dollar mortgage on an even bigger warehouse, surrounded by forests, ponds, and fields—in his words, “a perfect backdrop for filming.” Hobson, known online as the Hacksmith, called the new location HERC, for Hacksmith Engineering Research Campus. He said it was loosely modelled on the headquarters of Stark Industries in Marvel’s “Iron Man” series. His staff grew to thirty people.
At first, the expansion of Hobson’s business kept pace with his ambitions. “We doubled in size year over year,” he told me. “It was pretty darn exponential.” But, when subscriber growth slowed, HERC’s operating costs remained high. Two rounds of layoffs followed, and the company managed to stave off bankruptcy in large part because its online shop, Hacksmith.store, was unexpectedly successful. The classic strategy of scaling up left Hobson disillusioned. When I talked to him, he said that, as the head of a large, chronically cash-strapped organization, he was stressed out and nostalgic for the days when he could obsess over a single project. “Making videos has become a lot less fun for me,” he told me.
Colin Furze, a former plumber whose YouTube channel has more than thirteen million subscribers, is like Hobson’s British doppelgänger; their career paths are a study in contrasts. When we spoke, Furze had recently posted a video titled “Digging A SECRET GARAGE Part 4 Digging Done!,” which showed him at home in a suburb of Stamford, England, pouring concrete in a large, subterranean garage that he was excavating in his front yard. Furze plans to store his vintage DeLorean there; he will summon it to the surface with a hidden elevator fit for the Batcave. The video has been viewed more than five million times.
Furze, like Hobson, began publishing videos on YouTube in the early days after the platform’s launch. Initially, he filmed BMX tricks, but as he got older he gained showmanship; in one video, he modified a towed van so that he could serve meals to people in other cars while driving. An early hit came when, for reasons he cannot fully reconstruct, he decided to build the world’s largest bonfire. “I collected pallets for over a year,” he told me. A short video clip of the feat attracted hundreds of thousands of views. (At the time, YouTube did not accept uploads of large files.)
In 2010, Furze broke another record on camera when he accelerated a supercharged mobility scooter to more than seventy miles per hour. He was later invited to ride it onto the stage of “Good News,” a TV show, but a crucial cable snapped during filming, forcing him to improvise a conversation with the host from backstage as he frantically made the repair. An employee of Sky, the British broadcaster, was impressed by Furze’s banter and brought him to London to audition for a co-host’s job on a new program called “Gadget Geeks.” He landed the role.
While building zany contraptions for the show, Furze learned the importance of onscreen charisma and projects that were over the top—what the producers called “TV big.” After the season completed filming, in 2011, he kept building gadgets for his personal YouTube channel. His video of the “world’s fastest” stroller has attracted seven million views. He has so far earned nearly double that audience for a follow-up project in which he attached a jet engine to a bicycle. (The video’s description read, “Why not put a massive pulse jet on the most rubbish bike to hand seems a cracking idea to me HAHAHA.”) Furze, like Hobson, suddenly had sponsors eager to fund his work. He could now make a living on YouTube.
Here, Furze’s path diverges from Hobson’s, creating a sort of natural experiment with an unexpected result. Hobson parlayed his early success into rapid growth, with his budget soon ballooning to a quarter of a million dollars a month. Furze, by contrast, continued to conceive, film, and edit his videos almost entirely on his own, with his modest budget almost exclusively dedicated to the materials needed for his projects. His wife sometimes held a camera, and his friend Rick sometimes lent a hand with builds, but Furze did not hire any formal staff and worked primarily in a back-yard workshop and an old barn. (Hobson, who knows Furze, told me that he was shocked to learn that the barn, which gets very hot in the summer, isn’t even air-conditioned.)
In 2024, Hobson and his team published twenty-five videos that have attracted more than twenty-seven million total views. In the same period, Furze’s five videos, which he produced more or less by himself, have earned eighteen million total views. In addition to this content on his main channel, Furze also posted behind-the-scenes footage of his subterranean-garage project on a second channel called 2 Much ColinFurze. “Everybody went absolutely nuts for it,” he told me. These additional videos bring his total views in 2024 to forty-three million—much higher than Hobson’s number, generated with a fraction of the stress and expense.
For these two exercises in creative capitalism, bigger investment didn’t lead to better results. I asked Hobson and Furze what they thought was going on, and they both highlighted an unusual feature of media platforms on the Internet: the personal connection that creators establish with viewers. “When it was just out of my garage—even though it was a really nice garage—the content was a lot more relatable,” Hobson said. “People become such earnest fans, because they know you and are watching for you. Just because you can do a higher-production-value thing doesn’t mean you’ll succeed.” In this context, a low-tech setup can come across as more authentic. “How people describe the channel is that it’s like you’re in the shed with me,” Furze told me. “As soon as someone was with me, and the camera was moving . . . they knew it wasn’t just me.” (Some fans tell Furze that they’ve been watching him since they were kids, which, he said, makes him feel old.)
When Hobson scales up a project, his audience often grows, too—but not enough. “Our really big, out-there projects typically work,” he said. For one recent video, his team spent more than a year recreating a bulletproof suit worn by Keanu Reeves in several “John Wick” movies. It has generated more than twenty-three million views. Hobson can star in only so many videos, however. “I can’t create enough of those to cover our base expenses,” he said. “Unless I have a bunch of these queued up—which I don’t—it’s not really sustainable.”
Furze, by contrast, sometimes strategically keeps his projects modest. “Some of my best performing ideas have been the stupid, silliest ideas that have cost virtually nothing,” he said. He spent a couple of hundred dollars on making a life-size concrete Weeble, a toy that wobbles on a rounded, bottom-heavy base without falling over; a V.P.N. provider signed on as a sponsor and the video racked up ten million views. “If you can nail that every week or month, then you’re absolutely laughing,” Furze told me.
Furze’s solo success is a quirky challenge to the traditional narrative that survival requires continually growing, and that a small number of well-financed winners eventually eat most of the economic pie. He demonstrates that in certain corners of the creative economy an individual with minimal overhead can work on select attention-catching projects and earn a generous upper-middle-class income. Beyond this relatively modest scale of activity, however, the returns on additional investment rapidly diminish. As Hobson’s experience suggests, there’s no obvious path for a D.I.Y. video creator to turn his channel into a multimillion-dollar empire, even if he wants to. Furze seems to be maxing out the financial potential of his medium by staying small.
In the context of the media industry as a whole, the low-key success of indie YouTubers is unusual. As entertainment companies compete to amass viewers, budgets have ballooned: TV shows such as “Gotham” (Fox) and “Masters of the Air” (Apple TV+) spend hundreds of millions of dollars in production. One show, “Rings of Power” (Amazon Prime Video), cost a billion. Tellingly, when the all-star YouTuber Mr. Beast moved his online shtick to Amazon Prime, in the form of a ten-episode series called “Beast Games,” the streamer invested a hundred million dollars to produce a TV-worthy product. The movie industry also famously rewards capital-intensive blockbusters. Universal spent a hundred and fifty million just on the marketing for its fall hit, “Wicked.” Even the comparatively staid book-publishing industry relies on major investments in a few mega-best-sellers to achieve profitability. In 2022, reportedly only three hundred and twenty books sold more than fifty thousand copies, the approximate threshold required to earn a hundred thousand dollars in royalties.
On certain newer media platforms, however, Furze seems like an archetype rather than an exception. E-mail newsletter writers, podcasters, TikTok influencers, and OnlyFans stars follow similar principles to carve out a good living without the need for endless growth and investment. The fact that these formats rely on the Internet is not coincidental. A key element of their success—their ability to support an intimate connection between creators and a dedicated audience—may be inherently easier to achieve online. It’s this same element that is hard to scale up. It takes a long time to build a loyal audience and a lot of work to maintain it. And, because the Hobsons and Furzes of the world operate in idiosyncratic niches, there’s a limit to the total number of fans they can ultimately attract. Their model is better for builders of secret suburban garages than for old-fashioned entertainment companies seeking enormous profits.
