Tonight’s Wild Scoop: YouTube’s 3-Hour Video Essays Are the New Streaming Blockbusters!

You heard right—move over TikTok, because creators like Hbomberguy, Folding Ideas, Leftist Cooks, and ContraPoints are dropping three-hour deep dives into Twilight, conspiracy theories, and gold-plated cultural critiques—and the internet can’t stop watching.

Hbomberguy's near four-hour epic on plagiarism raked in 38 million views—that’s more than the number of Brits who watched Princess Diana’s funeral live on the BBC!!

These aren’t your average explainer videos. We're talking about costume changes, evidence boards, philosophical theory, and enough production effort to make a mini-documentary—but on YouTube.

• ContraPoints reinvented video essays with elaborate aesthetics and six costume changes in a single video exploring conspiracy thinking. The Guardian+1
• Folding Ideas, run by Dan Olson, has earned praise for tackling media criticism, conspiracies, and NFTs—filling a void that broadcasters won’t touch. The GuardianWikipedia
• Leftist Cooks bring philosophy, art, and social science mixology—with literal hat changes to embody the nuance of their ideas. The Guardian+1

Despite Trendwatchers saying attention spans are nuked—TikTok’s 47-second scroll era—these long-form masterpieces are flourishing. It’s a “golden age” of video essays, fueled by Patreon and creator-first platforms like Nebula.

Even media icon Adam Curtis says if he were starting now, he’d become a YouTuber—it’s “the last wild west” of content production.

These creators are part of what started as a niche named “BreadTube,” born from progressive responses to GamerGate and internet contrarianism . They’ve since grown into cultural heavyweights:

• Hbomberguy (Harry Brewis) crafts highly researched, comedic long-form essays with clutch investigative journalism chops and even addresses plagiarism head-on.
• ContraPoints (Natalie Wynn), mixing philosophy and showmanship to explore gender, politics, and identity through curated aesthetics

On Twitter and Reddit, reactions are through the roof:

• “Giant YouTube essays are the antidote to brain rot.”
• “Three hours on conspiracy with standout production? I’m bingeing that like it’s Grey’s Anatomy.”
  Everyone’s tagging friends, debating theories—these are cultural events, not clicks.

Will this trend push broadcast networks to step up, or will it remain a YouTube-only spectacle? Will these creators move exclusively to Nebula or Patreon to escape changing ad algorithms? And which creator is about to drop the next multi-hour jaw-dropper?

Grab your popcorn. The biggest content shift you’ve never known about is here.