At nearly 20 years old, Vlogbrothers has proven its longevity. Hank Green is using it to take risks and keep things weird.
Jul 29, 2026 [[read-time]] minute read
Listen to article
If you want to understand why fans love Hank Green, look no further than the community-run counter Days Since Hank Green Last Started a New Thing. The ticker rarely makes it far (as of writing this, it’s at 13 days.)
During his nearly two decades on YouTube, Hank has been an author, entrepreneur, inventor, science educator, app store mogul, consistently choosing creative risk over playing things safe.
We caught up with Hank at OpenSauce—an annual convention focused on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics in the San Francisco Bay Area—to talk about the mindset that’s driven him to keep experimenting and make bolder choices than even his most passionate fans could have predicted.
You recently encouraged creators to not hesitate to intentionally shrink their audience. That sounds counterintuitive on YouTube. When did you know that was the right choice for Vlogbrothers?
Hank: My brother John wrote the book The Fault in Our Stars and there was a time right after the movie came out where our YouTube channel just exploded in popularity. It felt like, suddenly, we had a very different audience and they were reacting to our content in ways we didn't expect.
After that moment—which was very exciting and fun—we realized: we want the audience we want. That's not to say that any of the people who came in after from the movie weren’t right for the YouTube channel, but it felt like some of them weren’t, and we decided we weren’t going to adapt our channel for a new crowd. We chose to keep making videos for the people we’d always been making them for.
We had a period of time for maybe six months where we titled every video on Vlogbrothers a line from the Smash Mouth song "All Star.” Applying that constraint to yourself is not how you get the most views on YouTube, but it was hilarious.
Vlogbrothers really is not trying to reach the most people. It is trying to create a cohesive community. And you don't create a cohesive community by getting the most people every time. More than that, not every video is supposed to be a one out of 10. If you make a video that is about creating a deeper relationship with your community, it's not gonna be a home run because it's not doing that work. It's doing a different kind of work. If you just let that one number define whether a video is succeeding or failing, then you are not going to have the same staying power.
Does that focus on depth explain why your audience shows up so strongly for real-world efforts—like charity fundraising or live events?
Hank: Absolutely. It infects everything.
The thing about YouTube is, if you make a video that's not that sticky, it doesn't punish you as much as some other platforms. It can still be seen by a lot of people. If a tenth of usual is 30,000 people, that’s a lot of fricking people! It seems small because we think in percentages, but you have to think in absolutes.
There’s a narrative that YouTube is the new Hollywood—the idea that independent online creation is the primary driver of modern culture. Do you agree with that sentiment?
Hank: Yes. No. It's not the new Hollywood because it's a brand-new thing. Hollywood is built on induced scarcity. There are only so many movie screens in America, so you can only have so many movies come out and screen for so long. On YouTube, there is zero scarcity. Anybody can post anything. There are no gatekeepers.
Sometimes people ask, ‘Why isn't there a Grammys for YouTube?’ Well, because there's no scarcity. Legacy media industries required physical scarcity—only so many slots at the record store or bands on the radio spectrum. Removing that scarcity makes online video a completely different medium.
It doesn't recreate Hollywood, which is great. Hollywood was never going to greenlight Technology Connections. They were never going to feature a guy getting a million views for taking apart toasters. That wasn't going to happen on HGTV.
I’ve never wanted to go do something that somebody else already did. I want to do my own thing here. That’s what most YouTubers are doing—blazing their own paths rather than trying to follow the tracks of their heroes.
When you decide to take a big swing—like launching an app, starting the Good Store, or shifting Complexly to a non-profit—how do you evaluate that risk?
Hank: I look at the concept of one-way doors versus two-way doors.
Launching an app is a two-way door. If it fails, or if it’s just too much work to maintain, you can unlaunch it. People might be sad, but you can walk back through that door. If it doesn't catch on, you just look at it as two weeks of learning.
Turning a business into a non-profit, however, is a one-way door. You cannot come back from that choice. When you run an organization with 88 employees, figuring out what a non-profit shift means for your projects and what the IRS thinks about it is a massive risk. We thought about that decision for years before pulling the trigger.
But when it comes to the creator side—just me, or me and John—we are completely comfortable messing around. Doing interesting things is just much more fun than doing the expected thing. We’ve been on YouTube for almost 20 years. We have people in our audience who can name the exact video we uploaded the day they were born.
There is an immense freedom that comes with that longevity. It’s almost like the freedom of old age, where the old guys are completely fine farting in public. That is how I feel about Vlogbrothers now. We can mess up. If people think we're not valuable because we messed up, what do I care? I don't care about that.
Is it easier to take those risks now that you have size and resources, or was it easier back when you were a small channel with nothing to lose?
Hank: I think it's easier to take risks now. We don't have a massive, dedicated staff infrastructure depending on Vlogbrothers. If we suddenly get 30% fewer views, it affects nothing. That gives so much freedom. It might hurt my ego a little bit, but we’ve been through the ups and downs before.
Audiences can feel that safety and confidence, and it's appealing to watch. It's compelling to follow a creator who says, ‘I don't know what curveball the algorithm or the audience is going to throw at me next, but we're in it for whatever it is.’
What kind of experimentation are you seeing from other creators right now that’s inspiring you?
Hank: I love the people who are still innovating genre. When we started, formats like Let’s Plays, vlogs, and haul videos were brand-new concepts. Sometimes I think there can’t possibly be any creativity left to uncover, and then I’ll see a group of young creators making something that is half adventure comedy, half sketch show, and half YouTube challenge all at once. I’m left wondering: Who are you? Where did you come from? Why is this so funny?
Personally, my own consumption algorithm is very ‘46-year-old man.’ It's mostly informational utility (Vox, Today, Explained, and SpaceX updates) basically the digital equivalent of a dad reading the newspaper. But I'm still aware of how much weird stuff is being built out there.
I do wish we saw even more of that experimentation across the platform. Because YouTube has become a mature, established industry, a lot of creators are just running standardized businesses. I get it—I run businesses on YouTube, too. But most creators are creatives at heart. I want them to feel safe enough, and connected enough with their peers, to keep doing weird stuff.