Perhaps Thunderf00t has become a grifter after all?

I have been writing a few blog posts about the youtuber who goes by the nickname Thunderf00t, who is one of the longest-active youtubers with a significant amount of subscribers, having been there since almost the very beginning of the platform, and still uploading videos semi-regularly.

He became originally famous for his science content, particularly his videos debunking scam crowdfunding and other similar projects that promised physically impossible things.

Then at some point, he became a notable anti-feminist, one of the first ones on the platform, and a very notorious one. He had a long beef with the part of the world-wide (although primarily American) atheist community that had been completely invaded and taken over by radical far-leftist activists set on aggressively pushing their leftist political agenda onto the atheist community.

He still created videos on the topic of science and crowdfunding scams while doing that. However, at some point, for some reason, he suddenly became an "anti-anti-feminist". Not a feminist, but not an anti-feminist either, loudly and prominently denouncing the "anti-feminists" crowd. To my memory he created maybe one or two slightly anti-feminist videos after that, but then stopped completely, and concentrated solely on the science-based videos.

Then, one day, he made a video critical of Elon Musk and some project of his. At first it seemed to be just another "this project is ridiculous and physically impossible" debunking video, and to a large extent it was.

Then he made another such video. And another. And another. Quite quickly, in less than a year, the proportion of anti-Musk videos, compared to videos not related to him, started to rapidly increase until they not only became the majority, but after just a year or two more his channel has become 100% an anti-Musk channel.

Indeed, for a couple of years now 100% of the videos he has uploaded are about Elon Musk, and that's it. That's his entire channel now. He has not made a single video about any other topic for at least a year or two now.

In my previous blog post about this subject I wrote:

"I would love to give him the benefit of the doubt and accuse him of actually being a grifter. In other words, that he is not making so many anti-Musk videos because he actually hates the guy so much and is actually so obsessed with him, but solely because of the views and thus ad revenue. In other words, that he's just doing it for the money. That would make him dishonest and an opportunist, but not insane.

However, while I would love to give him the benefit of the doubt like that, I have the hunch that it's actually not the case. Having watched him for over 15 years now, I don't get the impression that he is such a grifter. I think he is being genuine. I really think that he is not well in the head."

However, after a while I am actually tempted to change my opinion.

It could actually well be that Thunderf00t has indeed become a grifter. Maybe he noticed that he could just pump anti-Musk video after anti-Musk video, which are very easy to make (after all, he is just repeating the same dozen points over and over in every single video), and that's an easy 300k views per video.

On YouTube, getting 300k views on a monetized video isn't nothing. The estimates vary, but I believe the current estimates are that you get about 1-2 cents of ad revenue per view (that does not have ads blocked). If even half of those views are not ad-blocked, that's an easy 150k-300k cents, ie. 1.5-3 thousand dollars of ad revenue per video. That's like a good month's salary just for making and uploading one video.

I am actually starting to suspect that, in fact, Thunderf00t has actually become a grifter. In other words, he has just noticed that "hey, if I just keep making an anti-Musk video every month or two, that's a good 3k of revenue, for doing a few hours of work."

I suspect that he actually doesn't care about Musk all that much. He's just getting a nice salary for each video he does, using the same old formula, and uploads to YouTube. Easy money for a few hours of work. No need to go through the trouble of creating any other type of video. Just rehash the same dozen of old points that he has been repeating for years, do some lazy-ass editing (which has genuinely become worse and worse over the years), and that's it: A month's salary just like that.

In other word, maybe Thunderf00t is a grifter after all.

Either way, I think this tells more about his viewers than he himself.