Tom Scott Stops Making Weekly Videos After 10 Years

After posting a video (almost always an elaborate, well-produced and well-researched one) to his YouTube channel every week for ten years, Tom Scott is stepping back for a break.

I’ve been throwing stuff at the internet since 1999. And for many, many years, that stuff went almost nowhere. I had occasional bits of success, but could never make any of them last long-term. I remember thinking, so many times during all those years… will any of this stuff I’m making ever work?

Well, this did.

I didn’t know that, back when I was filming the first videos for the series that was then called Things You Might Not Know, I just held out my phone at arm’s length and talked into it for 90 seconds with almost no research! I really don’t like those videos now. But the first of them was published exactly ten years before this one. To the minute. 4pm, January 1st, 2014.

For the first month of that format, I was publishing a video almost every day, and then I settled down: one video a week. Mostly on location, near windswept infrastructure, although there’s computer science and linguistics in there too, and occasional green-screen animated videos. I experimented with other formats on other days, but the rule I set myself was: Monday, 4pm, something interesting.

Incredible. Scott has one of the few Weird Internet Careers that I am truly envious of — it just looks like so much fun getting to do all of that stuff and then telling people all about it.

Congratulations, Tom Scott — I hereby induct you into the Internet Hall of Fame! 👏 👏 👏 👏

P.S. Was the long explanatory walk-n-talk an homage to James Burke’s famous “perfectly timed clip” from Connections? Honest to god, I thought Scott was going to stop at the end of the video, turn, and watch a rocket take off. (via waxy)

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