Videos with titles like “What Happens When Shredder Vs The Strongest And Everything Else” and “Top 1000 Best Shredding Moments | Satisfying ASMR Compilation” feature gigantic hydraulic presses crushing vehicles or industrial sanders grinding domestic things into dust.
Creators of videos in which mundane objects like watermelons and children’s toys are destroyed in favor of more expensive ones like PlayStation 5 systems and a $200,000 sports car are finding themselves with a lot of disposable income because of the videos’ massive popularity.
At the time of writing, the Hydraulic Press Channel, managed by Lauri Vuohensilta, had 3.79 million subscribers. Vuohensilta’s channel, which he launched seven years ago, shows videos of him utilizing the industrial press at his family’s shop to show the effects of tonnes of pressure on various objects, such as sponges, rubber band balls, crayons, and even a real human tooth.
“It’s surprising how long the tires retain their air pressure when being crushed and deformed,” one reader’s comment on his channel read. “Something about casual destruction and the embrace of entropy is just… so alluring,” another wrote. “I mean — I like when hydraulic press makes lock go squish, hahaha.”
Films by Vuohensilta, such as one in which he tested if he could fold a piece of paper more than seven times using the press, can generate anywhere from 50,000 to 26 million views, and the creator told The Wall Street Journal that he received $650,000 in ad revenue from the videos last year.
You can see the entire process of folding a piece of paper with a hydraulic press more than seven times in the video shown below-
When contacted by Insider, Vuohensilta did not provide a comment right away. Jimmy Donaldson, better known as Mr. Beast on YouTube, made $54 million that year, more than any YouTuber in the platform’s history. Although Donaldson’s channel is not only dedicated to destruction like Vuohensilta’s, a recent video of him crushing a cherry red Lamborghini between a brilliantly striped hydraulic press garnered 107 million views.
It is unknown how much money he made from the film, although Donaldson has stated that he invests $8 million each month into making his lavish videos and advertising his enterprises. Insider’s request for comment from Donaldson and the Google representatives who own YouTube went unanswered.
Destruction of property for the sake of online notoriety is nothing new. Two years after the inception of the video hosting platform itself, the infomercial for BlendTec blenders titled “Will It Blend?” premiered and rapidly established the genre by putting its headline question to the test.
More than 16 years ago, Tom Dickson, CEO of BlendTec, became famous for his propensity to blend everything. There were clips showing the blender crushing a brand new $1,000 iPhone X and pulverising a can of Coca-Cola to prove the blender’s strength.
You can watch the entire process of combining Coke and chicken in the embedded YouTube video below:
According to a statistic by Producers Handbook, the average ad revenue per million views earned by creators who are paid to destroy objects on their channels is around $2,750. Some videos on popular channels like Vuohensilta and Donaldson can earn upwards of $65,000 in revenue.
If we assume that there are 100 such channels, each of which publishes five videos per month, and each of those videos receives ten million views, then the annual revenue for such channels is approximately $165,000,000. Some viewers may view the producers as wasteful or materialistic despite the fact that they earn hundreds of thousands of dollars by trashing commonplace goods for entertainment.
Carla Abdalla, a professor at Brazil’s Armando Alvares Penteado Foundation who specialises in consumer behaviour, told Wired, “When I ask digital influencers what their expertise is in, the answer is almost always ‘lifestyle.” “When I ask them which kind of lifestyle, they talk about the consumption of designer clothes, gourmet restaurants, high-tech gadgets, trips around the world, and so on. Their expertise is the consumption.” Many people can’t seem to tear themselves away from the videos, despite the widespread belief that they are pointless or overdone.
“There’s something in the human brain that says ‘oh my god, there’s so many of these things. There’s so much of this thing. I’ve got to see that,'” YouTuber Anthony Padilla said in a 2019 video criticizing so-called YouTube “junklords,” who make videos with unnecessarily massive quantities of items to get clicks.
“Watching someone waste a whole bunch of money doing something ridiculous with a whole bunch of things is fascinating.”
If you’re already on Twitter and you’d want to see more of our updates in your feed, then all you have to do is follow us!