What Is Going On With Men and YouTube?

By now, we’ve all seen it: our partners, brothers, friends, hunched over their phones, eyes locked in, earbuds half-falling out, laughing at a video you have absolutely zero interest in. They’re not watching the match, they’re watching highlights of the match. Or a tiny house tour. Or a three-hour podcast about why millennials are ruining the Roman Empire.

The other day I saw another post on X that read, “me & my plus one” and it was just a picture of a man and a woman watching YouTube together. The post had over 50K likes. The men were whopping and cheering in the comment section – as if someone had finally understood them.

So naturally, I began asking every man around me if he watches YouTube. And of course, I was met with a disgusted look, like I’d asked them if they breathe air to live.

This isn’t new, of course. But it is interesting. It’s 2025, and somehow YouTube has become the last remaining sacred space for male attention spans. While the rest of the internet atomises into 10-second clips and AI-generated soullessness, the men—God bless them—are still glued to this chunky digital monolith like it’s a warm, glowing VHS tape from their childhood.

But why?

The Cathedral of Unstructured Obsession

“I love that it’s unstructured,” says Prannay, Esquire's Copy Editor who seems genuinely surprised by the platform every time he opens it. “It’s category-free. I keep expecting to be surprised.” He watches sports highlights, interviews, tiny home tours, gadgets being unboxed, Criterion closet clips. None of these things go together, and that’s kind of the point. YouTube rewards attention without commitment. You can learn about Kantian ethics and three minutes later watch a raccoon steal a slice of pizza. There’s freedom in that kind of chaos. And a strange kind of comfort.

In a world where men are told to be more intentional, YouTube is the last place where they can drift. Float. Click on things without purpose. Open up five tabs of Neil deGrasse Tyson talking about black holes.

And make no mistake—this is emotional. Nostalgic, even. “It was the television for the internet,” says Manav, an entrepreneur who grew up on YouTube and still sounds oddly loyal to it. “No high budget production. Just people telling stories, teaching things, being dumb for fun. You grew up with the same creators. They felt relatable. They weren’t celebrities, just… guys.” There’s an intimacy to it that Instagram doesn’t have. It’s the difference between watching your friend drunkenly pitch a tent and seeing a Vogue shoot about “glamping.” One’s ridiculously fun. The other’s boring.

For many men, YouTube has replaced the best friend, the mentor, and, occasionally, the therapist. For instance, Aaron Marino—one of YouTube’s longest-running “manfluencers”—has been teaching men how to be men for almost two decades now. Want to walk like a badass? He’s got you. Want a haircut that flatters your weirdly shaped skull? Done. Want a skincare routine? He’s yelling at you about it right now in HD.

Vansh, another YouTube disciple, puts it this way: “It’s not genre-specific. It’s both user-generated and professional. And it’s informational. There’s community. You get fact-checked.” Which is a very TED Talk way of saying: it feels useful. Men like tools. YouTube feels like a tool.

Where other platforms deliver the finished product—curated, polished, brand-ready—YouTube still lets you watch someone build a log cabin alone in a forest with nothing but a dog and a GoPro. It’s real, in the way your dad thinks reality TV is real. But also, sometimes, it’s better than real. It’s aspirational without being intimidating. Personal without being invasive.

“I literally don’t need anything else,” says Saurav, our digital editor. “Music, movies, comedy clips, news, sports, podcasts. Old movie scenes. Random trending things. All of it.”

And that’s probably the most succinct explanation we’ll get. For men, YouTube is both background noise and existential crutch. It’s their lounge, their barbershop, their classroom, their dopamine drip.

It’s not just distraction, in case you were thinking it is.

It’s All In There

There’s a strange comfort in the way men turn to YouTube like it’s a long-lost friend. They don’t binge it, the way people do Netflix. They inhabit it. They drift into it like they’re entering a warm bath of low-key male curiosity: a podcast here, a city walking tour there, a video essay on the rise and fall of Blockbuster somewhere in between.

Also, in a world where men are constantly told to express themselves—but also to chill out, but also to toughen up, but also to open up emotionally, but also don’t be cringe—YouTube is the one place that asks nothing of them except attention. And then quietly offers a reward: a new skill, a fresh obsession, a reminder that someone, somewhere, is also awake at 2:43am, wondering if aliens built the pyramids.

So no, it’s not just “some random stuff.” It’s the last place where men still learn things. Still ask questions. Still get to be curious without anyone calling them soft or stupid. That counts for something.