Ryder: Hello and welcome to another episode of A Brief History. Today’s episode: The Vlogbrothers. Ready, set, go!

January 1st 2007, two nerdy brothers, John and Hank Green launched a video project called Brotherhood 2.0. Inspired by Ze Franck, Brotherhood 2.0 was an ambitious… ambitious? Ambitious! Brotherhood 2.0 was an ambitious online video project in which the Green brothers would give up all forms of textual communication for a year. Their only source of communication for this year would be their daily YouTube videos. The younger Green brother, Hank, helped garner plenty of attention to this project through his now classic video/song about Harry Potter entitled ‘Accio Deathly Hallows’.

After the Brotherhood 2.0 year came to a close, the brothers chose to continue making video blogs and (garbled noises). The brothers chose to continue making video blogs and as the quantity of their videos increased, so did the quantity of their viewers and their inside jokes. Seriously, there are too many inside jokes in Nerdfighteria, but who’s complaining.

With their new found popularity, the Vlogbrothers started multiple new projects like the Nerdfighter community, the Nerdfighter Blurbing Book Club and most interesting of all, the Project for Awesome. The Project for Awesome was a day in which a bunch of people would hack the YouTube algorithms to make all the videos on the front page of the site be about charity instead of cats and Miley Cyrus. It was a huge success and has become an annual YouTube event raising hundreds of thousands of dollars for different charitable causes.

The Vlogbrothers have become incredibly popular and influential on the Tubes, inspiring countless young vloggers everywhere including this guy whose voice you’re hearing right now. They gained some serious accolades in 2010 when they created and organized the first ever VidCon which, as the name would imply, is like a Comic Con but for YouTubers.

Over the past couple of years, the brothers Green have started multiple other channels including Hanks Channel, Hankgames, their educational channels SciShow and Crash Course and Hank’s brain crack come true, the Lizzie Bennett Diaries which, for those of you who don’t know, is the story of Pride and Prejudice told through the medium of video blogging.

Since the beginning of their YouTube career, Hank along with his video making and his C.E.O.-ing of the company EcoGeek, has co-founded a record label, released three albums of his own, one of which chartered on billboard and has just been doing all the things! And John Green has written multiple New York Times bestselling books such as Looking for Alaska and more recently The Fault in Our Stars. A few months ago, the Vlogbrothers performed to a sold out Carnegie Hall in what they called ‘An evening of awesome’. This event included special guests like The Mountain Goats and freaking Neil Gaiman. It was a perfect way to celebrate six years of Nerdfighteria.

As of today, the Vlogbrothers have uploaded over 1000 videos to their main channel alone and they show no signs of stopping and let’s hope they never do. I’ll see you in a week guys, DFTBA!

(Credits)

John Darnielle: ‘People were mean to you
But I always thought you were cool
Clicking down the concrete hallways
In your spiked heels
Back in high school

You deserved better than you got
Someone's got to say it sometime because it's true
People should have told you you were awesome
Instead of taking advantage of you’