What is the YouTube New Wave?
The internet can be a nightmare. A flashy, attention-grabbing, vapid void of content. And, far from making people content, it demands more and more attention until it’s all-consuming.
But it doesn’t have to be this way.
The internet is ours to shape. It is what we make it—and we can make it a place for art, community, and authentic storytelling.
The YouTube New Wave is a movement to do just that: to make the internet a better place by creating more meaningful, thoughtful, and singular videos on YouTube.
But this story doesn’t begin with a group of top YouTube creators, nor does it begin at YouTube’s San Bruno Headquarters—instead, the New Wave found its roots in the backwoods of Montana. There, four internet friends met for the first time, all with a shared vision for a better internet. Three years and 4,000 videos later, the YouTube New Wave has transformed the landscape of online content.
But why? What made a small group of young creators think they could change a platform as vast and saturated as YouTube?
I. A Better Internet
Image shot by Ethan Tran | Base Camp: Redwoods
The internet has reshaped the fabric of modern culture and community. Its explosive growth, particularly the rapid rise of social media platforms, has created new opportunities, issues, and avenues of connection.
In 2020, lockdowns and social distancing across the globe brought even more of everyday life onto the internet. Combined with the continued expansion of internet access, consumption of online content reached an all-time high in 2020 and has continued to climb.
As the internet’s reach and relevance have skyrocketed, online platforms like YouTube have increasingly become recognized as the potential foundation of a profitable career, or even a digital media empire.
As more online creators started making a living from their work, a new term was coined—the creator economy. A 21st century industry, built on the work of creators making content for platforms like YouTube.
With such great potential for audience and revenue growth—and an abundance of analytics to inform creators of exactly how to optimize their content for maximum reach and profitability—certain metrics began to take precedence. On YouTube, click-through rate (CTR) and watch time became dominant topics of creator conversation. Getting viewers to click on thumbnails, and retaining their attention for as long as possible, were the goals of every creator vying for views. In the early days of YouTube, creators made videos as acts of self-expression or artistic experimentation. There wasn’t an established roadmap to a career on the platform.
But as certain creators began to explode in popularity, building careers and businesses simply by posting videos online, others began to follow in their footsteps. What resulted was the spread of certain kinds of videos—broadly appealing, sensationalized, and formulaic. Editing styles fed into the dwindling attention spans of viewers, creating a vicious cycle of ever-increasing spectacle and artificiality. Thumbnails and titles toed the line of clickbait, often stepping over. One of the most prominent examples of YouTube success—whose influence has been both positive and negative—is MrBeast. With over 200 million subscribers, regularly breaking YouTube views records, the MrBeast style of you’ll-never-believe-this thumbnails and titles, fast-paced editing, and broad appeal has spawned innumerable imitators, leading to what some have called the “MrBeastification of YouTube.”
But the game played by most of MrBeast’s copycats can’t be won. The pursuit of algorithm optimization has no end—and while pursuing views at all costs may inflate a creator’s pocketbook, it won’t make the internet a better place. It can do just the opposite. Much research has been done in recent years about the effect of consuming online content. In a very literal sense, it’s addictive—like empty calories, most videos on YouTube leave you wanting more.
For those who’ve grown up with the internet, this problem is even worse. Gen Z spends more time online than any other generation. For some, they’ve been disillusioned by the easily consumable, inauthentic, and ultimately meaningless content flooding their online world. The more optimistic among these young people see a better path forward.
Simon Kim was one of them. In 2020, he gained a following online by creating positive mental health videos—slower-paced, more thoughtful content than most of what the platform had to offer.
After finding a few creators with a similar desire to create meaningful content—including Max Reisinger, who made videos about an optimistic way of life, and Ryan Ng, a film school dropout who told stories with an artistic touch on YouTube—Simon reached out to connect. Through a Discord server, the group discussed their shared passion for storytelling. They had a desire to create videos that took more inspiration from films than trending YouTube content.
But they were just a small group of creators in a sea of content churned out by veritable media giants—the MrBeasts of the world. How could they possibly change the internet for the better?
When the group booked an Airbnb in the backwoods of Montana in 2021, they had no such plan. But one month later, intentionally or not, they’d started a movement to do just that.
II. The Wholesome House
From left to right: Naren, Tanner Ray, Zachary Salter, Aidan Gallagher, Ryan Ng, Simon Kim, Max Reisinger, Mathias, Natalie Lynn
Connecting with other creators in person can be transformative.
This small group of internet friends—who’d never met in person—rented a cabin in Montana to live together for a month, almost on a whim. It was dubbed the Wholesome House, after the social handle of the group’s instigator, @wholesomesimon. Simon, Max, Ryan, and fellow YouTube filmmaker Tanner Ray lived in the cabin for a few weeks, later joined by more creators including Natalie Lynn and Aidan Gallagher.
The Wholesome House was the antithesis of the typical content house. As the creator economy took off, ‘content houses’—where online influencers shared extravagant mansions in places like LA to create more content and go viral together—popped up left and right. Many ended with groups broken up, and with creators screwed over by managers or burned out.
This rustic cabin in the woods, quiet and secluded from society, was something entirely different.
In the month the group spent there, they would talk late into the night about storytelling, art, filmmaking, and how to create a space for meaningful videos in a world of hyper-sensationalized content.
On one of these late nights, Ryan—the resident film history buff—brought up the French New Wave.
The French New Wave was a movement among filmmakers in mid-20th century France who sought to rebel against the status quo, creating films with new artistic styles and narratives. New Wave films often had a documentary quality, blending both realism and subjectivity. These films were places for artistic expression, where a filmmaker could take time to tell a meaningful story without yielding to contemporary norms. They dealt with societal issues and explored complex themes with more nuance, and often ambiguity, than typical films of the era.
The members of the Wholesome House had a similar intent behind their videos—telling stories with authenticity about real-world issues and meaningful ideas. They wanted to challenge the status quo, too.
The group believed in putting storytelling above optimizing for an algorithm, impact over views, depth over width. The YouTube algorithm had, for many creators, become an enigmatic god to please, sacrificing artistic integrity in the hopes of gaining more views and subscribers. The widespread obsession over analytics had led to an overriding sameness, a lack of authenticity and artistry. These creators wanted to be fully themselves, to create unique videos that evoke emotion and create change.
The group’s mission was the 21st-century equivalent of the French New Wave. Their vision for YouTube was what the French New Wave’s was for filmmaking.
So what better to call this burgeoning movement than… the YouTube New Wave?
III. The New Wave
It had humble beginnings. The members of the Wholesome House group started using the hashtag #youtubenewwave on their videos, sometimes including the name as a title card like the opening credits of a film—“The YouTube New Wave presents…” The message wasn’t shouted from the rooftops; it was rarely mentioned directly at all.
But it didn’t need to be. It didn’t take long for videos from other creators to appear with the #youtubenewwave hashtag.
The movement began to spread, first to a loosely connected group of like-minded creators, some of whom had visited the Wholesome House during that month in Montana. Tanner Ray (Wicked Stew), Cameron Clayton, Aaron Clemens, Natalie Lynn, and Aidan Gallagher (Valspire Family) were among the earliest, creating videos aligned with the YouTube New Wave ethos of meaningful, singular storytelling.
In Montana, when Simon, Max, Ryan, and Tanner had dreamt of a better internet, there was little proof that this idea of an alternative kind of content was sustainable. It wasn’t guaranteed that making these kinds of videos could build a significant audience or a career—maybe hyper-sensationalized content was the only way to succeed on YouTube.
But it didn’t take long for that to be proven wrong. This authentic, artistic style of content could succeed. Natalie Lynn’s “Borderless” series, for instance, gained millions of views—with no flashy thumbnails, clickbait titles, or hyperactive editing. Cumulatively, the original members of the Wholesome House gained hundreds of thousands of subscribers in 2021 alone.
With views and subscribers came wider attention. The YouTube New Wave was no longer a small group of creators with an idealistic dream—it was a movement, real and growing, that started to be recognized and talked about. After its inception in 2021, the YouTube New Wave gained momentum and visibility in 2022 and 2023. Colin and Samir, leaders in the creator economy space on YouTube, brought greater attention to the YouTube New Wave in 2023—the main topic of the first physical edition of their newsletter The Publish Press was the YouTube New Wave, with New Wave creator Natalie Lynn featured on the cover.
This wider attention added to the building momentum of the YouTube New Wave. People wanted to watch this different approach to YouTube—and not just watch, but join in.
These videos felt like a breath of fresh air in an ever more homogenous and uninspired online media landscape. If typical YouTube fare was fast food, then the YouTube New Wave was fruits and vegetables—layered, nourishing, healthy.
The hashtag #youtubenewwave began to be adopted by creators outside the original group. Young creators made videos documenting what it’s like to grow up in the 21st century, examining societal issues, and exploring ideas about life and creativity. The subjects are wide-ranging—the YouTube New Wave is defined not by a specific style or type of video, but by an approach to making videos. A more thoughtful, expressive, artistic way of creating. Far from being a trend or a template to emulate, the YouTube New Wave fosters unique, different videos that allow creators to express what makes them, and thereby their art, singular.
Now, there are over 4,000 videos with the hashtag #youtubenewwave.
The YouTube New Wave is encouraging the creation of more meaningful, original, and artistic content. Not jumping on trends or following a formula, but listening to one’s own artistic voice. To try things that might not work—because that’s how innovation happens. It’s inspiring the next generation of artists to create fully as themselves, not imitating what’s popular or surrendering to the dictates of fickle algorithms.
The internet can be a nightmare. Or it can be a place to share meaningful art, to build community, to encourage positivity. The YouTube New Wave, from its origins in a log cabin in the woods to the present, is a movement to make the internet a better place, one video at a time.
