How 2 Brothers Turned a YouTube Experiment Into a Charitable Mission

Six years ago, brothers Hank and John Green took their relationship to a new level by ceasing all textual communication for one year.

On Jan. 1, 2007, Hank posted the first video blog to the VlogBrothers YouTube channel, and it was John's brotherly duty to respond the following day. They called their new video-based relationship "Brotherhood 2.0."

YouTube wasn't a daily part of Internet users lives at that time, but the brothers were eager to create a project together — even when they weren't earning a lot of pageviews.

"It was partially sort of this dawning realization that cool things were being done in video online, and we had the ability to try it out for ourselves and see what would happen," Hank tells Mashable.

Hank, who now works in online video production, got his start through the first VlogBrother video, and John, who is a New York Times bestselling author, caught the attention of his fan base.

Now, the loyal followers of the VlogBrothers are known as nerdfighters, but although they might be a little nerdy, they aren't violent.

"A nerdfighter is a person who, instead of being made out of, like, bones and skin and tissue, is made entirely of awesome," John says in the video above.

"Awesome" is a key word for the brothers. Along with making funny videos about Helen Hunt, eating toilet paper and going goth, they created Project For Awesome.

After becoming fairly successful during the first year of Brotherhood 2.0, the VlogBrothers wanted to create a project to do good, based on their growing YouTube following. They asked people to replace the thumbnails of their YouTube videos with the Nerdfighter Power Project for Awesome thumbnail, and to begin conversations around philanthropy or charity organizations.

"YouTube was sort of a weird place that was fairly easy to sort of game the algorithms. And the way that the thumbnails worked and all of the different lists were important for getting views," Hank says. "It was sort of frowned upon to game the system, but we thought, 'What if we gamed the system for good?'"

After rounding up a few fellow YouTube friends, they harnessed their audiences to make videos about charity while "sort of" hacking YouTube's algorithms into promoting social good.

"The first year was very successful, and it's only gotten bigger from there," Hank says. "Now we actually make money and have options, and we try and organize people. It has grown and grown and grown into quite a beast, which is really exciting."

At the end of Brotherhood 2.0, the VlogBrothers decided to continue posting videos on a bi-weekly basis. As if posting hundreds of laugh-inducing videos that reach millions of viewers isn't enough, they also launched an educational channel in 2011.

Crash Course, which is funded by YouTube's Original Channel Initiative, is a platform where the brothers teach traditional high-level high school and low-level college history and science courses.

"It's a totally unique challenge to try and hit curriculum points and make the information that is required for the AP exam interesting and compelling," Hank says. "We also don't get to force them by law to come watch our programming, which schools get to do, so we have to make it interesting, which is really a challenge, but I think it's been really successful."

 

The future of the VlogBrothers correlates with the change of culture, online videos and the Internet. But the brothers also pay close attention to what excites the community.

Hank recently vlogged about gay marriage — a post he worried would offend people or encourage hateful comments. However, the video actually resulted in high ratings.

"That's really exciting," Hank says. "It's stuff like that where I feel like we're making the world a better place, and resonating with how people feel about new cultural ideas, and really being a part of the cultural evolution toward a better way of understanding each other and the world."

Hank is grateful for the "ultimate first world problem," also known as having too many opportunities on his plate, but above all, he and John wish to instill one resounding message in nerdfighters: "Don't forget to be awesome."

Images courtesy of John Green GIFs, Gage Skidmore