When YouTube Reactions Stop Being Polite And Start Getting Real

By Elizabeth De Luna


Like cats with strings, days at the zoo, and bedroom sing-alongs, reaction videos are about as old as YouTube itself. For the past 10 years, the genre has maintained a relatively consistent look and feel, even because the platform around it evolved into the second-largest site in the world. Right now, change usually be catching up with it. Slowly although surely, within the past two years, YouTube reaction videos have been taken over by the pros. Lawyers, doctors, plant experts, and folks of seemingly every other sort of occupation are reacting to videos related to their line of work. Aspire to watch a Wiccan react to a YouTuber becoming a witch for a day? You could. How about a magician critiquing beginner magic? Or a music producer swooning over the harmonies in "Bohemian Rhapsody?” Those are accessible, too.


Professional reactions aren’t feats of filmmaking, editing, or artistry. Alternatively, their crowning glory is having breathed new life into one of YouTube’s oldest and most consistent pillars of content. Intelligence confirms that professional reactions are having a moment: YouTube searches for videos with the term "react" in their title are the highest they’ve been since 2014 — the beginning point for accessible intelligence — and searches for videos with both "real” and “react" in their title (as in “Real Engineer reacts to The Big Bang Theory”) saw their biggest week in five years this past January.


Around the birth of YouTube, before video editing services were widely accessible, reaction videos were limited to house videos of children gleefully ripping open Christmas presents or reacting to The Scary Maze Game. As time went on, editing made it possible to superimpose videos on screen, alongside the reaction, allowing the viewer to watch them simultaneously.


For the most part, reaction videos on YouTube showed common people reacting to mainstream movies, television, viral videos, fails, and memes. Anyone could react to anything, no expertise needed. After awhile, some streams tried to set themselves apart with video titles like “dad reacts,” “couples react,” or perhaps "Black guy reacts.” The Fine Brothers, the pre-eminent pioneers of the react genre, were granted trademark registrations for "Kids React" in 2012 and "Teens React" and “Elders React” in 2013 before eventually spinning out “Adult,” “College Kid,” “YouTuber,” and “Celebrity” react series as well. The new wave of professional reaction videos have taken inspiration from those series titles, adding “real” or “expert” to an occupation as a way to legitimize their content, as in “real chef” or “dinosaur expert.”


All reaction videos, professional or not, tend to stick to the same common set-up. The reactor sits in front of a laptop computer or looks off-camera to a huge monitor, positioned to one side of the screen to let room for a video inlay in post-production. They press play and the reaction starts, with the audience at residence following along through that little video-inside-the-video. The reactor adds commentary, some days pausing to accomplish longer thoughts before moving on.


However where reactions by non-professionals are generally structurally loose and emotionally unbridled, pros take on a more constrained air of authority. They quibble over small specifics, and assert their expertise by recounting their own experience on the job. Their familiarity with the topic adds new dimensions to the viewing experience, which is especially efficient in giving new life to classic movies or television shows that have been etched into the pop culture zeitgeist.


It’s tough to pinpoint exactly any time reactions got professional, yet it was likely sometime in 2016. In November of that year, Wired uploaded a video that featured dialect coach Erik Singer analyzing accents in Hollywood films. The video, “Movie Accent Expert Breaks Down 32 Actors' Accents,” was a hit and Wired expanded the series to include four more videos with Singer, additionally to the reactions of other professionals like a lawyer, a hacker, and the CIA’s former Chief of Disguise. Since and then the format has absolutely blown up, with Buzzfeed, Glamour, SELF, New York Magazine, GQ, INSIDER, and multiple independent YouTube creators making their own videos of experts reacting to or reviewing scenes from television and movies.


It was a video from the Wired series, “Surgical Resident Breaks Down 49 Medical Scenes From Film & TV,” that instigated Dr. Mikhail "Mike" Varshavski D.O., Known to The world wide web and his patients as Doctor Mike, to imagine the reaction format for his channel. Doctor Mike started making videos on YouTube in April of 2017 out of agitation. In 2015, Buzzfeed had written up his Instagram profile, telling readers “You Really Need To be able to see This Hot Doctor And His Dog.” Right after that Doctor Mike says that “what seemed like 1,000 other outlets” wrote about him, also, fascinated by the “paradox of seeing a good-looking doctor who is also practicing in real life.” People named him “sexiest doctor alive.” This exposure helped him attract more than one million Instagram followers, however he felt that his attempts to post “meaningful content” about medicine on the platform were futile. He saw YouTube because the correct venue for educating a young audience.


Over the course of Doctor Mike’s first year on YouTube, his videos about medical myths why as well as how to get the correct quantity of Vitamin D had attracted more than 380,000 subscribers to his channel. Still, he wanted to reach more people. While watching Wired’s video, a reaction struck him as an excellent idea. He had seen the success of a video he made comparing his life as a doctor to the portrayal of doctors on TV and determined to lean in to mainstream media’s depiction of him as “real-life Dr. McDreamy,” the fictional doctor from Grey’s Anatomy. In April 2018, he uploaded “Real Doctor Reacts to GREY'S ANATOMY,” which showed him watching the TV drama for the opening time, pausing to allocate his thoughts on whenever it was stretching the truth. The video was an immediate hit, with a couple of million views in the initial few days, and his follow-up videos reacting to The Good Doctor and House M.D. were identically well-received. It was the spark his channel needed; much less than one month later, he hit one million subscribers.


Inevitably, not each person imagined he was for real. Doctor Mike sees 30-40 patients a week moreover to writing for the American Academy of Family member Physicians and making typical appearances on the Fox Corporation Network and various morning shows. Despite all this, he is still asked if he really practices medicine. Brad Mondo, a hairdresser with a popular series called “Hairdresser Reacts,” has fielded similar doubts from viewers. He no longer works daily in a salon, although has seen strangers on Reddit talk about looking up his license to verify that he is qualified to be decorating hair. That strikes him as foolish. “What could be the point of me faking it?” He muses.


By the time Mondo hit upon his “hairdresser reacts” series, he had been creating content on YouTube on-and-off for about 10 years. As a teen, he “was obsessed with YouTube,” he says, however was never able to routinely attract a crowd. Plus, he wanted to be a hairdresser, so he stopped uploading, went to school, and worked at salon for a number of years. If he returned to YouTube in 2017, he still struggled to find his footing. As a teen, Mondo had been a fan of the Fine Brothers’ React videos and recalled that one of his preference creators, Elena Genevinne, had crudely bleached her hair on camera a few many years ago. On a whim, Mondo sat down to film his reaction to Genevinne’s video and posted it to YouTube with an innocuous title he can no longer recall. It blew up. Number of a day or two later, to improve the video’s already impressive traffic, he changed its name to “HAIRDRESSER REACTS TO AWFUL DIY HAIR COLOR! [Sic]”


The series changed his life. In the two years since posting that first video, his channel has gained more than 2.7 million subscribers and he right now owns his own hair care brand, XMONDO HAIR. He has diversified his channel content to include makeovers and reviews, nevertheless his reactions are more popular than ever, regularly pulling in between one and two million views each, despite the fact that they follow the same generic format because the original. Sure, Mondo has upgraded his bedroom to a shiny studio set-up and is noticeably more comfortable and charismatic on screen, yet he is still sitting at a desk and reacting to a hair care fail. And viewers still eat it up, more than 100 reactions later. He thinks people even upload their own hair care fail videos to YouTube in the hopes he is going to will acquire them and include them in a video. Throughout a recent reaction, he was visibly proud once a young woman trying to dye her hair a neon yellow-green shouted him out. “Brad Mondo is crying,” she giggled as she applied dye to her roots. “Aww, hi Amy!” He smiled, “You’re in one of my videos now!”


Reactions from professionals can also add new layers of interest to pop culture touchstones we already love. Doctor Mike says people click on his video because they're fans of Grey’s Anatomy, nevertheless just be sticking around for his commentary. It’s one of the reasons he doesn’t “want to let the hot doctor thing go” although. “I can wear a flashy suit, be funny, be flirty, do something that’s going to get people watching [because] it means that I can be straightforward with the medical statistics, because I myself am the scandal.” At the end of the day, despite the elaborate breakdowns of medical terminology he provides while reacting, “it doesn’t feel like you’re learning,” he says. And, for Doctor Mike, that’s sort of the point.


The honesty that Dr. Mike claims to bring to his videos may be the most compelling component of professional reactions. Experts supply a satisfying palate-cleanser to the without attention proliferation of suggestions online. In a "post-truth" world, there’s some relief in sitting down to watch a reaction based case in point and experience and grounded in authority. At the same time, reactions help us feel more connected to experiences we all share. A 2011 New York Times article summarizing the merits of reaction videos mentioned that watching them not only allowed us to “vicariously recaptur[e]” the “primary experience” of our own reaction to something, yet also reminded us of “the comforting universality of human nature.”


In a now-deleted video from 2016, the Fine Brothers mentioned that they hoped that reactions they produced on their streams would “live on forever as a time capsule [that] people can look back on to be able to see what various generations were saying about the culture and issues of our time.” It’s a grand vision for genre a little bit over a decade old, nevertheless even Mondo is thinking that far ahead. He says he is happy to give his audience what they want for as long as he can. “I'll be milking Hairdresser Reacts up until the day I die!"