I watch a lot of YouTube. This is not a confession so much as a statement of fact that probably applies to a significant portion of anyone reading this. But among the many rabbit holes YouTube has to offer — tutorials, deep dives, video essays, cooking channels I will never actually learn from — the category that has held my attention the longest is one that sounds, on the surface, almost embarrassingly simple.

People watching things.

That’s it. That’s the whole genre. Someone sits down, presses play on a movie or a song or a TV episode, and a camera records their face while it happens. And yet I keep coming back to it. I’ve been doing it for years, and I don’t think I’m going to stop anytime soon. So I figured it was worth taking a minute to actually think through why.

A Little History First

The reaction video, as a format, has been around longer than most people probably realize. If you want to trace it back to television, Japanese variety shows were doing something similar as far back as the early 1980s, with what’s called the “waipu” format — a small box superimposed in the corner of the screen showing a celebrity reacting to footage as it played. It’s not so different from what YouTubers are doing today; the medium just changed.

On YouTube specifically, the format started gaining traction in the late 2000s and exploded in the early 2010s. The biggest organized push came from Benny and Rafi Fine, better known as the Fine Brothers. They launched their Kids React series on October 16, 2010, with a group of children responding to viral videos of the moment. The format took off. By 2011, Teens React was up and running. By 2012, they had Elders React and YouTubers React. Kids React even won an Emmy at the 39th Daytime Creative Arts Emmy Awards for Best Viral Video Series, which was a legitimizing moment for a format that a lot of people still weren’t sure deserved to be taken seriously.

I came into reaction videos through the Fine Brothers, same as a lot of people my age. And for a while, their content was genuinely enjoyable. But things got complicated in early 2016 when they announced React World, a program through which they intended to license the format of their shows to other creators — combined with an effort to trademark the word “React” itself. The backlash was swift and significant. Critics pointed out that the Fine Brothers did not invent the concept of filming people’s reactions to things, and the optics of trying to own a word as broad as “React” were not great. Ultimately, they backed down, filing paperwork to rescind all their trademark applications and discontinue the program. But for me, and for a lot of viewers, the trust was already damaged. I quietly moved on to other channels.

What the Format Actually Does Well

Before I get into who I’m watching these days, I want to make a case for why reaction videos are worth your time at all, because I think the dismissive take — that they’re lazy content, a shortcut, people making money off other people’s work — misses what the format actually accomplishes when it’s done well.

There’s something neuroscience has to say about this, actually. The neuroscientist Lisa Aziz-Zadeh has pointed to mirror neurons as one reason watching someone else’s reaction to something can feel almost participatory. We share in the experience of the person we’re watching. That might sound like a lot of academic scaffolding to explain why you’re watching someone’s face while a song plays, but I think it gets at something real. When you watch a reactor genuinely encounter something for the first time — really encounter it, not perform encountering it — there’s a kind of secondhand wonder that happens. You get to feel the discovery again.

And here’s the thing that I’ve been honest about before: I’m probably not going to have kids. Which means I’m probably never going to get to sit next to my own child and watch their face the first time the twist lands in The Empire Strikes Back, or when they finally understand why everyone always talks about the drum fill in “In the Air Tonight.” That specific joy — showing someone you love a thing you love and watching it hit them — I don’t expect to have it the traditional way.

Reaction videos fill a version of that void. When I watch a reactor hear something for the first time that I’ve known and loved for years, there’s a genuinely emotional experience attached to it. They’re standing in for a version of connection I don’t have another obvious path to. That might be the most honest thing I’ve said about why I keep watching, and I think it’s worth saying plainly.

There’s also just the pure entertainment of it. Good reactors bring personality, humor, and genuine curiosity. The best ones make you feel like you’re watching alongside a friend rather than performing for a camera. That distinction matters. The ones who are performing — who hit every beat a little too precisely, who know exactly when to gasp — those you can spot pretty quickly. The ones worth watching are the ones who seem to forget the camera is there.

The Channels I Actually Watch

I’ve rotated through a lot of channels over the years. The ones I keep coming back to right now are a pretty specific crew, and each one brings something a little different.

Popcorn in Bed is Cassie’s channel, and her setup is exactly what it sounds like: she’s in bed, watching movies, and you’re along for the ride. There’s a coziness to the format that works really well. She’s not trying to be a critic or an analyst. She’s just watching, and her reactions tend to be warm and genuine. It’s the YouTube equivalent of a friend texting you their thoughts as a movie plays.

Holden and Jen Hardman are a couple who watch together, which adds a dynamic that solo reactors don’t have. There’s something fun about watching two people experience the same thing simultaneously and having different reactions to it. The conversation between them as things unfold becomes part of the content in a way that feels natural rather than staged.

CinePals leans a little more into the film appreciation angle. If you’re watching reaction content because you love movies and you want to watch someone engage thoughtfully with them, this is a good one. There’s genuine enthusiasm for cinema here, and it shows.

And then there’s NikkiLu, which is my personal favorite by a significant margin. NikkiLu watches alongside her husband, who is almost always off-screen — you hear him occasionally, you see his arm maybe, but he remains a presence without being a main character. The result is that NikkiLu carries the reactions herself, and she’s wonderful at it. She’s funny without being performative about it. She gets emotionally invested without it feeling calculated. Her taste is solid across genres. And there’s a warmth to her channel that I genuinely look forward to, which is not something I say lightly about a YouTube creator.

Here’s the thing about NikkiLu specifically: I’m fairly certain that if I knew her and her perpetually off-screen husband in real life, they would absolutely be among my closest friends. I realize that says a lot about both my parasocial tendencies and my taste in people. I’ll take it.

The Copyright Question

One thing worth addressing, because it comes up every time reaction videos come up in conversation: the question of copyright and whether reactors are doing something they’re technically not supposed to be doing.

It’s genuinely complicated. In the United States, whether a reaction video constitutes fair use depends on a number of factors — how much of the original content is shown, whether it’s been transformed in some meaningful way, and whether it competes with the market for the original. Courts haven’t drawn a clean, bright line here, and the legal landscape continues to evolve. In China, the People’s Court of Yangpu District, Shanghai ruled in 2023 that reaction videos on the platform Bilibili related to a specific TV series did not qualify as fair use, ordering the platform to pay 350,000 yuan in compensation. Whether that has any bearing on what happens in other legal systems is a separate question entirely.

What I know as a practical matter is that most reactors manage this by limiting how much of a film or episode they show on YouTube — often covering their camera during key scenes or cutting away at specific moments — and by offering full, unedited reactions through Patreon for paying supporters. I’ve thought, more than once, about becoming a Patreon subscriber to one or two channels. I’ve also thought about starting my own reaction channel as a side project, since I do spend a lot of time watching movies anyway. Neither of those things has happened yet, but I’m not ruling them out.

What It Comes Down To

I know there’s a version of this argument where reaction videos represent some kind of cultural shallowness — people watching other people watch things, with the original content getting further and further away in a chain of mediated experience. One commentator described it as an infinite regression of screens watching screens. I get that critique. I even think it’s partially valid.

But I also think it misses something. At its best, the reaction video format is about shared experience. It’s about the moment when someone discovers something you love and you get to watch that happen in real time. It’s about the universality of a strong reaction — the dropped jaw, the instinctive “wait, what?” — that crosses backgrounds and generations and makes you feel briefly, genuinely connected to another person.

And honestly? Sometimes you just want to watch someone hear the drum break in “In the Air Tonight” for the first time. When Tim and Fred Williams posted their reaction to that song in July 2020, it climbed back to No. 2 on the iTunes chart. A 1981 Phil Collins song, returned to relevance by two 22-year-old twins in Gary, Indiana, reacting to a drum fill that was almost 40 years old. That’s the format doing exactly what it does best.

I’ll keep watching.

What about you? Are you a reaction video fan, or do you think the whole format is just a little too meta? Drop a comment and let me know who you’re watching.

Feature Photo by Andrea Piacquadio