The Laptop Boyfriends Can’t Stop Watching YouTube in Bed
Young men are consuming YouTube videos while they sleep, eat, work, rest, cook, bathe, and poop.
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Johnny Gaffney is having a nightmare: He is in prison. A bunch of other inmates—skinheads from the Aryan Brotherhood—are stabbing him as retribution for ratting them out to the guards.
He jolts awake. Where is this coming from? Why is a 38-year-old New York comedian dreaming about a race war behind bars? Then he notices: He has once again fallen asleep watching a YouTube video about surviving prison as a government informant.
This situation is not unusual for Gaffney. Most nights, he passes out to what he calls “male-centric true crime” on YouTube. “There’s a thriving ecosystem of crime, men doing crime, regaling war stories of their crime, success and failures and adventures and misadventures,” he says. “I will be falling asleep to that shit.”
If you are a man or know one intimately, Gaffney’s story may sound familiar. (It does to me: My drugs of choice are motorized Lego cars being tested on obstacle courses and Savile Row bespoke suit fittings.) Increasingly, friends and partners have noticed just how much time the guys in their lives spend watching YouTube. While they sleep, eat, work, rest, cook, bathe, and poop, men are watching YouTube. And we just can’t seem to stop.
YouTube launched in 2005 after its founders realized there was no way to rewatch the Janet Jackson–Justin Timberlake Super Bowl incident. Two decades later, YouTube is the most-watched video provider on televisions in the US, surpassing Netflix and Amazon Prime. With an estimated annual revenue of $52 billion in 2024, it is second only to Disney among entertainment companies. These days, the platform legitimately challenges the major TV networks for live-sports viewership, especially since it obtained lucrative exclusive rights for certain NFL games this season, and in late December, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced that the Oscars, which have aired on ABC since 1976, will exclusively stream on the platform starting in 2029. But for all of YouTube’s newfound business bonafides, it’s the niche, rabbit-holeable content—the four-hour ASMR deep dives on the Roman Empire, for example—that keeps us coming back.
