YouTube’s Hydraulic Press Channel Takes Off

The biggest YouTube success story of the week comes from Finland. It is there we find a lone man with a powerful hydraulic press and a desire to crush puny objects within his machine’s unstoppable vise grip. The result is the Hydraulic Press Channel, which hosted its first video last October but took off after being shared on Reddit on March 15th.

In each video on the Hydraulic Press Channel, the faceless narrator, puts a new item into his press and squeezes the life out of it. In the channel’s biggest hit so far, the narrator uses his press to respond to a common urban legend that says you can’t fold a piece of paper in half eight times. He gets explosive results.

A later video featuring a ballooning hockey puck shows us the staying power of the Hydraulic Press Channel. After all, there are so many objects to crush. The videos here have a similar appeal to Will It Blend? and The Slow Mo Guys, but with more unflinching machinery and an excitable Eastern European host to boot. They’ve drawn a big audience, too. In the week after its coming out party on Reddit, the Hydraulic Press Channel pulled in more than 175,000 new subscribers. That’s a just reward for a creator who executed a fresh idea in an entertaining fashion.