On Jan. 1, 2014, at 4 p.m. local time, Tom Scott uploaded an 83-second video to YouTube.
It was an edutainment clip called There Are Special Crossings For Horses In Britain, and he wasn’t expecting it to get a significant response. As he explains it, he’d been “throwing stuff at the internet since 1999, and for many, many years, that stuff went almost nowhere.”
But the video did get a significant response.
Subscribe for daily Tubefilter Top Stories
He uploaded another one the very next day, talking about why there are so few helicopter crashes in London. Then, the next day, another, about how to make an orange peel flamethrower.
He soon collectively gave these videos a series name, Things You Might Not Know, and decided he would upload one every single week.
And, for the past 10 years, that’s what he’s done. He has covered hundreds of topics across dozens of interests and industries, and though some videos were a couple days late for his usual Monday posting, and some were “blatant filler” (his words, not ours) like the two-and-a-half-hour unedited raw cut of garlic bread flying in space that got almost 8 million views, he has never, ever missed a week.
Until now.
“It’s time to take a breather,” Scott says in his latest upload, called After ten years, it’s time to stop making videos. He uploaded it at exactly 4 p.m. on Jan. 1. “I can’t keep this up. This is my dream job and I have a lot of fun doing it. I know I’m incredibly lucky. But a dream job is still a job.”
Doing YouTube is “a job that keeps getting bigger and more complicated, and I am so tired,” he says. “There’s nothing in my life right now except work.”
After consulting with some fellow creators, Scott felt there were only two options for him: keep pushing his videos to be more and more bombastic to chase views, or scale back and pursue projects he’s passionate about, knowing it could cost him.
He chose the latter, and as of now, is no longer doing weekly uploads.
“I don’t know when or if I come back, but when I do, it won’t be weekly–at least not in this format, not here. This probably isn’t goodbye goodbye, like not forever,” he explains. He does, however, intend to start pursuing new projects that are “experimental and weird and can fail, because I miss doing stuff like that.”
“And when some fool comes along and says, ‘Oh, you fell off, this new stuff isn’t getting the views, is it?’ Yeah. Okay. That’s fine,” he says. “This project has worked, and it’s time to move on.”
Scott says he will continue to run his weekly podcast, Lateral, and will upload occasionally on his other channels.
He closes the video with a montage of his favorite moments from a decade of Things You Might Not Know–and with a flight where he’s harnessed to the underbelly of a helicopter, something he’d always wanted to try on the channel but “couldn’t find an excuse to do.”
