Everything Ines Told Me About the Webvideopreis

A friend named Ines had just come back from the Webvideopreis ceremony in Düsseldorf—Germany’s answer to a YouTube awards show—and over dinner she spent an hour telling me about the channels, the creators, the whole ecosystem, while I sat there with essentially no frame of reference for anything she was describing. My YouTube diet had always been American by default: Polygon, VICE, the PBS Idea Channel. Names like Gronkh or LeFloid or Sarazar meant nothing to me, and the only German creator I could vaguely place was Coldmirror, and only from her Harry Potter parodies, which feel older than the modern internet.

So I spent the weekend clicking through channels, trying to fill the gap. My going-in assumption was that German YouTube was mostly a joyless copy shop—local kids doing dim impressions of American personalities, all the aesthetic with none of the spark. That assumption wasn’t entirely wrong. But it wasn’t the whole picture either.

Rocket Beans TV I’d already encountered and liked—gaming and pop culture commentary done with actual personality and some sense of what makes a channel worth returning to. BeHaind held up better than expected on a proper watch. Kelly MissesVlog is funny in a way I can only describe as: what the fuck? Which I mean as a compliment. The results were patchy overall, but patchy is better than the wasteland I’d imagined.

There’s something slightly absurd about having a blind spot this large in the German-language corner of a platform you use every day. YouTube had become what television used to be—the place where actual personalities built actual audiences—and I’d been scrolling past the entire domestic branch of it for years. Better late than never. Though I’m not sure I believe that.