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Tom Scott (YouTuber)

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Thomas Scott (born 1984 or 1985) is an English YouTuber and web developer. On his self-titled YouTube channel, Scott creates educational videos across a range of topics including history, geography, linguistics, science, and technology. As of August 2024, his five YouTube channels have collectively gained over 7.8 million subscribers[a] and 1.87 billion views.[b][2]

Tom Scott
Scott in 2016
Personal information
Born
Thomas Scott

1984 or 1985 (age 38–39)
Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, England
EducationUniversity of York
OccupationYouTuber
Websitetomscott.com
YouTube information
Channel
Years active2006–present
Genres
  • Education
  • science
  • comedy
Subscribers
  • 6.44 million (Tom Scott)
  • 254 thousand (Matt and Tom)
  • 832 thousand (Tom Scott Plus)
  • 162 thousand (The Technical Difficulties)
  • 118 thousand (Lateral with Tom Scott)
[1]
Total views
  • 1.77 billion (Tom Scott)
  • 45.59 million (Tom Scott Plus)
  • 49.71 million (Matt and Tom)
  • 3.61 million (The Technical Difficulties)
  • 16.29 million (Lateral with Tom Scott)
[1]
100,000 subscribers2014
1,000,000 subscribers2017
Last updated: 14 October 2024

Born in Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, Scott first came to media attention as a student, creating a parody of a governmental website. He created his channel in 2006, but only began to enjoy mainstream popularity after 2014, when he began his education series "Things You Might Not Know". Scott produces and uploads educational videos to the channel across a range of topics including linguistics, technology, geography, history and science. His output has included series such as Language Files (which focuses on linguistics and languages), The Basics (computing and IT), Amazing Places (geographical locations), and Things You Might Not Know. Typically his videos take the form of relatively short videos on interesting items, with many having received external coverage including colours unable to be recorded accurately on video,[3] compact hovercraft,[4] and how bear-resistant infrastructure is tested.[5]

Scott has also collaborated with other YouTubers.[6] He announced that he was taking a break from his YouTube work starting January 2024, after a decade of consistent weekly uploads.[7]

Early life

 
Scott as "Mad Cap'n Tom" in 2010

Thomas Scott[8][9][10] was born in 1984 or 1985[8][11] in Mansfield, Nottinghamshire,[8] and graduated from the University of York with a degree in linguistics and the English language.[8][12] He later earned a Master of Arts in educational studies.[13]

In 2004, when Scott was 19 and at university, he produced a website parodying the British government's "Preparing for Emergencies" website,[14] including a section explaining what to do in case of a zombie apocalypse. This resulted in the Cabinet Office demanding the site be deleted, to which Scott sent a "polite response declining to take down the site".[9][10][15]

In 2009, Scott became the official UK organiser of International Talk Like a Pirate Day,[16] and was subsequently nominated by his friends to run for student president at the University of York Students' Union, under the guise of his Talk Like a Pirate Day persona, "Mad Cap'n Tom Scott". Despite running as a joke, he gained almost 3,000 votes, won the election, and served as the organisation's 48th president.[17] When running for Parliament in the Cities of London and Westminster constituency as a joke candidate in 2010, Scott used the character – at the time, he described his chances of winning in the safe Conservative seat of Westminster as "Somewhere 'twixt a snowball's chance in hell an' zero."[18] He received 84 votes (0.2% of the total), finishing in last place behind Pirate Party UK.[19]

Career

Early career

In 2012 Scott was a presenter in the Sky 1 series Gadget Geeks alongside Colin Furze and Creative Technologist Charles Yarnold, where he was responsible for the creation of software solutions.[20] He also worked creating Flash games for the Daily Mirror's UsVsTh3m website. These included a viral "North-O-Meter" which judged its players' northernness.[21]

Scott received coverage in 2013 for "Actual Facebook Graph Searches", a Tumblr site which exposed a potentially embarrassing and dangerous collection of public Facebook data using Facebook's Graph Search, such as showing men in Tehran who have said that they were "interested in men" or "single women who live nearby and are interested in men and like getting drunk".[22]

YouTube career

Scott produces and uploads educational videos to the channel across a range of topics including linguistics, technology, geography, history and science. His work has included series including the languages and linguistics focussed Language Files, computing and information technology based The Basics, Amazing Places, and Things You Might Not Know. Typically his videos take the form of relatively[vague] short videos on interesting items, with many having received external coverage[dubious – discuss] including colours unable to be recorded accurately on video,[3] compact hovercraft,[4] and how bear-resistant infrastructure is tested.[5] Scott has also collaborated with other YouTubers, including challenging YouTuber Jordan Harrod to create a deepfake version of him for $100.[6]

Scott announced that he was taking a break from his YouTube work starting 1 January 2024, after a decade of consistent weekly uploads. "I am so tired. There's nothing in my life right now except work" he explained, although it was his "dream job". Scott believed YouTube made it impossible to reduce the quality of his videos. Thus he saw his only other option as expanding further and hiring staff, forcing him to "become a manager", which he deemed beyond his skills. Soon after, he noted that other YouTubers with similar long-form content were also reducing or stepping away as views and ad-revenue fall. Scott predicted "difficult years" ahead given the rise of "junk zero-effort generative AI channels" and competing video options.[7][23][24]

In 2022, Scott won the Streamy Award for Learning and Education.[25] He was nominated in the same category in 2023.[26]

The Technical Difficulties

Scott is a member of the four-person comedy troupe, The Technical Difficulties, with whom he hosted a radio show of the same name on University Radio York which won the Kevin Greening award at the Student Radio Awards in 2008.[27] The group consists of Scott, Matt Gray, Gary Brannan and Chris Joel.[28] The group has created several podcasts and video series over the years, including:[29]

Series Duration Ref.
The Reverse Trivia Podcast 2010–2014 [30]
Citation Needed 2014–2018 [31]
Two of These People Are Lying 2019–2021 [32]
Adventures 2022–2023 [33]
Reverse Trivia 2024– [34]

Lateral with Tom Scott

A weekly comedy podcast taking the format of a game show where Scott and three contestants take turns asking each other difficult questions that require lateral thinking to answer, which was adapted from a 2018 six-episode game show on Scott's main YouTube channel that was also co-developed with David Bodycombe.[35][36]

Scott has continued the podcast into 2024 despite indefinitely pausing his weekly YouTube release schedule.[37]

Other work

 
Scott at dConstruct in 2014

In 2014, Scott co-founded Emojli along with Matt Gray. It was a parody emoji-only social network inspired by Yo. Emojli was described by Salon as "an inside joke turned into reality".[38][39] It closed in July 2015 after it became too expensive to maintain.[40] In September 2015, Scott created a full-size emoji keyboard out of fourteen standard keyboards to type every standard Unicode emoji.[41]

Other web apps Scott has created include "Evil", a web app that revealed the phone numbers of Facebook users;[42][43] "Tweleted", which showed posts deleted from Twitter;[44] "What's Osama bin Watchin?", which mashed together an image of Osama bin Laden with YouTube Internet memes;[45] "Parliament WikiEdits", a Twitter bot that tweets whenever an IP address from the Houses of Parliament edited Wikipedia, which inspired a wave of similar accounts including CongressEdits;[46] and "Klouchebag", a satire of the social media rankings site Klout.[47][48]

In December 2022, Scott appeared in two episodes of Christmas University Challenge as captain of the University of York team.[49]

Electoral history

General election 2010: Cities of London and Westminster[50]
Party Candidate Votes % ±%
Conservative Mark Field 19,264 52.2 +3.9
Labour Dave Rowntree 8,188 22.2 −3.1
Liberal Democrats Naomi Smith 7,574 20.5 +2.0
Green Derek Chase 778 2.1 −2.2
UKIP Paul Weston 664 1.8 +0.7
English Democrat Frank Roseman 191 0.5 New
Independent Dennis Delderfield 98 0.3 New
Pirate Jack Nunn 90 0.2 New
Independent Mad Cap'n Tom (Scott)[51] 84 0.2 New
Majority 11,076 30.0 +7.8
Turnout 36,931 55.5 +4.4
Registered electors 66,849
Conservative hold Swing +3.5

Notes

  1. ^ Subscribers, broken down by channel:
    • 6.44 million (Tom Scott)
    • 255 thousand (Matt and Tom)
    • 832 thousand (Tom Scott Plus)
    • 159 thousand (The Technical Difficulties)
    • 115 thousand (Lateral with Tom Scott)
  2. ^ Views, broken down by channel:
    • 1.766 billion (Tom Scott)
    • 48.86 million (Tom Scott Plus)
    • 44.17 million (Matt and Tom)
    • 3.17 million (The Technical Difficulties)
    • 14.73 million (Lateral with Tom Scott)

References

  1. ^ a b "About Tom Scott". YouTube.
  2. ^ "Tom Scott's YouTube Stats (Summary Profile) – Social Blade Stats". Social Blade. Archived from the original on 9 June 2023. Retrieved 30 December 2022.
    "Matt and Tom's YouTube Stats (Summary Profile) – Social Blade Stats". Social Blade. Archived from the original on 8 March 2023. Retrieved 30 December 2022.
    "Tom Scott plus's YouTube Stats (Summary Profile) – Social Blade Stats". Social Blade. Archived from the original on 30 December 2022. Retrieved 30 December 2022.
    "The Technical Difficulties's YouTube Stats (Summary Profile) – Social Blade Stats". Social Blade. Archived from the original on 30 December 2022. Retrieved 30 December 2022.
    "Lateral with Tom Scott's YouTube Stats (Summary Profile) – Social Blade Stats". Social Blade. Archived from the original on 30 December 2022. Retrieved 30 December 2022.
  3. ^ a b "Here's why you can't see what the world's 'pinkest pink' looks like on-screen". The Irish News. 19 July 2017. Archived from the original on 13 December 2017. Retrieved 18 May 2020.
  4. ^ a b "Inventor's Hovercraft Goes Viral After YouTuber Takes a Ride". Yahoo News. 18 April 2023. Retrieved 1 January 2024.
  5. ^ a b Baitinger, Brooke (25 July 2023). "Grizzly bear takes 'selfie' — inside its mouth — while playing with GoPro in Montana". Idaho Statesman. Retrieved 1 January 2024.
  6. ^ a b Haysom, Sam (19 January 2021). "YouTuber challenges scientist to create an AI version of him for $100". Mashable. Archived from the original on 12 January 2022. Retrieved 7 March 2021.
  7. ^ a b Hern, Alex (5 January 2024). "'I am so tired': YouTuber Tom Scott ends Things You Might Not Know". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 5 January 2024.
  8. ^ a b c d "Student battles government over spoof site". The Guardian. Press Association. 28 July 2004. ISSN 0261-3077. Archived from the original on 4 September 2023. Retrieved 4 September 2023.
  9. ^ a b "Spoof website will stay online". BBC News. 29 July 2004. Archived from the original on 27 August 2018. Retrieved 27 August 2018.
  10. ^ a b Sherriff, Lucy (27 July 2004). "Emergency advice parody misses Gov UK funny bone". The Register. Archived from the original on 5 November 2011. Retrieved 16 January 2012.
  11. ^ Scott, Thomas (27 August 2018). That Time I Got In Trouble With The Government (Video). Event occurs at 1:12–1:47. Retrieved 15 June 2024. When I was 19, the British government mailed a leaflet out to every home in the country. [...] That sort of joke was still new and exciting in 2004.
  12. ^ "Spoof website will stay online". BBC News. 29 July 2004. Archived from the original on 27 August 2018. Retrieved 4 September 2023.
  13. ^ BBC Two – Christmas University Challenge, Christmas 2022, Durham University v University of York. BBC. 21 December 2022. Event occurs at 4:55. Archived from the original on 4 December 2022. Retrieved 4 December 2022. I graduated in English language and linguistics, and then an MA in educational studies in the early 2000s.
  14. ^ "Preparing for Emergencies – Homepage". preparingforemergencies.co.uk. Archived from the original on 15 May 2021. Retrieved 25 May 2021.
  15. ^ Scott, Tom (30 July 2004). "When zombies attack". The Guardian. Archived from the original on 14 September 2014. Retrieved 16 January 2012.
  16. ^ "Talk Like A Pirate Day UK Headquarters". yarr.org.uk. Archived from the original on 21 December 2020. Retrieved 18 September 2018.
  17. ^ Grimshaw, Gerran (10 March 2008). "'Pirate' becomes new student union president". York Press. Archived from the original on 5 October 2012. Retrieved 16 January 2012.
  18. ^ McDermott, Kerry (29 April 2010). "England's fringe candidates fight for votes". BBC News. Archived from the original on 26 August 2017. Retrieved 16 January 2012.
  19. ^ "Election Results 2010: Cities of London and Westminster". BBC News. Archived from the original on 23 August 2017. Retrieved 16 January 2012.
  20. ^ Barnett, Emma (15 January 2012). "My life as one of Sky 1's Gadget Geeks". The Sunday Telegraph. ISSN 0307-1235. OCLC 49632006. Archived from the original on 15 January 2012. Retrieved 16 January 2012.
  21. ^ Burrell, Ian (30 May 2021). "How to heat hamsters humanely while setting the web alight thanks to the power of YouTube". inews.co.uk. Retrieved 8 July 2024.
  22. ^ Garside, Juliette (23 January 2013). "Facebook's Graph Search tool causes increasing privacy concerns". The Guardian. Archived from the original on 8 February 2014. Retrieved 25 January 2013.
  23. ^ Shaukat, Rahman (4 January 2024). "Tom Scott Is Done Releasing Weekly YouTube Videos". Game Rant. Retrieved 16 June 2024.
  24. ^ Mather, Katie (3 January 2024). "Who is Tom Scott? YouTuber's 'retirement' announcement raises concerns about creator burnout". AOL. Retrieved 16 June 2024.
  25. ^ Chan, J. Clara (5 December 2022). "YouTube Streamy Awards: MrBeast Takes Top Creator; Full List of Winners". The Hollywood Reporter. Archived from the original on 6 December 2022. Retrieved 30 December 2022.
  26. ^ Brant, Brian (27 August 2023). "Streamy Awards 2023: Complete Winners List". People. Archived from the original on 5 September 2023. Retrieved 28 August 2023.
  27. ^ Barnard, Mike. "Student radio talent celebrated at the Student Radio Awards 2008". Milkround. Archived from the original on 2 May 2012. Retrieved 21 November 2012.
  28. ^ Scott, Thomas; Gray, Matthew James Bartholomew; Brannan, Gary; Joel, Christopher (21 March 2020). Tech Dif Make Ice Cream - Will It Soft Serve? (Video). Matt and Tom. Event occurs at 0:29. Retrieved 10 July 2024 – via YouTube. Mr Christopher Joel
  29. ^ "The Technical Difficulties". techdif.co.uk. Retrieved 1 January 2024.
  30. ^ "The Technical Difficulties". Apple Podcasts. Retrieved 6 October 2024.
  31. ^ "Citation Needed, from the Technical Difficulties". YouTube. Retrieved 6 October 2024.
  32. ^ "Two Of These People Are Lying". YouTube. Retrieved 6 October 2024.
  33. ^ "We've been on Adventures". YouTube. Retrieved 6 October 2024.
  34. ^ "Reverse Trivia, from the Technical Difficulties". YouTube. Retrieved 10 October 2024.
  35. ^ "Lateral with Tom Scott on Apple Podcasts". Apple Podcasts. 11 August 2023. Archived from the original on 14 August 2023. Retrieved 14 August 2023.
  36. ^ Gutelle, Sam (25 May 2018). "YouTuber Tom Scott Pits Creators Against One Another In Game Show Based Around Lateral Thinking". Tubefilter. Archived from the original on 6 March 2020. Retrieved 14 August 2023.
  37. ^ Trahan, Philip (1 July 2023). "Tom Scott announces indefinite YouTube break after 10 years of uploads". Dexerto. Archived from the original on 14 August 2023. Retrieved 14 August 2023.
  38. ^ Gray, Sarah (2 July 2014). "An emoji-only social network: Ridiculous ... or brilliant?". Salon. Archived from the original on 30 July 2014. Retrieved 28 July 2014.
  39. ^ Solon, Olivia (30 June 2014). "Emoji-only social network Emojli is the new Yo". Wired UK. Archived from the original on 31 August 2014. Retrieved 17 September 2017.
  40. ^ "Investors tried to throw cash at this startup that was actually just a joke". Business Insider. Archived from the original on 2 May 2012. Retrieved 29 August 2016.
  41. ^ Kentish, Francesca (21 September 2015). "Guy creates emoji keyboard so we may never use words again". Metro. Archived from the original on 8 July 2020. Retrieved 4 April 2020.
  42. ^ Butcher, Mike (24 May 2010). ""Evil" app shows how Facebook users make their mobile numbers public". TechCrunch. Archived from the original on 19 January 2012. Retrieved 16 January 2012.
  43. ^ Arthur, Charles (6 October 2010). "Is your private phone number on Facebook? Probably. And so are your friends'". The Guardian. Archived from the original on 15 February 2014. Retrieved 16 January 2012.
  44. ^ Fletcher, Dan (20 July 2009). "Tweleted: Making Mischief on Twitter". Time Business. Archived from the original on 15 January 2012. Retrieved 16 January 2012.
  45. ^ Gross, Doug (9 May 2011). "Make Osama watch 'Friday,' suffer other indignities". CNN Tech. Archived from the original on 18 January 2012. Retrieved 16 January 2012.
  46. ^ Newman, Lily Hay (14 July 2014). "Here's How to Know What Edits Governments Are Making on Wikipedia". Slate. Archived from the original on 7 July 2020. Retrieved 13 April 2020.
  47. ^ Pagels, Jim (27 April 2012). "Who Are the Real Klouchebags?". Slate. Archived from the original on 2 May 2012. Retrieved 2 May 2012.
  48. ^ Kosner, Anthony (30 April 2012). "Hate Klout? Tom Scott Mixes Meaningless Metrics with Feminine Hygiene in Response". Forbes. Archived from the original on 2 May 2012. Retrieved 2 May 2012.
  49. ^ Nunn, Catriona (12 January 2023). "Meeting the Challenge of 'Christmas University Challenge'". Alumni Voices. Archived from the original on 17 January 2023. Retrieved 18 January 2023.
  50. ^ "Election Data 2010". Electoral Calculus. Archived from the original on 26 July 2013. Retrieved 17 October 2015.
  51. ^ Rentoul, John (15 January 2015). "Al Murray is not alone: From Katie Price's free breast implants to the Pirate Party's tax-free rum… Britain's most famous election outsiders". The Independent. Retrieved 10 October 2024.
 
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