When Dan Hentschel, A 28-year-old YouTube comedian goes to make a video, puts his phone on the dashboard of his car, talks for up to 40 minutes without interruption, and then posts it.
“I don’t edit them,” he says of his videos. “The reason people enjoy this type of content is because it feels spontaneous, because it feels like someone is just talking to you.” Hentschel’s simple approach is paying off. In less than four months, he’s amassed more than 160,000 subscribers and 12 million combined views.
Hentschel represents a new breed of creators who have recently emerged, building a large audience by posting raw, unedited content with little or no editing. Fitness YouTuber Sam Sulick is perhaps the most famous unedited creator. He started uploading videos of himself working out in the gym without any cuts, commentary or editing last January, and in just a year, he’s amassed more than 3.5 million subscribers. Last spring, Davis Clark, a capital management executive at Citizens Bank in Boston, grew to nearly 730,000 followers on Instagram through unedited videos in which he simply shares his thoughts on life and business directly to the camera.
After years of drowning in so-called edited-for-preservation content, which features lots of enhanced graphics, bold text on the screen, sound effects and visual elements, audiences are moving towards simpler, unedited videos, giving these budding creators a boost.
“For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction,” says Brendan Gahan, co-founder and CEO of Creator Authority, an influencer marketing firm. Gahan says social media users are tired of the overstimulating, mind-numbing style of video, where graphics and sounds appear every 1.5 seconds. He says creators who aren’t edited build deeper relationships with their followers.
“Audiences are drawn to creators they feel they can relate to,” he says. “The unedited format feels more intimate. It’s like hanging out with your friend at the gym, going for a drive, or just hanging out at home. These unedited creators, in particular, mimic face-to-face communication, which creates a sense of intimacy. They talk directly to the camera as if they’re looking directly at you.”
Even YouTube’s biggest star, Mr. Beast, seems to recognize the shift. “In the past year, I’ve slowed down our videos, focused on storytelling, let scenes breathe, shouted less, focused on character, longer videos, etc. Our views have skyrocketed!” he posted on X in March. “My fellow YouTubers [let’s] “Get rid of the age of hyper-fast/hyper-stimulating content. It doesn’t even work.”
For creators, the change has been liberating. Joseph Araujo, a 20-year-old creator in Los Angeles with 840,000 followers on TikTok, says that since he recently stopped editing his videos, he’s been able to produce more content in a shorter amount of time, giving him a better chance of a single video going viral. “I had a moment where I was making edited videos on TikTok, almost like a mini-production,” he says. “But I realized, with so much content out there, and so many creators, it’s not really worth it to make highly edited videos. The time and effort it takes to edit doesn’t translate into views.”
Industry experts say unedited content is outperforming well-edited videos across Instagram, TikTok and YouTube. Adam Mascouri, who negotiates content partnerships and licensing with creators and runs the Instagram page @baai, which posts viral content, says he’s seen a surge in unedited content in the past two months. “The clips that perform best are the ones that don’t have text overlays, cuts or special effects,” he says. “They’re usually just continuous clips.”
Maskuri says 90 percent of the videos he posts to his main Instagram account, which has more than 1.4 million followers, are completely unedited. “These videos average 100,000 to 200,000 views,” he says. “The ones that are heavily edited, with camera cuts or text overlays, don’t perform as well. People want to see real things, especially now. It’s easier on the eyes, less cumbersome to consume. When there’s a lot of stuff going on on the screen at once, it can be hard to process.”
Many creators say Rolling Stone Adopting a no-editing approach not only saves them time, it saves them money. Matt Johansen, a cybersecurity expert and content creator in Austin, used to pay someone to edit large amounts of content for YouTube Shorts, TikTok, and Instagram.
The videos, which were analyses of the biggest hacks of the day, were edited in classic viral style, with lots of on-screen graphics, bright text, money sounds and flashing animations. But they failed to attract attention, so he decided to cut costs and release raw footage of himself talking to the camera in front of a green screen.
“I was like, ‘Hey, I’m actually in this industry.’ I’m not trying to be a fancy content creator, I’m just trying to talk about things that I know and care about,” he says. “Now, my process is: I open TikTok, point the front-facing camera at myself, give my thumbs up and down and talk. No post-processing at all.” The new approach has paid off. His videos have gone from less than 5,000 views to nearly tens of thousands of views on Instagram alone.
King Asante, a Gen Z content creator who covers pop culture and has 1.5 million followers on TikTok, says many young people find unedited content more relatable and trustworthy. He used to spend hours creating a single heavily edited TikTok video, setting up a studio, lighting, microphones, transferring his files to a laptop, and then editing. Now, he often records in his kitchen using just his phone.
Not only does it produce more uneditable content, it consumes it as well.[No-edit content] “It feels like a FaceTime call,” he says. “I feel like that’s what people want right now.”
Ashlyn Lepore Rossi, an educational content creator in San Diego who publishes content with little or no editing, says the no-editing trend is a direct response to the constant chaos of the internet these days — and that this next wave of no-editing content creators may finally bring some peace and calm to our timelines.
“People are overstimulated,” says Lepore Rossi. “Everyone is overwhelmed by all the social content we see all the time, and the world around us is on fire. Nobody needs a whole bunch of crazy graphics and things flashing on the screen. I’m just someone you can relate to.”
