You know that feeling you get when you learn something that blows your mind, something new, something that perhaps you didn’t even think to ask about? That’s our goal with every Vox video: We want to help you understand the world in a visually clear, creative, and hopefully beautiful way.
If that sounds like a mission you support, and you love our videos, then we ask that you consider joining the Vox Video Lab, our brand-new membership program on YouTube that will help us give you even more ambitious explainer videos and series.
Why are we doing this? The core reason is pretty simple: Our videos take a ton of work.
The process that makes our polished, pretty little pieces of internet often takes more than a month from greenlight to publish — including the research, interviews, field shoots, transcribing, writing, editing, animating, fact-checking, and copy editing that goes into each one. As a video moves through this process, it usually goes through six rounds of review.
This is not the cheapest way to make video journalism. But it’s all that work that’s led to success we couldn’t have imagined when we got started less than five years ago: 5 million subscribers on YouTube, the first digital-only interview of a sitting president, Netflix’s first weekly current events show, and the chance to make a second season.
The foundation of all we’ve done is our free, ad-supported short-form video program. But few of the highest-quality free videos are supported by advertising alone. We all adore the free segments of Last Week Tonight on YouTube — and they probably will stay free as long as people keep paying for HBO. Dozens of our favorite independent creators give their fans the chance to support their work through Patreon.
So, today, we’re asking fans of Vox video to help us continue to expand our ambitions by joining the Vox Video Lab on YouTube. It starts at $4.99 a month for membership, and gets you a whole bunch of perks as thanks for your support.
We’ll share all sorts of behind-the-scenes videos and extras from our work, sort of like DVD extras (remember those?). We’ll do regular Q&As and live streams. We’ll make a monthly list of recommendations of what we think are the best videos on the internet (we spend a lot of time watching videos on the internet), along with why we think they’re so good. And we’ll be doing some new experiments, too.
For those of you who want even more and want to support our mission twice as much, we’ve got an upper tier that costs $9.99, which gets you in the Vox Video Lab and onto our new member advisory board. We’ll be starting with a monthly live stream, and will give you the chance to participate in our editorial process and give feedback.
We think you’ll love the perks, but the most important thing is this: Signing up for either level of this membership will help us tell more stories we know you’ll love. So please do consider signing up — or maybe if you know a Vox Video fan in your life, signing them up as a gift. We’re thrilled to say YouTube is supporting this effort too, through a Google News Initiative grant announced Monday.
All this will help us do more work, enable us to do better work, and it will make us more accountable to you. We can’t wait. So if you like our videos, we’d love your support. Join here.