What they are doing is distilling and weaponizing the feeling people get when watching maker content. The joy of seeing the transformation, the steps to completion, the finished product being better than you expected, etc. That set of feelings is the reason the entire maker video genre exists. However, if you can get people to feel something without all the effort of actually making things and filming it, why not (they think)?. Easier profit!
Hence all these fake videos. It’s worth noting that the fake videos do way, way better than the real ones. The fake videos do tens or hundred of millions of views, and the real ones rarely more than one million. If you see a maker video that isn’t Colin Furze do more than, say, 2m, it’s almost certainly fake.
It works because these content farms have figured out how to concentrate that set of feelings I talked about through editing and the illusion of the activity in question. If you don’t have the burden of making a real thing that actually works, you can concentrate the feelings a lot more. That concentration is much more powerful than the real thing- it’s like shooting heroine vs. taking pills.
Mainstream people who don’t generally work with their hands and don’t know a lot about how the built world is constructed are vulnerable to this “hey, neat” and “just so” style of video because they don’t see why it wouldn’t work. It’s a source of constant frustration for those of us making the real thing and trying to educate people about how to build real things in the real world. The fantasy is much more powerful.
