Saturday, September 16, 2023

The most popular museum on YouTube may surprise you A collection of armoured vehicles on a once-secret military base “in the middle of nowhere

 

12 Incredible Youtube Museum Channels You MUST Watch


The most popular museum on YouTube may surprise you

A collection of armoured vehicles on a once-secret military base “in the middle of nowhere” has got more video subscribers than the Louvre. Tour the World's Most Magnificent Museums!

The Tank Museum in Bovington, England, doesn’t usually rank among the world’s great museums. Located next to a military base in serene countryside, the collection of about 300 armoured vehicles attracts only a few hundred thousand visitors a year, mainly families on rained-out beach vacations.

A German Panther medium tank from World War II on display at The Tank Museum, Bovington. Alamy

Yet, there is one place where it not only ranks among the world’s largest museums, but surpasses them: YouTube.

The Tank Museum’s channel has more than 550,000 subscribers – surpassing the Museum of Modern Art (519,000) and the Metropolitan Museum of Art (380,000) in the United States or the Louvre in Paris (106,000).


The museum culture that is internet

The Tank Museum in Bovington, England, doesn’t usually rank among the world’s great museums. Located next to a military base in serene countryside, the collection of around 300 armored vehicles attracts only a few hundred thousand visitors a year, mainly families on rained-out beach vacations.

Yet there is one place where it not only ranks among the world’s largest museums, but surpasses them: YouTube.

The Tank Museum’s channel has over 550,000 subscribers — surpassing the Museum of Modern Art (519,000), the Metropolitan Museum of Art (380,000) or the Louvre (106,000).

In April, it announced it was the first museum to get over 100 million views on YouTube, with weekly clips including intensely detailed discussions on tank history, chatty videos of the curators’ favorite war machines and newsier items on how armored vehicles are being used in Ukraine.

Here is more from the New York Times, via Philip Wallach.