Happy (early) birthday, YouTube. To celebrate the site’s 20th anniversary, we present: The InsideHook Guide to YouTube, a series of creator profiles, channel recommendations and deep dives about the viral, controversial, unstoppable video-sharing giant.
In 2009, at a time when my friends and I were sending videos like “Charlie Bit Me,” “Grape Lady” and “Shoes” back and forth to each other incessantly, Mark Wolters had already set about establishing himself as one of the preeminent travel vloggers on YouTube. Fifteen years later, he’s still at it.
I’ve now interviewed the 47-year-old Illinois native twice in as many years. “You know I am always here to help,” he tells me when I reach out again. “Let me know what I can do to help.”
If you’re familiar with Mark’s work, it’s an unsurprising sentiment. It’s the ethos from which he’s built his brand — the most plausible explanation for why, even after all this time, his channel Wolters World still surfaces dozens of times in response to a question about best travel bloggers posted to r/TravelNoPics — a subreddit that purports to be “pretty much the anti-Instagram.”
Mark Wolters just wants to help.
It all started while he was working on his PhD in Portugal. (Yes, he’s a PhD.) During a break, he hopped on a flight over to Italy and from there, at the counsel of a AAA guidebook he picked up at the airport, he made his way to a small town he’d never heard of. The town was not as advertised and, ultimately, a colossal disappointment.
“I wasn’t so much upset at the book itself, but I couldn’t help but think, ‘Man, if somebody gets their once-in-a-lifetime European vacation, and they read this guidebook, they would come to this town and waste 20% of their vacation on some crap town because someone got paid to write something nice,” Wolters told me back in 2022. “From then on, I wanted to tell honest travel stories.”
Wolters World is the fruit that fateful trip bore. To date, he’s produced more than 2,600 of those honest travel advice videos, and amassed an audience of over one million subscribers — though none of that success was quite that simple, or that fast. Remember, he started in the early days of YouTube when it was still a Wild West of sorts.
“When I started making YouTube videos, I just made any kind of video I thought people might find helpful for travel,” says Wolters, who has been a professor at the Gies College of Business at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign since 2011. “I made language videos for travelers, family advice, top sights videos, just anything and everything. Our most popular early videos were teaching foreign languages to Germans.”
We really focus on preparing people to travel in an honest way. The videos are not about us, but about the destination and helping other travelers get the most out of it.
– Mark Wolters, Creator of Wolters World
However, after a few years of throwing mud at walls, things really began to stick.
“Maybe three years into YouTube, a random family came up to my family when we were in Venice, and the father asked if I could take a picture,” Wolters recalls. “I said yes, thinking he wanted me to take a picture of him and his family. But then he said no, he actually wanted a picture with me, as my videos really helped him prepare his family for his trip to Italy. It was really a moving moment for me, having some random person come up and say thank you.”
But then, perhaps even more significantly, the channel hit 50,000 followers — a tangible confirmation that his content was resonating. “I was on the way to the airport and got the notification that we passed 50,000 and my wife and I were so excited, we took the next exit and made a thank you video for our followers.”
An interesting thing to note about Mark is that, even a million followers later, not all that much has changed since he really started to take off. The quality of his videos has improved — with technology, of course, but also with the help of the editors he now employs to cut them — but he himself, the way he hosts and the nature of the content has remained largely unchanged.
He doesn’t necessarily look the part of viral travel YouTuber, at least by 2024 standards. That is, Mark Wolters is not a 20-something model moonlighting as a travel expert. Rather, he is a dad, a professor, a history buff and, crucially, very relatable. The kind of guy you’d feel comfortable approaching on the street for directions if ever you were to get lost. Or for a photo.
That is where, I believe, the power of YouTube lies, and how it’s persisted where many other video-sharing platforms have failed. As of April 2024, YouTube had more than 2.5 billion monthly active users, which is nearly half of the internet users worldwide. As Wolters himself posits, “YouTube allows everyone to be heard and create content. You can be a chubby guy talking about travel, a young person discussing video games, a grandma making knitting videos, and there is a community for you.”
The InsideHook Guide to YouTube
For YouTube’s 20th anniversary, we’re profiling creators, recommending channels and dissecting the viral, controversial, unstoppable video-sharing giantThere’s also something to be said for the enduring appetite for tried and true travel advice, versus aesthetically pleasing photos of far-flung destinations that are all too easily conflated with expertise. On Mark’s channel, you’ll find videos that cover topics like “How NOT to Kill Grandma When You Travel,” “The Don’ts of Air Travel,” “Why American Travelers Annoy the French,” “7 DUMB Ways People WASTE Their Vacation,” “Flying Cockroaches & 10 Shocks of Visiting South Carolina,” “Airbnb Red Flags” and “6 Low Key Travel Safety Hacks.” In other words: stuff you might actually Google ahead of a trip.
“We really focus on preparing people to travel in an honest way,” Wolters says. “The videos are not about us, but about the destination and helping other travelers get the most out of it. We do not do too many ‘personal vlogs’ where it is all about us.”
“I’ve had a few other influencers mention to me that they felt like we were one of the few travel YouTubers that really just focused on travel education, and not showing off that we are traveling.”
If Mark has any plans of slowing down, he doesn’t let on. He travels around the university’s break schedule, at least once a year to a destination of his audience’s choosing, as well as over long weekends when he can swing it. He admits to not sleeping a lot…or ever, often working into the wee hours of the morning. When he’s on the road, he’s up early to shoot in an effort to avoid the crowds, with only his script book, tripod and camera in tow. He’ll meet up with his family later in the morning, do some sightseeing, shoot some B-roll, rinse, repeat. Then it’s back to the university again.
“It helps that both teaching and making the travel videos are things I love to do,” he says, “so it never really feels like work when I am doing them.”
It feels like the type of thing you might say at Thanksgiving to convince your in-laws that, yes, you do make enough money and, no, you’re not being crushed by an insurmountable workload — save for the fact that Mark Wolters is nothing if not honest.
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