I've seen a lot of people rightfully questioning why people were watching and giving money to this James Somerton guy, considering how... bad his videos were. Like watching a few minutes of his content evidences pretty clearly that he doesn't have much in the way of charisma, that his presentation of the subject matter was super bland, etc.
And a lot of people weren't just casually engaging with Somerton's work, they were subscribing to his Patreon or deeply invested in his Discord community. So it's not just, like, "oh people know this is garbage but they want some noise on in the background."
I think what's going on is that Somerton was making a quasi-passable imitation of better content, and Youtube was primed to reward that. Somerton didn't just plagiarize content, he also copied style. Like he even had the damn copy of Disney War on the table in one video. He did a lower-effort version of the aesthetics that a lot of video essayists employ – the props, the moody lighting, etc.
But the difference between him and the video essayists he was imitating is that he was uploading a lot more frequently. And I think that's the key: Somerton was basically making a surrogate product. There's not that much Lindsay Ellis video you can watch on YouTube. But if you watch it all, YouTube will suggest videos from slightly-worse creators. Consume enough of this material and you'll get James Somerton, and Somerton has a regular upload schedule and puts out a lot of videos, and at that point maybe you are not so discerning about the quality of the material because you're pursuing something that kind of reminds you of better creators, but is a lot more voluminous.
Like, the video essay game has gotten advanced over the last few years. Hbomb himself only uploads basically once a year now, and before she quit YouTube, Lindsay Ellis was going in the same direction of slower, bigger, more sophisticated videos before she quit YouTube. People are making feature-length documentaries. I have a pile of YouTube subscriptions that haven't uploaded in months, and I know those channels aren't dead, just working on some massive essay.
I think creators like Somerton and Illuminaughty were exploiting a niche borne out of this: that people want things that have the outward trappings of video essays (ie, stuff that doesn't immediately come off as thrown-together or vloggy) but at a volume that's simply not sustainable for a video essayist. And that constant volume makes their audience both parasocially bond with these creators more strongly (as we see with Somerton's very invested fanbase) and it kind of inures people to the low quality of the videos by sheer force of familiarity.
I think there's also an element of just affinity fraud to this – Somerton portrayed himself as basically the only queer creator on YouTube, and a lot of the factoids he fabricated in his videos played up historical queerphobia. And when people view someone as part of their in-group, especially an in-group that feels like a besieged minority, their critical sense can turn off.
i think another factor is he stole from good writers* so he actually "had" a lot of good writing! the article he plagiarized on hellraiser is really good for instance, that's one i just happen to have read (and that's when the jug was up for me).
* though, also bad writers, as in that near miss with the right wing religious example lol
