Chapel Hill YouTuber experiences spike in engagement

When Max Reisinger learned he was moving to France for a year, he knew he had to do something with the opportunity.

“I knew it would be a pretty incredible part of my life that I’d always want to remember,” he said, “so what better way to capture it than to make a YouTube channel?”

The junior spent his sophomore year in Aix-en-Provence, France, where he filmed videos about his life as a student there.

Despite having produced weekly videos for the duration of his time abroad, it wasn’t until he moved back to the States that things really started to heat up online.

Reisinger gained nearly 20,000 subscribers in a week in late August due to an algorithm boost that recommended his videos to thousands of viewers around the world.

Over the span of a month, his channel grew from having 2,000 subscribers to over 50,000 subscribers today.

Despite the outpour of support given by his newfound fans, his recent explosion of popularity coupled with the start of the school year has posed some challenges for the junior.

“I definitely feel more pressure to keep working hard on providing interesting content while also doing well in school,” he said. “Junior year has forced me to not procrastinate—with the channel, I kind of don’t have the option to anymore.”

Reisinger’s channel features “vlogs,” or video logs, of his daily life. They feature a highly stylized form of editing popularized by vloggers such as Casey Neistat, whom Reisinger cites as his biggest influence.

Reisinger edits all of his videos himself, a process that usually takes hours.

Reisinger featured Chapel Hill in his video “My First Day of American Public School,” which has over 400,000 views.

Reisinger’s most popular video, “A Day in the Life at French Public School,” now has over a million views. Cumulatively, his videos have been viewed over 2.7 million times.

Reisinger hopes his story will empower his peers to pursue their passions despite the hurdle of teenage insecurity.

“I definitely thought about not making videos because I was worried about what people would think,” he said. “That’s why it’s important to push past those feelings and just go for what you’re passionate about.”