Techmoan: The retrotech hit with 1.3 million fans proves there's more to YouTube than dancing cats

For a bit of tech that was launched less than 20 years ago, YouTube can boast some pretty impressive stats.

The Techmoan channel has built up a following of around 1.3 million subscribers and more than 323 million total views.

According to Wikipedia, which is a little over two decades old itself, the Google-owned video sharing platform has more than 2.5 billion monthly users, who collectively watch more than one billion hours of footage each day. Beyond the countless clips of pets doing hilarious things there’s really rather a lot to like about YouTube.

Since discovering it had been squirted into my (occasionally) smart telly as a new app, I’ve become addicted to content on a myriad subjects, mainly of a super geeky nature, I must confess. And nothing gets much geekier than a channel going by the name of Techmoan. In reality Mr Techmoan is a middle-aged bloke called Matthew Taylor, who has been churning out video reviews and retrotech insights for the past 13 years or so, which must make him pretty ancient in YouTuber terms. I say churning out but that’s doing a disservice. I don’t think there’s a lot of scripting involved, but Techmoan manages to create some of the most engaging, insightful and thoroughly addictive material out there.

A glance at his most popular video creations proves that point. How about four million views for a 17-minute item about transparent plastic prison tech, almost three million for a half-hour dissection of the long lost VHD video disc format, and two and a half million tuning in to an item on the smallest CD Discman ever made (ironically one of his shortest offerings at just over nine minutes)?

I’m not sure how many people watching those big hits get drawn into Mat’s more esoteric delights but those seem to be the ones that resonate the most with me. As a result, I now have a working knowledge of the various audio tape formats that have appeared over the decades, a better understanding of the intricacies of the linear-tracking turntable and an obsession with the hi-fi graphic equalizer.

And Techmoan’s own stats? At the last count, about 1.3 million subscribers and more than 323 million total views. There’s life beyond dancing cats on YouTube, you tube.

Scott Reid is a business journalist at The Scotsman