[WIP]

About

Adam Ragusea is an American cooking YouTuber and former journalism professor at the Mercer University. He is mostly known for his direct presentation, and relatively short, straightforward videos. His channel over the span of 2 years has grown immensely, restulting in his videos becoming the subject of memes and recurring injokes. As of December 7, 2020, Adam's youtube channel has over 1.15 million subscribers.^[1]

History

Adam was a journalist at residence at Mercer University from 2014 to 2020 when he retired to focus on his YouTube career. Through that time, he worked as a journalist at NPR, a professor at the university, and as a longtime host at a public media trade podcast called "The Pub"^[4][5]
Adam created his YouTube channel on February 12, 2010. His earliest video, a cover of Cher's "Believe" was on May 23rd of that year(shown below).

Prior to his viral fame, Adam first gained internet notoriety for a piece he did with Vox Media over Mariah Carey's "All I Want For Christmas Is You", where he talked about a musical chord that was a common theme in Christmas music, citing Mariah Carey's "All I Want For Christmas Is You" in particular. On December 18, 2015, Slate published Adam's piece on the topic^[6], and a year later Vox contacted him to do their own piece on the topic.^[7] Vox's video on the topic was published on December 21st, 2016(shown below).

The video became the subject of controversy on Twitter, with people debating Adam's observations. On December 23rd, 2016 Adam Neely made a response video arguing against the Vox video's claims(shown below, left). On December 21st, 2020, Ragusea put out a video reflecting on the whole drama(shown below, right).

Adam started making cooking videos as a way to learn video making firsthand, as he was set to teach a journalism class in Mercer University that involved multimedia production.^[1] Adam's first foray into cooking, a video about ribeye steak, was uploaded on October 7, 2017. While it was not the video that gained his channel notoriety, over the years it has gone on to reach over 1 million views(shown below).

Adam's channel only really gained attention 2 year later in 2019, when his videos were recommended by the YouTube algorithm. The earliest uploaded of these videos is his New York style pizza recipe video(shown below). This video is also Adam's most popular to date with over 16 million views as of December 7, 2020.

The one that really kickstarted Adam's career, however, was his chocolate chip cookies video, which got posted to r/videos with the title "Rare: This cooking video instantaneously gets to the point".(shown below)^[3] To date the video has over 3 million views and the reddit post has over 72,000 upvotes.

Internet Notoriety

Adam's internet following has a tendency to make injokes out of Adam's videos, with comments reporting on recurring subjects like the presence of white wine in recipes, or Adam's use of sponsorships. Adam has also been the subject a number of YouTube poops(see below). The most popular of these, "Adam Ragusea breathes", a supercut of breathing noises made by Adam during his stovetop macaroni and cheese video, has over 300,000 views(below, bottom middle).

In addition, Adam's fanbase has several injokes relating to recurring things in his videos, one such example being the snowclone "Why I X my Y, not my Z", which is a reference to Adam's videos explaining his unconventional seasoning methods(shown below), something first introduced in his video "Why I Season My Cutting Board, NOT My Steak".

Examples of such jokes are shown below

Another popular injoke in Adam's fanbase is Adam's usage of white wine, which has been a recurring thing in earlier videos of his, to the point that Adam made a video explaining his usage of white wine in cooking(shown below)

examples of related jokes are below

Search Interest

External References