The Boys in the Algorithm: On Loneliness as a Business Model

There is a way in which the subscriber count tells you everything you need to know about what happened here.

I am looking at a spreadsheet compiled by the Center for Countering Digital Hate, and the numbers have a certain poetry to them. Andrew Tate: 8.7 million followers on X before his initial suspension. Fresh & Fit podcast: 1.4 million YouTube subscribers. Sneako: 3.8 million across platforms. The spreadsheet continues, name after name, and I find myself thinking about what each number represents — not in the abstract sense of 'engagement' or 'reach,' but in the specific sense of a young man, probably alone, probably in a bedroom, probably sometime after midnight, clicking subscribe.

We tell ourselves stories in order to live. The question is who controls the telling — and, more pressingly, who profits from it.

The Architecture

What I am describing is not, strictly speaking, an ideology. It is an industry. The Global Wellness Institute estimates that the 'men's personal development' sector — a category that did not exist a decade ago — generated $1.9 billion in revenue in 2024, a figure that excludes merchandise, gambling partnerships, and cryptocurrency promotions. This is the first thing to understand about the masculinity influencer economy: it is, above all, an economy.

I know what I am talking about here. I have spent the past three months watching these videos, following the recommendation algorithms, joining the Discord servers. The experience is disorienting in a specific way — not because the content is uniformly extreme, but because so much of it is not. A young man searching 'how to be more confident' on YouTube will be served a video about posture. The posture video will recommend a video about fitness. The fitness video will recommend a video about 'female nature.' By the fourth or fifth click, he has arrived somewhere he did not intend to go.

The architecture was always commercial. This is the second thing to understand.

What It Means to Need

I met Daniel in Manchester, which is not his real name, though everything else about him is real. He is twenty-three. He works in logistics. He spent approximately £2,400 between 2022 and 2024 on courses, subscriptions, and coaching programs marketed by masculinity influencers — money he describes now as 'tuition for understanding how the game actually works.'

'The game' is a phrase that recurs in these conversations. It suggests both competition and hidden rules. It suggests that ordinary life — dating, employment, friendship — operates according to a secret logic that only certain people can see.

Daniel found Andrew Tate in 2022, when he was twenty and had not had a girlfriend in two years. 'I wasn't looking for someone to tell me women were the problem,' he said. 'I was looking for someone to tell me I wasn't the problem. There's a difference.' I am not sure the difference is as clear as Daniel believes, but I understand what he means. The content offered an explanation for pain that located the source outside the self. This is a very old form of comfort.

The American Survey Center published data in March 2025 showing that 28% of men under thirty report having no close friends, compared to 18% of women in the same cohort. The gap has widened by six percentage points since 2020. These numbers are cited frequently in discussions of male radicalization, and they should be, but they tend to be cited in a way that implies causation flows in only one direction: loneliness produces susceptibility to extremism.

This is true, but incomplete. The influencer economy does not merely exploit loneliness. It produces loneliness. It teaches its audience to distrust the relationships they have and to pursue relationships structured entirely around transaction. A man who believes that women are incapable of genuine love will, unsurprisingly, struggle to form loving relationships with women. The prophecy fulfills itself. The subscription renews.

The Precedent

None of this is new. I keep returning to a passage in Susan Faludi's 'Stiffed,' published in 1999, a quarter-century before Andrew Tate launched his 'Hustler's University': 'The men I came to know,' Faludi wrote, 'did not feel oppressed by feminism so much as abandoned by the society feminism had tried to address.'

The abandonment is real. Wages for non-college-educated men have declined 13% in real terms since 1979. Marriage rates among young men have fallen to historic lows. Male enrollment in higher education now lags female enrollment by fifteen percentage points. These are structural conditions. They produce structural consequences.

What is new is the business model. The men's rights movements of the 1990s and 2000s were largely volunteer operations, sustained by grievance rather than profit. The current infrastructure is venture-scaled. It has affiliate programs. It has retention metrics. It understands that a man who has paid for one course is statistically likely to pay for another, and it designs its content accordingly.

Who Benefits

I am not sure what I expected, but it was not this.

When I began this reporting, I expected to find an ideology with commercial features. What I found instead was a commercial enterprise with ideological features — a distinction that matters because it changes what we understand the problem to be.

The platforms benefit. YouTube's recommendation algorithm served masculinity influencer content 3.2 billion times in 2024, according to data compiled by the Center for Countering Digital Hate. Each view generates advertising revenue. Each subscription drives user retention. The platforms are not neutral conduits for this content; they are its infrastructure and, in a meaningful sense, its financiers.

The influencers benefit. Andrew Tate, facing human trafficking and rape charges in Romania that he denies, reportedly maintains a net worth exceeding $350 million, much of it derived from young men paying for advice on how to become wealthy.

And certain political movements benefit. A Pew Research Center survey from January 2025 found that men under thirty who regularly consume masculinity influencer content were 34 percentage points more likely to identify as conservative than their peers who do not. The pipeline does not end at misogyny. It ends at a voting booth.

The Reckoning

Daniel no longer watches Andrew Tate. He stopped in late 2024, around the time the Romanian charges were expanded. 'It wasn't the charges,' he told me. 'It was that I realized I wasn't any happier. I wasn't any richer. I wasn't any less lonely. I'd just spent two years being angry.'

This is one exit. There are others. The Institute for Strategic Dialogue has documented peer-led 'deradicalization' communities on Reddit and Discord, young men helping other young men find their way back. These communities have no venture funding. They have no affiliate programs. They are sustained, like most things that matter, by people who care.

But the industry remains. It will remain as long as the conditions that feed it remain — the loneliness, the economic precarity, the absence of alternative narratives about what it means to be a man in a world that has changed faster than our capacity to make sense of it.

I keep thinking about the subscriber count. 8.7 million. Each one a click. Each click a choice made by someone who was looking for something and found this instead. The algorithm does not distinguish between a cry for help and a purchase decision. Perhaps that is the point.

We tell ourselves stories in order to live. The boys in the algorithm have been told a story, and it is this: that their pain is someone else's fault, that their loneliness is a form of strength, that the transaction is the relationship. It is a story that costs $49.99 a month. It is a story that someone is always willing to sell.