The Young Men Who Hate Everything. Someone Is Making Money.

There is a sound that YouTube's algorithm has learned to recognise. It is the sound of a young man, usually between sixteen and twenty-four, speaking rapidly into a microphone in a room with bare walls. The production value is deliberately low. The anger is not.

I have been watching these videos for three months. Not because I want to, but because in April 2026, after Andrew Tate was sentenced in Romania to eleven years for human trafficking and rape, the network he built did not collapse. It metastasised. Hustlers University, his pyramid scheme disguised as self-improvement, claimed 200,000 paying members at its peak in 2023. By March 2026, researchers at the Network Contagion Research Institute identified 847 active successor channels, most of them operated by men who had paid Tate $49.99 a month to learn how to monetise male grievance. They are still teaching the curriculum. They have simply changed the name.

The question is not whether young men are angry. The question is who profits from keeping them that way.

The Arrangement

The business model is elegant. A young man, call him Jordan, lives in Wolverhampton or Toledo or Perth. He is twenty-two. He works retail or drives for a delivery service or does not work at all. He spends between four and seven hours a day on his phone. A 2025 study by the Pew Research Center found that men aged eighteen to twenty-nine now spend an average of six hours and eleven minutes daily on social media, an increase of ninety-three minutes since 2021. Jordan does not think of this as unusual. Everyone he knows does the same.

The algorithm learns what Jordan watches. It learns that he pauses on videos about dating rejection. It learns that he watches videos about women longer than videos about anything else. It learns, most importantly, that he watches videos that make him angry all the way to the end. Anger is engagement. Engagement is revenue.

Jordan does not know he is being sold to. He thinks he is being educated.

What It Means to Learn Contempt

The curriculum is surprisingly consistent. I have watched hundreds of hours of this material. The entry point is almost always the same: a video about self-improvement. How to build muscle. How to earn money online. How to become, in the vocabulary of the manosphere, a high-value male. The advice is not inherently toxic. Lift weights. Read books. Start a business. The toxicity is in what comes next.

Within three to five videos, the subject shifts. Now the young man is being told why he is not successful. It is because women have been given too much power. It is because feminism has destroyed the natural order. It is because society has been designed to disadvantage men. A 2024 study published in the journal Sex Roles by sociologist Michael Kimmel and researcher Tal Peretz analysed the rhetoric of 120 manosphere influencers and found that 89 per cent framed gender relations as a zero-sum competition in which women's gains necessarily constitute men's losses. This is not analysis. It is radicalisation.

The videos tell Jordan that he is right to be angry. They tell him that his anger is justified, even noble. They tell him that other men understand. And then they tell him that for $29.99 a month, he can join a private community where he will learn the real truth that society is hiding from him.

The Men Who Sell the Anger

I am not sure what I expected when I started researching the men who run these channels, but it was not this: most of them are themselves barely adults. The median age of manosphere content creators identified by the Network Contagion Research Institute is twenty-six. Many are younger. They learned the model from Tate, or from men who learned it from Tate, and they have refined it with the sociopathic efficiency of a generation raised on growth hacking and A/B testing.

Take Mason Hartley, a twenty-four-year-old in Arizona who runs a YouTube channel called Alpha Ascension. Hartley was interviewed by Vice in January 2026, before the article was killed for legal reasons I have not been able to confirm. In the unpublished interview, which I obtained from a former Vice staffer, Hartley describes his business with the casualness of a man selling protein powder. He films two videos a day. He outsources editing to a team in the Philippines for $400 a month. He uses TubeBuddy and VidIQ to optimise his titles and thumbnails for maximum click-through rate. His most successful video, posted in November 2025, is titled Why Modern Women Are Impossible to Date. It has 2.7 million views. The top comment, with 14,000 likes, reads: Finally someone says it.

Hartley earns, by his own accounting, $47,000 a month. He is not an outlier. In February 2026, the tech newsletter Platformer identified at least nineteen manosphere influencers earning more than $500,000 annually. The highest earner, a thirty-one-year-old Canadian named Konstantin Petrov who goes by the name Koda Kingsley online, is estimated to gross $3.2 million a year through a combination of YouTube ad revenue, a private Telegram group with 18,000 paying members, and affiliate commissions from a Romanian online casino that targets young men. Petrov was banned from Meta platforms in 2024 and reinstated in 2025 after filing a lawsuit alleging viewpoint discrimination. Meta settled. The terms are sealed.

What the Data Conceals

The standard narrative about the manosphere is that it preys on lonely, marginalised men. This is true but incomplete. A 2025 survey conducted by the Institute for Family Studies found that 42 per cent of men aged eighteen to twenty-nine in the United States report having no close friends, an increase from 28 per cent in 2019. Male suicide rates in the same demographic increased 31 per cent between 2019 and 2024, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. These are real crises. The manosphere did not create them.

What the manosphere did was build an economic model around them. It took loneliness and translated it into content. It took male economic anxiety—real wages for men without college degrees have been flat since 1979—and sold it back as ideology. And it worked because the alternative, which is to address the structural conditions that produce isolation and economic precarity, requires admitting that the system itself is broken. It is easier to blame women.

A Boy in the Bedroom

I know what I am talking about here. In March 2026, I spoke to the mother of a seventeen-year-old in Manchester whom I will call Lucas. She asked me not to use her name or his. Lucas had been, by her account, a normal kid. He played football. He had friends. In 2024, during his first year of sixth form, he started spending more time in his room. She assumed it was normal teenage behaviour. By mid-2025, he had stopped playing football. He stopped seeing his friends. When she asked him what was wrong, he told her she wouldn't understand because she was a woman.

She found his phone unlocked one evening in January 2026. He had subscribed to eleven different manosphere channels. He was a paying member of three private communities. He had spent £340 in six months. One of the channels he followed, run by a twenty-three-year-old in Milton Keynes, had recently posted a video titled Why Your Mother Ruined Your Life. It had 480,000 views.

Lucas is now seeing a therapist. His mother does not know if it is working. She told me that the therapist said Lucas was not mentally ill. He had simply learned a way of thinking about the world that made it impossible for him to trust anyone who was not also inside the community. The therapist called it epistemological capture. Lucas's mother calls it brainwashing. I am not sure the distinction matters.

The Reckoning That Is Not Coming

Andrew Tate's conviction in February 2026 was supposed to be the moment when the manosphere collapsed. It was not. Within forty-eight hours of his sentencing, six new channels launched using variations of his branding. One of them, operated by a twenty-two-year-old in Bucharest who had worked as a moderator in Hustlers University, gained 100,000 subscribers in its first week. When Tate was sentenced, the young man posted a video titled The King Is Down. The Princes Rise. It now has 1.9 million views.

The infrastructure is the point. Tate was never the product. The product is a system in which young men are taught to see their economic and social alienation not as a structural failure but as a personal betrayal by women, by feminists, by a society that has supposedly abandoned them. And the system is profitable.

In March 2026, the European Union announced new regulations requiring social media platforms to throttle content that promotes gender-based hatred. The law takes effect in January 2027. YouTube, Meta, and TikTok have six months to comply. I spoke to a senior policy advisor at the European Commission who asked not to be named because the regulations are still being finalised. He told me that the platforms have already hired lobbying firms to weaken the enforcement mechanisms. He told me that the platforms know exactly what they are doing. He told me that they will not stop unless someone makes them.

We tell ourselves stories in order to live. The young men in the manosphere are being told a story in which they are victims and warriors simultaneously, in which their suffering is both unique and shared, in which the solution is not solidarity or structural change but self-improvement and contempt. It is a story that makes them feel powerful and keeps them afraid. It is a story that someone, somewhere, is being paid to tell.

The question is not whether the manosphere will end. The question is how many young men will be lost inside it before we decide that their isolation is not a market opportunity. I am not sure we have decided yet.