The Views: The Black Excellence Excellist Shows Us the Path to Black Excellence

Black Excellence Excellist is a YouTube channel focusing on African American and Black excellence in all walks of life, from sciences to humanities, to an audience of over 400 thousand subscribers. The Black Excellist provides advice to Black Americans, including lifestyle, music, and more. A great example of this is their “Game Changers” series, which offers commentary and deep analysis of influential Black and African American figures. The channel overall is an insightful gaze into African American culture within the YouTube online space, in the style of lifestyle coaching.

Handle: They identify as @Black Excellence Excellist on their YouTube channel, as @BlackExcellist on Instagram, @BlackExcellist on Facebook and @BlackExcellist on TikTok.

Series: They have a lot of series on their YouTube channel - all organized in playlists - but their biggest playlists seem to be centered around Black Business, Wealth and Biographies (with over 100 videos each on average).

Creators: Their voice-overs switch out often but seem to be a mostly consistent team of people.

Platform: Their content can be mainly found on YouTube, with various clips on TikTok and Instagram.

Genre/Genres: Documentary-style short-form content, including tier lists and compilations, all with a primary focus on lifestyle coaching.

Subscribers/Followers: The Black Excellence Excellist has 441,000 subscribers on YouTube, 67,800 followers on Instagram, 44,000 followers on Facebook and 12,600 followers on TikTok.

According to the “About Us” page on their website, Black Excellist premiered its first video in November 2018 and at the time, had reached 100,000 subscribers. Since then, the channel has quadrupled its audience growth and now features over 700 videos in its catalogue, spanning seven years on YouTube. The Excellist presents a diverse range of content that appeals to a broader audience, particularly on what they describe on their website as “Black Excellence Enthusiasts.

The YouTube channel trailer doesn’t give too much away, encouraging users to keep watching the channel’s numerous YouTube playlists and check out the Black Excellist website. The site serves as a hub, allowing channel members to engage more directly with the platform and stay updated p with other services.

Most of their videos are short form, going on average from 7 minutes to 15 minutes long in length. Exceptions include compilation videos, such as their hour-long feature on Black Celebrity Mansions, showcasing several Black celebrities offering guided tours and commentary on their luxurious homes.

Despite varying lengths, each video is densely packed with information, largely due to their specificity of their subject matter. For example, there are many kinds of videos with many different topics, like for example the cultural connection between Sprite and Black America, accumulating Black generational wealth, or the life, achievements (and mansion) of famous Black actress Viola Davis. The good thing about a channel like the Black Excellist is its dedication to empowerment and enlightenment through this specificity, keeping audiences engaged on one topic at a time in depth, much like the completion of a multi-pieced puzzle. For example, the channel’s playlist on “Black American Game Changers” involves a video about Ryan Coogler, director of Sinners and Black Panther. Past the channel intro and familiar branding, the video presents a brief background on Coogler before diving deeper into his life in a “10 facts about [...]” format, which is the overarching style of content across the channel. This approach makes the filmmaker’s life and achievements easier to digest succinctly. 

Audience members in the comments praise Coogler’s excellence. Even in cases where someone points out a potentially incorrect or “watered down” fact, the Black Excellist channel replies with sources. Evidently, they put a lot of attention towards their videos being as well researched as possible.

Apart from their semi-regular updates of their website, the YouTube channel (where the bulk of their content resides) posts on average three to four videos every two or three weeks. With their amount of subscribers, this posting schedule not only ensures that the at-present audience will be updated but that also increases the likelihood of attracting new subscribers to explore  their catalogue. Speaking of which, the catalogue itself spans a rather broad age range. 

Many videos seem to appeal to audiences of aged 30 and over, given the amount of videos on topics such as starting a family, (generational) wealth, employment, certifications, and locations to settle down. However, that’s not to say that there isn’t an appeal to members of the elder Gen Z (those 20 and over), with videos advising on college, starting employment, and even more specific pop-cultural (like the video on the location Ryan Coogler picked for Sinners, considering the movie’s success was likely to attract some eyes) and historical (multiple playlists on Black History and Biographies - taught in a way that is informative and also fills in existing gaps) deep dives. 

All this assumes the channel makes age divisions outright, but that is also not entirely the case. If anything, the Black Excellence Excellist attributes its success to “international audiences,” a phrase that reflects how much of an audience they have amassed: the term international being both literal and more figurative for the type of scale they have reached. This goes back to the discussion of the channel’s mission. Anyone can be enlightened and empowered, regardless of age, thus it becomes clearer why the channel doesn’t define a specific age demographic. Over seven years of content creation on YouTube, the Black Excellist has grown a diverse audience by producing videos that range from “10 things about [topic]” compilations to analyses of cultural trends and Black historical figures. The Black Excellist appeals to everyone indiscriminately, but most importantly to their African American/Black audience, to “enlighten” them. Enlightenment has no age.