Fidias' "I Spent 100 Hours In The World's Poorest Country"

About

Fidias' "I Spent 100 Hours In The World's Poorest Country" is a Burundi travel vlog video from YouTuber Fidias that received viral backlash due to its thumbnail featuring Fidias among a group of African children with his arms spread out and his mouth open wide. The thumbnail's aesthetic and video content was likened to MrBeast videos (who Fidias has worked with) and clickbait content in general.

Origin

Fifi "Fidias" Panayiotou is a YouTuber from Cyprus who's been uploading vlogs, challenges and prank videos since March 2019.^[1] On March 8th, 2022, Fidias posted a video^[2] titled, "I spent 10 days in a VR headset," which kicked off his series of videos starting with the phrasal template, "I spent X in X."

On July 17th, 2022, Fidias uploaded a video^[3] titled, "I Spent 100 Hours In The World's Poorest Country," where he traveled to the African country of Burundi, which was ranked as the world's poorest country in the year 2022 by the World Population Review.^[4] In two days, the video received roughly 554,800 views (shown below).

On July 17th, 2022, Twitter^[5] user GRIMVVICE tweeted a screenshot of the video's thumbnail (since-altered), captioning it, "MrBeast Ruined a Whole Generation of YouTubers." The tweet received roughly 187,700 likes in one day (shown below).

Spread

Multiple reactions and memes emerged from the attention Fidas' thumbnail received on Twitter. For instance, on July 18th, 2022, Twitter^[6] user GanonMain tweeted a reply to GRIMVVICE's tweet^[5] that asked, "why does he look like that," earning over 5,000 likes in one day (shown below, left). On July 19th, 2022, Twitter^[7] user doomsgreys pointed out that Fidias had photoshopped many of the children into the thumbnail (shown below, right).

On July 19th, 2022, Keemstar posted a tweet^[8] that attached the thumbnail, stating, "YouTube content is trash now," and received over 5,000 likes in less than a day (shown below, left). Due to the backlash, Fidias changed the YouTube thumbnail on July 19th. This change was also highlighted in a tweet^[9] from the news site Dexerto on July 19th (shown below, right).

Various Examples

Search Interest

Unavailable.

External References