Bald and Bankrupt

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About

Bald and Bankrupt is a travel vlog channel on YouTube started by Englishman Benjamin Rich, a.k.a. Mr. Bald, in June 2018. The channel, and Benjamin in general, are most known for their straightforward approach to travel vlogging. The long, unedited, GoPro-style footage with unstereotypical intros features Mr. Bald out-of-place in a remote area with just his wits and personality. The channel mostly focuses on him exploring post-Soviet states in Eastern Europe, as well as a couple of other countries where Benjamin is fluent or semi-fluent in the native language, like India and Bolivia. Bald and Bankrupt gained a notable following going into 2019, and the channel has roughly 3 million subscribers as of August 2021.

Online History

On June 12th, 2018, Bald and Bankrupt would post its first video (shown below).^[1] The channel's first 14 videos would be filmed in India, until August 2018 when Rich began posting from Russia.

The channel's first video to receive over a million views was uploaded on July 15th, 2018 (shown below, left), under the title "Why I Returned To India After 20 Years." During October 2018, Bald and Bankrupt gained roughly 5,000 subscribers every day.^[12] In November 2018, Bald and Bankrupt began to receive more Google searches,^[2] mostly for a video posted on November 10th, titled, "Solo In India's Biggest Slum | Dharavi Mumbai" (shown below, right).^[3]

This video received over 2 million views. For this second trip to India and all its videos, Rich traveled alongside friend and fellow travel vlogger Harald Baldr who, at the time, had a larger subscriber base. Influence from Baldr's channel rubbed off on Benjamin's, and relatively quickly, Bald and Bankrupt became a notable figure in the travel vlogging community due to this early connection. Rich even states later in a Q&A about his channel how Baldr was an inspiration for him early on.^[4]

On December 15th, 2018, the /r/MisterBald ^[5] subreddit was founded, which now boasts roughly 12,600 members as of August 2021. By March 2019, the channel had over 330,000 subscribers with over 38 million views from a total of 145 videos, according to the Bald and Bankrupt Fandom.^[12]

Bald and Bankrupt then went on to be featured in online articles and publications about his channel. On June 28th, 2019, for example, Rich was featured in a Daily Express UK article about his video series on Moldovian bunkers.^[6] By August 2019, Bald and Bankrupt had amassed roughly a million subscribers in only one year of posting.^[7]

Bald and Bankrupt continued garnering more subscribers during the COVID-19 pandemic, which forced many people inside, isolated and with nowhere to travel. His stockpile of charismatic videos from 2018 and 2019 became a YouTube homepage staple for many users.

As of August 2021, the Bald and Bankrupt YouTube channel has roughly 3 million subscribers.^[8] It also has a secondary channel called "Daily Bald," which was made by Rich on August 15th, 2018.^[9] It now has roughly 535,000 subscribers as of August 2021.

Reputation

On July 10th, 2019, Pewdiepie was asked on the Cold Ones podcast,^[10] hosted by Anything4Views and MaxMoeFoe, who Benjamin stated were his favorite YouTubers (shown below). His first response was Bald and Bankrupt. According to Google Trends,^[2] this is when Bald and Bankrupt began accumulating most of its searches. Rich even commented on the video below on July 15th, 2019, saying, "Haha awesome! I have nothing more to achieve now."^[11] This shoutout from Pewdiepie was a big factor in the channel moving from 330,000 subscribers in March 2019 to over 1 million subscribers by August 2019.^[7]

Personal Life

Not much is known about Mr. Bald's personal life according to his Fandom website.^[12] The website claims that Mr. Bald has a Belarusian ex-wife, and through her is how he became fluent in Russian. The fandom also states that he has a daughter and that he started his channel after his business in England went bankrupt, hence the name.

COVID-19 Hospitalization

In May 2020, Mr. Bald was in Belarus and Serbia, countries which never locked down due to the COVID-19 pandemic.^[13] Mr. Bald saw the perfect opportunity to keep making his videos during the pandemic, but he caught the virus after flying to Serbia from Belarus.^[13] After a video posted on May 21st (shown below) from Belarus,^[14] his channel went silent for a whole month until he released a now-deleted video, called "My COVID-19 Nightmare," on July 10th, 2020, where he detailed how he had been hospitalized from the virus. He used the bad experience to warn his viewers about the pandemic's severity.