Ignoring a filmography leaves you shallow; you become a tourist who only visits the Eiffel Tower and calls it a tour of France. Ignoring popular videos leaves you pretentious; you become the critic who complains that no one understands the brilliance of a 10-hour slow cinema piece while the rest of the world watches Oppenheimer .

For decades, if you wanted to see an actor’s body of work, you pulled out a newspaper or a physical encyclopedia to check their filmography. If you wanted to watch something popular, you tuned into a broadcast network during prime time. Today, the lines between traditional cinema, television, and digital content have blurred into a single, endless stream of entertainment.

On the opposite end of the spectrum are popular videos that mimic Hollywood. YouTubers like Sam and Colby, Ilya Fedorovich, or Danny Duncan are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on single videos, hiring full film crews, using drone photography, and composing original scores. The production value of these popular videos makes them indistinguishable from traditional television documentaries.

The is the resume. It is the cold, hard truth of productivity. It tells you where an artist has been. The popular video is the legacy. It is the hot, fleeting lightning strike of public attention. It tells you what the world actually cares about right now.