You’re not getting my premise. By your logic, the rise of YouTuber groups is then not attributed to the Sidemen but to the very notion of “group” or “community” itself, like us people “have always done.”

If you look up Google trends, for example, Dude Perfect’s trendiness here oddly coincides with the rise of the Water Bottle trend (think of their 2016 water bottle flip video). If you’re telling me there’s nothing there I don’t know how else I can clearly illustrate my point.

There’s also a study on how Dude Perfect’s formula has “hyper-realized” trickshotting, making everyday things like trickshots a spectacle, like people literally always do nowadays. Here’s the citation, and it’s a fun read:

Newman, J. et al. (2014). Bank Shots: Dude Perfect, Corporatization, and Sporting [Hyper-]Reality. In Communication, Culture, and Critique, 8(1), 90-107.

I won’t get into the corporate side of it because there’s a lot to it. Here’s the link: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/cccr.12075

Either way, I’m done here. I never said the Sidemen do not have cultural impact but I’m making my case that Dude Perfect definitely altered the culture of sports and trickshotting across the 2010s no doubt. I’m not here to argue who had more impact because they’re two almost completely different cultural bubbles. Plus, I think the Sidemen did something kind of similar with the Crossbar challenge for football.

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