About Reaction Cloud
Hi, my names Chris, I'm a nerdy music lover from the UK (the place where good music was invented) and the creator of Reaction Cloud.
What's Reaction Cloud you ask, well it's a home for YouTube reaction channels, artists and music fans. It's a constantly updating, fan curated catalog of YouTube reaction videos free from any algorithms. A place where you can discover a new musical rabbit hole or indulge in a musical obsession.
Why does Reaction Cloud exist?
In January 2023 I discovered an artist thanks to the legend that is Justin Hawkins. That artist was Ren and, like many others say, his music found me when I needed it. I won't say too much about Ren here, but suffice to say his music sucks and it had a profound effect on me.
Watching reaction videos to his music on YouTube became a daily occurrence. This led me to discovering Reaction channels featuring a refreshingly genuine, diverse group of people from all around the world. Not only entertaining, they were obviously helping to promote independent artists and connecting fanbases. These people are doing good but in 2025 I became aware of several issues effecting them.
Firstly many reaction channels were receiving large volumes of copyright take-down notices, mainly from Universal Music Group (UMG) resulting in their videos being de-monetised or taken down. These issues have been covered by the Musician/Producer/YouTuber/Legend Rick Beato, this video explaining the situation. The long and short of it is these are bogus claims generated by automated systems. Why are they bogus, because reaction videos modify the original art and should therefore be considered "fair use", thus being exempt from copyright. On top of that, they promote the original piece of art which is to the benefit of the copyright owner.
Secondly I started to realise that my searches for reaction videos were not bringing back everything, I'd look for new reactions each day but search results would ofter be mixed with result that had no relation to the search term. It was obvious that these results were part of an algorithm designed to funnel content towards me.
Both of these things made me angry and made me think…
…and in September 2025 I had an idea. I might be able to solve the second issue by building something that takes away "discovery" from YouTube and the algorithm. The larger goal being, if I could build a community of music fans there, maybe we could also find ways to support the reaction channels removing their reliance on the revenue being taken away by the bogus copyright claims. Two annoying birds killed with one stone.
So, Reaction Cloud was born. Born not out of a desire for profit, but from a desire to help others because as a wise Welshman once said "a rising tide lifts all ships".