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Sal Mercogliano appears on my video call screen looking precisely how you’d hope one of the internet’s foremost shipping experts would: surrounded by nautical paraphernalia, wearing a shirt so riddled with parrots and margaritas that it would have made the late Jimmy Buffett weep with pride. A military- and maritime-history professor at Campbell University in North Carolina, Mercogliano runs What’s Going On with Shipping?, a YouTube channel where he cheerily explains dark fleets, blockades, and tariffs. When he started the show, in 2021, he had a hundred and thirty-seven subscribers. (Up to that point, he’d mostly used his account to post academic presentations.) Now, boosted in part by the world-shaking events in the Strait of Hormuz, he’s at more than seven hundred thousand subscribers and gets several million views a month. “It’s nuts,” he told me. “I’m always shocked.”
A native of Queens and Long Island, Mercogliano grew up piloting his dad’s Sea Ray while fishing for shark and tuna. He hated the fish, but fell in love with boats, and spent years working as a merchant mariner. After teaching a course for the United States Merchant Marine Academy, he joined Campbell in 2010.
In March of 2021, the Ever Given, a container ship, got stuck in the Suez, briefly sparking an international shipping crisis. Mercogliano covered it obsessively on his YouTube show. His follower count grew. A fan suggested: there might be other notable ships he could talk about. Covering shipping, more generally, intrigued Mercogliano. But he worried: Would there be enough news to sustain such a show?
In fact, from the Titan submersible implosion to the Iran-backed Houthi militia in the Red Sea, the next few years would serve up plenty of high-seas intrigue. This year came the big one: the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran initiated in response to the United States and Israel’s joint attacks in February. A fifth of the world’s oil and natural gas flows through the strait; despite being militarily outmatched by the US, Iran has gained a strategic edge by launching drone strikes on commercial ships transiting the strait, thereby persuading most shipowners not to take the risk and reducing traffic to a trickle.
Mercogliano appears on his YouTube show a few times a week and as a recurring expert on CNN, Fox, and CNBC, among others. When we spoke, he had a BBC appearance scheduled for later in the afternoon, he told me, and his inbox was overflowing with requests for comment or analysis. Over the years, he’s fielded calls and messages he “just cannot believe,” he said, including from a four-star naval officer, CEOs of major shipping companies, even a spokesperson for the Houthis. (He reported that last one to the FBI.) He has testified before the Senate Commerce Committee’s Coast Guard, Maritime, and Fisheries panel. “There’s not enough of me to keep up with the mountain of news,” he said.
It’s not just Mercogliano: since the Hormuz crisis began, these have been boom times for shipping journalists. For Paul Peachey, the insurance and risk reporter for TradeWinds, an industry publication, it feels as if people are coming around to an elemental truth. “Most of what fills their houses has been brought to them by ships,” he told me. “It hasn’t escaped even the least alert people that what is happening in a narrow shipping lane between Iran and Oman is having an impact on how much they pay to fill up their car.”
The demand for expertise extends widely: Ship-tracking services such as MarineTraffic and nongovernmental organizations like the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air have grown popular on social media. Hapag-Lloyd, a shipping company, has started a podcast, starring its CEO, called Straight Talk with Rolf Habben Jansen. TradeWinds, Peachey said, has seen serious traffic spikes. “Anything that burns is well read,” he told me.
Matt Smith, the director of commodity research at Kpler, a data and analytics firm, said that his work “tracking the water-borne flows of energy” was, not so long ago, “a very niche thing.” But for the past five months, Kpler’s experts have “been bombarded,” he said. “Our poor PR guy, Nikos. He’s our first line of defense. It’s been relentless, and you would expect that there would be some fatigue at some point. But it’s still going, every single day.” Smith laughed. “We’re deferring vacations. We’re all very tired now.”
Tom Sharpe, a columnist for The Telegraph with his own YouTube channel, spent twenty-five years as a commander in the British Navy, a tenure that included leading a frigate in the Strait of Hormuz and working with the US to prepare for a theoretical crisis there. Sharpe said that online experts like Mercogliano—his “YouTube hero”—are now providing information in a “vacuum” created by the US government’s brazen attempts to spin the war as a success and to bash any critical reporting. “That’s why we’re seeing a marked increase in shipping companies, CEOs, and maritime enthusiasts producing more content. Faith in the honesty of public institutions is being rapidly eroded.” As Mercogliano put it, “Trump has given the Iranians an atomic bomb on trade. I don’t think many in the government understand how commercial shipping works.”
But his YouTube audience sure does. Mercogliano said that, when he was first building up his viewership, he was sure that if he talked about something like marine insurance, people would “roll their eyes into the back of their heads and drop dead.” Instead, he found that his subscribers are voracious for shipping arcana and that, like him, they find joy in the obscurity of shipping channels. (To that end, he developed a drinking game: whenever he mentions the Bab al-Mandab, the strait in which the Houthis have most recently created havoc, you drink.) And he loves his populist reach. “Historians are supposed to write books that a hundred other historians read,” he said. “I’m like, no! I don’t wanna do that!”
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