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Archive Panic

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Plus or minus 4,000 at this point.
"Even though the adventure began recently, it's already over 3000 pages long. You just don't have time for this bullshit. You'll catch up later."
— Dave's Thoughts, Homestuck

You've just discovered a new Webcomic. Maybe a friend told you, maybe you were pointed to it by another site. Heck, maybe it was This Very Wiki or the other one.

Like any new reader, you read the strip on the main page. It looks good; the art passes muster, the writing's okay... Sure, you'll read this comic. So you hit the "First Strip" button.

And then you see the date. This strip started eleven years ago. Beads of sweat form on your forehead. You hit the "Archive" link...

Holy Mother of Shakespeare! There are hundreds upon hundreds of comics in here! Even with the longest Archive Binge of your life, it'll take you forever to read all of these!

This is the Archive Panic: when a reader is scared off from reading a comic by the sheer volume of its archives. This is far more common with daily comics, which can easily have lengthy archives by sheer weight of longevity.

Consider: if a strip updates once per day, Monday through Friday, then at the end of five years there will be over 1300 strips Exact count in its archive. The number increases to over 1800 strips Exact count if the strip updates on weekends as well.

Now consider a person who has a lot of free time and a fast connection to the Internet, and who reads five strips a minute. To get through that Monday through Friday comic, he would need almost four and a half hours of continuous reading.

Now, while that isn't a lot of time, most people won't want to or won't be able to binge like that. Broken up into short shots, that time can stretch into months; it's easy to imagine someone not having that sort of willpower. This problem is exacerbated when strip-a-day comics are archived on one day per page, rather than one week per page. Thus the time to click the 'next' button and the time for the page to upload can equal the few seconds needed to read each day's strip.

What's worse is that the strip is continuing to update while you're reading through the archive, making it even harder to catch up. Even worse is if the strip doesn't continue to update: there's the risk of it coming to an end. Few things are more disheartening than finally catching up with the current strip and seeing an author's note listing the end of the comic. In two weeks from now.note 

Strips with less intense update schedules (say, three times a week) rarely suffer Archive Panic, nor do strips that have suffered various Schedule Slip incidents. (It's less of a hassle to read through the archives of a strip that began 10 years ago if it spent seven of those years in various hiatuses.)

Video Games might be the most subjective medium for this trope, since how long one spends on a game can vary from person to person. Factors include how challenging one finds the game (and which difficulty they play on), whether or not they are going for 100% Completion, and how long they spend on the minigames. A game that one person breezes through might take hours more of playtime for another, and that's just on one entry in a series.

The site Archive Binge lets you subscribe to a webcomic's archive via an RSS feed at a rate you choose, allowing you to attempt to avoid panic. Another tool to help is Piperka which helps you keep track of a few thousand webcomics you might be reading. Piperka's page counts can also be useful for keeping the webcomic subpage updated. For podcasts, Spotify lets users speed up the playback speed of podcast episodes.

See also Doorstopper, Commitment Anxiety. May be eased if the author has decided to make some New First Comics to give readers a safe starting-off point. Can lead to thinking "Are We There Yet?"

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    Animation 
  • 3000 Whys of Blue Cat. The "3000" in the show's title is actually very fitting, as it ran for around 10 years and accumulated 3,000+ episodes during its run. All of the episodes are available on Youku, even for those outside of China, but even then it's still going to take you a while to get through the whole series.
  • Balala the Fairies might take you a while to watch in its entirety, with its 250+ episodes and three movies.
  • Boonie Bears has premiered over 600 episodes and eight movies since 2012.
  • Chhota Bheem, with its over 600 episodes and 40 direct-to-television movies. And that's not factoring in the spinoffs.
  • Chicken Stew had 418 episodes throughout its run, spread across seven seasons.
  • Crazy Candies has produced 246 episodes as of Season 6's completion. Put into a marathon, you would have a day and a half to complete the series without any breaks.
  • Doby & Disy totals 286 episodes spread across five seasons, as well as a theatrical movie.
  • Flower Angel has eight seasons with 288 episodes and a movie. It would take you upwards of two days to complete the series without breaks. If you're a completionist who focuses on entire franchises, there's also the MMORPG the cartoon is based on.
  • Fruity Robo totals 208 episodes and one movie. Its prequel, Fruity Musketeers, adds an additional 20 episodes.
  • GG Bond has accumulated over 1,000 episodes and six theatrical films.
  • Happy Heroes has 700+ episodes and three movies. It's been going since about 2010 and shows no signs of stopping.
  • The original run of KikoRiki alone has 215 episodes, with the 2012 CGI continuation, a 2020 2D revival and spin-offs like PinCode bringing it to over 450.
  • Larva has 286 episodes as of 2022, though thankfully the episodes are short, at 3-4 minutes long.
  • Motu Patlu has over 300 episodes, all 22 minutes long (two 11-minute segments per episode), so it would take about five days to binge-watch it in its entirety with no breaks. On top of this, episodes are still being produced and aired, making it harder to catch up, and there are also several movies based on the show to add to all this (one was released theatrically; the rest are direct-to-TV) as well as two spin-offs titled Inspector Chingum and Guddu the Great.
  • Pakdam Pakdai clocks in at 585 episodes.
  • Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf:
    • The series has been running since 2005 and has over 2,000+ episodes spread over 20+ seasons and spinoffs. Put into a marathon, the series would run for upwards of 16 days, or half a month without breaks. Of note, it is the fifth longest-running animated show in the world, right behind Doraemon, 3000 Whys of Blue Cat, Sazae-san, and Sandmannchen.
    • The first season alone has a whopping 530 episodes.
  • Pleasant Goat Fun Class is nowhere near as much of a hassle to binge as it is to binge its 2,000+-episode parent series Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf, but it still has plenty of episodes to spare, having reached 208 episodes as of Mighty Goat Squad 2, the eighth season.
  • Pororo the Little Penguin has somewhere upwards of 200 episodes.
  • The SEER television show ended with 392 episodes, the most of any of Taomee's television series. It would take you around three days to complete the series without breaks. There are also seven movies that are a part of the franchise as well.
  • Shaabiat Al Cartoon, from the United Arab Emirates, clocks in at a total of 332 episodes spread across 16 seasons as of 2022.
  • Super Wings totals 224 episodes as of the completion of Season 5.
  • Upin & Ipin: A whopping 543 episodes spread across fifteen seasons makes this one quite a binge-watch.
  • Yamucha's-Kung Fu Academy ran for 208 Quarter Hour Short episodes and has a 52 episode sequel. It also started as a webtoon with 15 episodes.

    Arts 
  • The overall medium of art has more than enough content and people in it to last you a lifetime, and then some. Let's start with the fact that Wikipedia lists over 3,100 painters alone, and it escalates even higher when you include artists in other fields, such as sculpturists and architects (The other wiki likewise lists over 700 for both), illustrators (around 500) graphic designers (at least 100), cartoonists (over 900 are listed on wikipedia altogether) and science fiction artists (well over 160), all from over 50 different countries and nationalities! To make a comprehensive list of them all would be flat out impossible—In fact, a 2001 poll counted over 2,500,000 artists living in the United States! Factor in the countless different styles and techniques of art, the cultures they were made in, and the fact that art history as we know it has spanned somewhere around 2,800 to 2,500,000 years, and then you'll understand why art history books tend to be doorstoppers!
  • To give another idea of the sheer scope of art history, here is just a small list of notable artists from 1375 to 1885; Juan Ramirez, Jose Luzan, Luis Melendez, Antonio Gonzalez Velazquez, Francisco Bayeu, Jose Del Castillo, Mariano Salvador Maella, Ramon Bayeu, Luis Paret Y Alcazar, Antonio Carnicero, Asensio Julia, Agustin Esteve, Zacarias Gonzalez Velazquez, Vincente Lopez Portana, Eugenio Lucas, Guiseppe Maria Crespi, Alessandro Magnasco, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, Pietro Longhi, Corrado Giaquinto, Francesco Guardi, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Giacomo Ceruti, Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo, Lorenzo Baldissera Tiepolo, Paolo Borroni, Sir Joshua Reynolds, George Stubbs, Thomas Gainsborough, George Romney, Thomas Rowlandson, William Blake, J.M.W. Turner, John Constable, Jean Ranc, Michel-Ange Houasse, Antoine Watteau, Francois Boucher, Louis-Michel Van Loo, Jean-Baptise Greuze, Jean-Honore Fragonard, Jean-Baptiste Le Prince, Jacques Louis David, Pierre Prud'Hon, Antoine-Jean Gros, Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres, Theodore Gericault, Camille Corot, EugeneDelacroix, Honcre Daumier, Édouard Manet, Anton Raphael Mengs, Juan Andres Mercklein, John Henry Fusel, Caspar David Friedrich, Johann Nepomuk Kaspar, John Singleton Copley, Charles Willson Peale, Gilbert Stuart, John Trumbull, Raphael Peale, Rembrandt Peale, Washington Allston, Thomas Sully, John James Audubon, Samuel F.B. Morse, George Catlin, Thomas Cole, William Sidney Mount, Hans Multscher, Stephan Lochner, Meister Francke, Lucas Moser, Conrad Witz, Michael Wolgemut, Michael Pacher, Rueland Frueauf the Elder, Veit Stoss, Martin Schongauer, Hans Pleydenwurff, Hans Holbein the Elder, Bernard Strigel, Grunewald, Albrecht Durer, Lucas Cranach the elder, Hans Burgkmair, Jorg Breu, Hans Seuss Von Kulmbach, Albrecht Altdorfer, Hans Schaufelein, Leonhard Beck, Hans Baldung Grien, Wolf Traut, Hanns Durer, Hans Springinklee, Wolf Huber, Barthel Bruyn, Hans Holbein the Younger, Georg Pencz, Sebald Beham, Barthel Beham, Enguerrand Quarton, Jean Fouquet, Simon Marmion, The Master of King Rene D'Anjou, Nicholas Froment, Maitre De Moulins, Jean Clouet, Jean Duvet, Francois Clouet, Robert Campin, Jan van Eyck, Rogier Van Der Weyden, Petrus Christus, Dirck Bouts, Hans Memling, Hugo Van Der Goes, Hieronymus Bosch, Gerard David, Geertgen Tot SintJans, Quentin Massys, Mabuse Jan Gossaert, Joachim Patinier, Joos Van Cleve, Bernard Van Orley, Lucas Van Leyden, Jan Van Scorel, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Fra Filippo Lippi, Piero Della Francesca, Gentile Bellini, Antonello Da Messina, Giovanni Bellini, Antonio Pollaiuolo, Andrea Mantegna, Jacopo De' Barbari, Luca Signorelli, Sandro Botticelli, Pietro Perugino, Domenico Ghirllandaio, Vittore Carpaccio, Fra Bartolommeo, Michelangelo Buonarroti, Giorgione, Andrea Del Sarto, Correggio, Pontormo, Francesco Parmigianino, Jacopo Tintoretto, Rembrandt Van Rjin, Claude Monet, Pierre Auguste Renoir, Henri De Toulouse Loutrec, Auguste Rodin, Bartholdi, Rodin, Jackson Pollock, Piet Mondrian, Raphael Sanzio, Donatello, Monet, Grant Wood, Edvard Munch, James Whistler, Georgia O Keefe, Alphonse Mucha, Edward Hopper, L.S. Lowry, René Magritte, Gustav Klimt, Titian, Cecil Bell, Alexandre Cabanel, and Francisco de Goya. Good luck.
  • Also consider how much art the individual artists made themselves — some artists like Pablo Picasso were so productive and prolific that it would be literally impossible to compile all of his work into any one reference book. Artists like Rembrandt made approximately 600 paintings, 300 etchings, and 1400 drawings.

    Audio Plays 
  • Big Finish Doctor Who has a rather massive recap page on this wiki.
    • For starters, there's the Main Range, which released a new audio story every month from July 1999 to March 2021; there are 275 stories that are usually two hours long!
    • And then there are the other ranges, such as the Eighth Doctor Adventures and the Fourth Doctor Adventures, just to name two. The EDAs have four full seasons with some specials mixed in there as well. As for the 4DAs, they're still going ever since 2012!
    • And then there are the boxsets starring such characters as the War Master, the Eighth Doctor, Missy, River Song and some other assorted characters and Doctors. There are also "companion chronicles" to go through.
    • And then there are all of the spin-offs! Bernice Summerfield's many, many ranges, I, Davros, which explores Davros' backstory, Jago and Litefoot, which went on for 13 seasons before one of the lead actors - Trevor Baxter - died in 2017, and Gallifrey which shows the politics and drama of the Gallifreyan government with both old and new characters. So yeah, there's a lot to get through!
    • And that's not even getting into the other ranges and stories that Big Finish does that aren't part of Doctor Who; Dark Shadows, Blake's 7 and Sherlock Holmes, just for starters!

    Card Games 
  • Magic: The Gathering has over 10,000 cards spread over more than 50 sets, some of which cost several hundred dollars. It's been going since 1993.
  • Pokémon Trading Card Game has about similar numbers to the above with around 50 sets. It's been going since 1996 (in Japan) and 1998 (in the U.S.A. and elsewhere).
  • Yu-Gi-Oh! rounds out the triumvirate, with nearly 12,500 cards as of January 2022, having been released continuously since 1999.

    Comic Books 
  • Print comics "win" by decades. If you start reading Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Captain America, etc. where do you start? Origin retellings? After or before Infinite Crisis (whatever that is)? Silver Age? Golden Age? Most of them are also still ongoing, and that's not even counting the spin-offs, team-ups, and guest appearances. This is the reason DC has "Year One" comics and Marvel launched its "Ultimate" line. Batman deserves a special mention for just how prolific the franchise is in all media; his comics have been regularly published since 1939, and he has 19 ongoing comic series total, and their stories often intertwine within themselves and other DC comic series. Then there's 22 oneshot comics, two literary books, two live action tv series, 30 movie serials (over 10 15-minute short subjects each), 8 live action movies (with a 9th one on the way) a CD album, 4 radio shows, 3 manga adaptations, 2 musicals, 3 pinball games, 44 video games (and 11 more with him in supporting or cameo roles), 2 web series, and he has starred in 11 animated series (7 of which give him top billing) and 17 animated movies (12 of which likewise give him top billing) and enough misc. tie in toys and merchandise to fill the Batcave! All this, and the series has been going strong for 75 years, and is showing no signs of stopping. To say the least, Holy Archive Binging, Batman!
  • Batman: Knightfall is huge in every sense of the word. The bare bones of the arc itself, according to Wikipedia, comprise of material from Batman, Detective Comics, Shadow of the Bat, Legends of the Dark Knight, Robin, Catwoman, Showcase and Justice League Task Force. And that's not even getting into the supplementary material like the Vengeance of Bane special or the Sword of Azrael mini-series, as well as a dozen or so lead-in issues of both Batman and Detective that show Batman's fatigue building as well as introducing both Azrael and Bane into the regular cast. And there's the two epilogue series, Prodigal and Troika, which help the story chalk up over one hundred issues in total. And it wasn't helped by the fact that DC only packaged "Knightfall" and "Knights End" in collected editions, but not either side of "Knightquest", though with the new "Knightfall" collection, it's been rectified somewhat: for some odd reason, "Knightfall" included Vengeance of Bane but left out Sword of Azrael while "Knightquest" only focused on "The Crusade" as Denny O'Neil does not think highly of "The Search". Put into perspective, the 2012-version paperbacks of the entire story are split up into three books. Each one is over 600 pages long. Lastly, the 2017 Omnibuses released so far, where the first volume collects the entirety of Knightfall, Vengeance of Bane and a number of prequel storylines setting up Knightfall (except Sword of Azrael) and the second volume collects both sides of Knightquest, finally averting Missing Episode, come in at nearly 1000 pages.
  • The DC series 52 has fifty-two issues spread over four collected volumes. You're going to be a while.
    • The 2008 Trinity series, being another year-long weekly, has a similar problem - except this time it's 52 issues over three volumes.
    • Similarly, there is Countdown to Final Crisis, though nobody would blame you for not reading it.
    • Then there's Batman Eternal, Futures End... DC had a thing for year-long weekly series for a good decade or so.
  • Gold Digger by Fred Perry has 225+ issues of the main series and still going, 6 miniseries side-stories, a number of miscellaneous one-shots, and a three-episode *OAV* made by the artist himself. To make things easier, it often have characters give a refresher at the start of its bite-sized arcs, though if you want to jump in, the first 199 issues were put online for free!
  • The complete Bone series took thirteen years and fifty-five issues to complete. It has since been collected in a handy phonebook form.
  • The famed and still ongoing Usagi Yojimbo has three series that add up to over 200 issues, plus three separate graphic novels.
  • Cerebus the Aardvark: The series clocks in at 300 issues, spread over about a dozen phonebook volumes (though some are a bit thinner).
  • Spider-Man: Spider-Man has had various titles of various lengths including; The Amazing Spider-Man (700), The Spectacular Spider-Man (300), Web of Spider-Man (141), Peter Parker: Spider-Man (155), and Marvel Team-Up (186) as his longest running titles. Then add in some 55 limited series about him and his appearances in other comics.
  • Many Marvel comics in general would qualify such as Iron Man and the X-Men. While the Civil War (2006) crossover is only 7 issues long, with all the various tie-ins across the various series', the issue total comes in around 200. It's made worse by the fact that few, if any, of these crossovers that span the entire publishing run are collected as a whole volume; the main series is collected in a single volume, while the tie-in issues are collected under their own individual titles, with the crossover as a sub-title. Moreover, since events in each individual title are influenced by not only the main series of the crossover, but events in other titles as well, one wishing to read chronologically would have to bounce back and forth between titles/trades to get the story in order. Thus we have the reader reaction known as "Event Fatigue"—not only weary of the convoluted way these crossover events are told, but equally weary of the fact that sometimes readers are given barely a month or two of publications to absorb the new status quo before a new event launches and shakes things up all over again. One wonders how a new reader could ever manage to get on board when current readers are getting tired of the cycle.
  • Judge Dredd has appeared in around 1700 issues of 2000 AD and 300 issues of the Judge Dredd Megazine. However, the Dredd segment in 2000 AD isn't particularly long.
  • The Walt Disney comics have been at it since the characters were created. Uncle Scrooge? 1947. Donald Duck? 1934. Mickey Mouse? 1928. All around the globe, too!
  • Hellblazer: John Constantine's original run clocked up 300 monthly issues, plus specials and original graphic novels. The trade paperbacks originally weren't even numbered, though Vertigo finally corrected that.
  • The Beano and The Dandy have both been running for more than 70 years and have been going for over 3500 issues each so there is a lot of stuff to read if you must read it all. The comics are Anthology Comics which means some strips have been running for a shorter time, but even then some strips such as Dennis the Menace (UK) have had over 3000 episodes. The Dandy finally ended after 3610 issues in December 2012.
  • Commando Comics has had over 4000 issues, so there's a lot to catch up on. But currently half of the new issues are reprints of older issues.
  • Mexican comic Samurai: John Barry spanned 981 weekly chapters over the course of 19 years.
  • Sonic the Hedgehog:
    • Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics) released its final issues in January 2017 and was confirmed to be cancelled later that year. The final count: 290 issues of the main comic (the officially longest-running franchise-based comic book ever), 94 issues of Sonic Universe, 32 issues of Knuckles' spin-off comic, 5 mini-series totaling 16 issues, 8 specials, 15 Super Sonic Specials, 10 Free Comic Book Day issues, 2 Sonic: Mega Drive issues, several original stories printed in Sonic Archives #5 and throughout Sonic Super Special Magazine and Sonic Super Digest, and, for crossover purposes, Archie & Friends: A Halloween Tale, Sabrina the Teenage Witch #28, Sonic X #40, and Mega Man (Archie Comics) #24-27 and #50-52. That's nearly 500 issues. And if you want to read everything Sonic-related Archie put out, there's 39 more issues of Sonic X plus the eleven issues of Sonic Boom.
    • Sonic the Comic, over in the UK, has a more manageable length: 184 normal issues (everything after was reprints), 9 poster mags, and four specials. And once you're finished with those, there's a fan made continuation.
  • Belgian comic strip Suske en Wiske started off in 1945 and new albums are still produced to this day. Their catalogue has over 338 titles now.
  • Belgian comic strip Nero started in 1947 and ended in 2002, clocking in at 216 titles.
  • Lucky Luke also started off in 1947, but counts only 81 albums at this point.
  • Jommeke is still running since 1955 and has over 274 titles.
  • Tom Poes ran from 1941 until 1986 and has 177 available titles.
  • Secret Wars (2015) is massive. First, there's the main 8-issue mini-series. Not too bad, but that's just the start. There's also the lead up with The Avengers, New Avengers and Avengers World (20 issues total) and then there's the umbrella titles of Secret Wars: Last Days (9 titles), Battleworld (15 titles) and Warzones! (31 titles!). The best thing about this, though, is that you do not need to read all of them to find out what's going on (the Avengers titles bleed into Secret Wars, but Secret Wars is self-contained) and all of the titles are separate on their own, so you don't have to read A-Force to find out what's going on in The Amazing Spider-Man: Renew Your Vows, for instance.
  • Malaysian comic book Gemeilia (Kokko and Mei, or 哥妹俩) also has more than 100 issues since 2003 and shows no signs of stopping. Fortunately, you just go to Malaysia and purchase the Comic Collection volumes (in Chinese, English and Malay). However, if you want to look for the four-comic strip about the series or the comic adaptation of the life of Malaysian-Chinese hero Yap Ah Loy or the Japanese occupation of parts of Southeast Asia during World War II, you better have start to learn Chinese.

    Comic Strips 
  • Newspaper Comics are a troublesome lot: A large majority of them have run a few decades, with some of them still running today. Also newspaper archives before 1970-1980 are sometimes incomplete (especially the Sunday sections), and most papers haven't run an strip's entire existence. And many of these strips have been adapted to diverse media over the years.
  • Dick Tracy has run since October 1931, and the franchise includes the Warren Beatty/Madonna movie, some film serials, a live-action TV show, an animated adaptation and a radio serial.
  • Blondie (1930) started in September 1930. 85 years of not only comic strips, but also a dozen live-action movies, 12 seasons of a radio show, two TV series and two animated specials.
  • Popeye first appeared in Thimble Theater in 1929, but the strip began ten years earlier. While the strip still runs nowadays, the daily strips are reruns.
  • Gasoline Alley and Barney Google And Snuffy Smith both began in 1918, meaning that both have over 30,000 strips each.
  • Mutt and Jeff ran between 1908 to 1982, and the strip actually began in 1907 as "A. Mutt" (Jeff only appeared some time later).
  • Winsor McCay's Little Nemo ran from 1905 to 1923, at roughly 52 pages a year. Wow. You have some reading to do.
  • Similarly The Katzenjammer Kids ran on Sundays between 1897 and 2006, around 109 years, and we can't forget their counterpart The Captain and the Kids which ran from 1914 to 1979.
    • At least the Katzes just had a daily strip briefly... but in the 1910s.
  • Garfield.com as well as GoComics.com has an archive of every Garfield comic strip ever published. There are over 10,000 strips. To put it another way, it's a 45-year-old seven-day-a-week comic. Don't worry, you'll be done in no time!. And don't forget about a dozen TV specials, a 10th anniversary retrospective, two cartoon shows and some TV movies... and probably two films with Bill Murray voicing the Garf.
  • Even worse than Garfield, Doonesbury had a complete archive dating all the way back to 1968 (the GoComics.com archive goes back to 1970). At least Trudeau has taken two sabbaticals (the first in 1982-1985, while the second one began in 2014).
  • GoComics.com also has, amongst dozens of comic strips:
    • The entire Dilbert archive available to registered members. Dilbert has been running more-or-less continuously, 3 panels a day (8 on Sundays) since late 1989. The archive at the official Dilbert site has 5300+ strips.
    • The complete archive of Peanuts, which ran from 1950 to 2000. That's nearly 18,000 strips, not counting reruns. The Complete Peanuts plans on printing every strip in 25 volumes; they're nearing The '90s as of 2013. And we're not counting the specials nor the feature films.
  • The Walt Disney comic strip output can be a nightmare, lasting from 1930 to 1994. There's the Mickey Mouse comic as well as Donald Duck. But Disney also made a Silly Symphonies Sunday-only strip, Uncle Remus, Scamp, True-Life Adventures and Winnie the Pooh. And there were comic adaptations of many of the studio's movies.
  • Mercifully averted with Calvin and Hobbes. The strip only lasted a decade (not counting two sabbaticals by Watterson), so the number of strips published (even when you include the poems and extra comics included in the treasuries) is pretty manageable compared to the above strips. Though of course, quite a few of these strips are fairly wordy due to Calvin's Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness, and the fantasy sequences and even the standard outdoor backgrounds are surprisingly rich in detail for a comic strip, so between keeping a dictionary handy and searching out all the Easter eggs, you'll be at it for quite some time.

    Cross Medium 
  • The Noddy franchise is comprised of 26 books, a 53-episode puppet show from the 50's, a 1963 animated short, another puppet series from the 60's which is mostly lost save for a single episode, 78 episodes over two different Stop Motion series, a 66-episode Kid Com that was a Framing Device for the second set of stop-motion segments, and 243 animated episodes as of March 2020. Not counting the lost 60's series, this would account for a total of 388 collected works related to the character.
  • Roco Kingdom is just one MMORPG. Not much of an archive panic there. But then it catapulted into Cash-Cow Franchise territory and produced four theatrical films, a webtoon with 59 episodes, a TV show called Roco Kingdom Adventure with 144 episodes, and a Live-Action Adaptation with eight episodes, as well as a few licensed books and a heaping pile of merchandise. Pretty impressive for a Pokémon knock-off.
  • Tamagotchi is a surprisingly large franchise to experience in its entirety.
  • BIONICLE has over four dozen books, including short novels, guide books and encyclopedias, a similar amount of comics (with additional pages in the LEGO Magazine), four Direct to Video movies (though the novels also cover the same plots with minor differences), a dozen or so web serials, numerous short animations, online games, short stories (a couple of which weren't published in English), a handful graphic novels and young children's books and loads of info only available on fan wikis and archived fan discussions with the authors. No single medium tells the whole story, though the books have most of the essentials. They are varying levels of canon and are often contradictory, especially the movies, with the wikis filling in the blanks. It was only in the late 2010s and early 2020s that complete fan-made compilations became available. Non-story material like video games, animated adverts, promo CD content and various web clips are also important parts of the franchise. LEGO approves of fans archiving these materials, so most are legally accessible.

    Podcasts 
  • The Best Show began in October 2000 as a weekly radio show, The Best Show on WFMU, broadcast from WFMU in Jersey City, New Jersey (and online at wfmu.org), later releasing music-free podcast episodes starting in 2006 and ending in December 2013, totaling over 500 episodes. The show returned in December 2014 as an independently produced, live streaming internet program and podcast (again with the music played over the air removed from most episodes for legal reasons). Average episodes run up to 3 hours, retaining the format it held for the majority of it's run on WFMU. Additionally, a variety of bonus episodes and spin-off shows have been produced concurrent to the main show.
  • The Doctor Who podcast Radio Free Skaro almost has 600 30-60+ minute long episodes. And that's not even including the special episodes like the 2016 advent calendar episodes which are thankfully only about 5 minutes long each. And of course, there are a few episodes that are almost two hours long. Best have lots of free time on your hands.
  • The Rooster Teeth Podcast celebrated its 500th episode in 2018. While the length of episodes fluctuated in the early days, it eventually settled on being ninety minutes to two hours long on average. And this is just one podcast the company puts out. They have several more.
  • The Super Best Friendcast, the podcast of Two Best Friends Play, only began in August 2013... however, with one episode released a week, averaging 2.74 hours per episode? It would take you nearly 10 days of uninterrupted listening to go from episode 1 to episode 87, for a total of 239.05 hours of Quebec-scented nerd ramblings.
  • Welcome to Night Vale has 170 episodes as of summer 2020, with each running about 30 minutes. Plus a few excusive live show recordings (paid content) and 3 books, which are available in audiobook format.
  • The Magnus Archives has about 200 episodes as of summer 2020note , with the length of the episodes usually varying between about 15 and 30 minutes, but some specials running on for 45 minute or more.
  • The Podcast Noobtoob has 236 episodes which comes to about 220 hours.

    Print Media 
  • Plenty of old magazines have their full scanned archives available online. For example—do you enjoy the humor of Amiga Power? Well, here are all 65 issues. They're rather thick. Hope you have a lot of time.
  • Edge Magazine is currently on issue 372. This is a hell of a lot of reading.
  • Teletext magazine Digitiser has a total page amount of about 90000, about 37000 of which is available on this page.

    Pro Wrestling 
  • The WWE Network has literally thousands of hours of programming on it thanks to WWE's vast library of Professional Wrestling footage. Even if you limited yourself to a single wrestling promotion and era, it could still take hundreds of hours to see everything from that era. Add also to the fact that RAW, NXT, various other wrestling events (like Main Event), original programming, and PPV's are constantly being added every month or in some cases every week. By 2014, the WWE Libraries clocked at 150,000 hours of programming. Luckily, only 40,000 hours are digitized for the WWE Network. That means it would take over 1,600 days, or a little over 4 years non-stop, to watch everything on the Network- back in 2014.

    Puppet Shows 
  • The Funday Pawpet Show's episodes are only available for download that week... which is just as well when you consider there are over 480 episodes of four hours per episode. Yappy later uploaded the entire archive (except for the 9/11 episode) onto the website. Have fun locking yourself in your room for the next 6 months!
  • Les Guignols de l'info is another noteworthy example of this, having a total of 5,704 episodes made, each ranging between 4-9 minutes. And that's not including the La Semaine and L'annee des Guignols editions of the show, 1 made for TV movie, 2 video games, or any of the unreleased sketches.

    Radio 
  • British radio-only soap The Archers surpassed Guiding Light in terms of volume and is showing absolutely no signs of stopping any time soon. SIXTEEN THOUSAND EPISODES.
  • The Brewing Network has this pop up with new listeners. The Session (as of January 2015) has 370 episodes, averaging between 3 and 4 hours. The Jamil Show has over 200 1 hour episodes, Brew Strong has over 150 one hour episodes, Lunch Meet has over 80 episodes and there is of course the relatively new Dr Homebrew and Sour Hour shows. Every month the network puts out four Sessions, two Brew Strongs, two Jamil Shows, one Sour Hour and two Dr Homebrews. Fans also encourage new listeners to listen to the shows from the beginning since a lot of the appeal is getting to know the brewcasters personally and learn about them as people as they live their lives. It makes for a lot of listening.
  • Desert Island Discs has an archive covering the full 70+ years of the show, with a total of 3018 episodes as of February 2015. At 45 minutes per episode, that's a total of 2263 hours, 30 minutes. Alternatively, that can be thought of as 94 days, 7 hours, 30 minutes.

    Roleplay 
  • Destroy the Godmodder: You'd think a simple forum game wouldn't have too much, would you? You'd be dead wrong. With a (current) life-span of just over two years, and an average of about 50 posts a day, some of which are over half an hour of reading material, you've got your work cut out for you. All told, there are two completed sessions, one with just over 6000 posts (which can vary in length anywhere from one line to comparable to multiple novel pages), and another with only 1500 posts of similar length, two others are still ongoing, the shorter of which has capped 3000 posts and is still going strong, and the other with over 18 thousand posts (which often have ridiculous amounts of text in them) plus an off-topic thread with roughly 4000 posts of its own. You've got a lot of reading ahead of you.
  • The crossover roleplay of Narbonic and Girl Genius, The Mad Scientist Wars. The story (at the current time of writing) has reached around 2200 posts (it's a forum story), and the "shop talk" topic is nearing 3300. It's often a good idea to read the shop-talk topic as well, or else you may miss out on exposition that isn't in the story.
  • Mahou MUSH celebrated 1000 scenes in February 2016, less than a year after opening. As of August 2016, the count is almost 1800 — not counting player-submitted cutscenes, of which there are nearly 200 — and more content is added on a near-daily basis.
  • Pokémon: Rise of the Rockets has been running for five years at the time of writing, and as a result has quite a lot of back story to take in—over 150 pages of readable content, in fact. And that's only partially taking into account the other 300+ pages of content that were lost with the BZPower hacking of 2013, covering the story's earliest days and plot arcs. Needless to say, it can be rather difficult to jump into the game.
  • Survival of the Fittest is a Battle Royale-based roleplay in which a group of high school students is kidnapped and forced to kill each other until only one of them is still alive. It is currently in its fourth round, but the first three versions of the game are still on the forum - good luck reading through the deaths of over 100 characters per game, including a grand total of 274 deaths by the end of v4.
  • Warrens of Oric the Awesome just hit its 5000 posts mark — that's over 300 pages, with updates almost every 5 to 20 posts.
  • Embers in the Dusk is over 700 threadmarks, about 2500 total story posts, and over 140,000 forum posts as of January 2020. In April, the second part was started, 900 pages as of October 2021. The 1d4chan recap alone is around 30,000 words as of early 2022.
  • NoPixel: Considering NoPixel runs exclusively on Switching P.O.V., and that you'd have combined hours upon hours upon hours of every single person who has ever livestreamed NoPixel on Twitch or Facebook Gaming — and we're talking multiple streamers for pretty much every day since about 2017 — you'd have an impossible task ahead of you if you tried to watch every single NoPixel VOD in full. The general rule of thumb is to watch clips of your favorite character, or YouTube recaps of clips and storylines, but even these can take a good while depending on how much you want to watch.

    Tabletop Games 
  • Warhammer 40,000 with its nine editions, dozens of sourcebooks, hundreds of novels, and many, many spinoffs...
  • The Worlds of Darkness:
  • White Wolf's other major gameline, Exalted, clocks up 70+ books between the first and second editions.
  • GURPS is no slouch on this score, with over 300 supplements.
  • If you thought the other games on this list were bad, you haven't seen the grandaddy of them all, Dungeons & Dragons. Just as an example, you could expect at least a book a month during 3.5e's heyday, not counting published adventures and setting-specific sourcebooks or the many years of both Dragon Magazine and Dungeon Magazine providing even more supplementary material.
  • BattleTech and its expanded universe have accumulated a massive repertoire of over a hundred novels and a hundred sourcebooks due to it being around since 1984. The plot spanning over a hundred years certainly complicates matters, as novels written later in the timeline will obviously spoil developments in earlier novels.

    Toys 
  • The Gogo's Crazy Bones series of collectible figurines has two incarnations, one from the 90's and one from the late 2000's. They both have a hefty amount of characters to collect, with the combined number being over 1,000. Pretty impressive for a blind bag collectable series to begin with, but it gets worse if you're aiming to collect all the characters' color variations - a criteria that's outright impossible for the 90's sets since they don't have restrictions on colors.
  • The Hot Wheels toys have been around since 1969, producing all sorts of toy cars with varying degrees of quirkiness to their designs. There's also the playsets, such as the build-it-yourself race tracks, as well as numerous Animated Adaptations and Licensed Games if you're a completionist.
  • Want to start collecting LEGO sets? Hope you've got lots of time and money to spend. You'd have upwards of 15,000 sets to seek out, and with older sets you may have to look hard. And then there's all the Animated Adaptations, Licensed Games, and other adaptations, if you're going to go further.
  • crayoncollecting,com — Crayola currently has had nearly a thousand color names (although some colors have had more than one name—and the same name has sometimes been used for different colors). Add in variations in packaging (boxes and crayon wrappers) and the number multiplies dramatically. And then there are numerous other manufacturers of crayons.

    Web Animation 
  • The long-running web cartoon Homestar Runner. Heavy on in-jokes, updated nearly every week between 2002 and 2009. The Strong Bad Emails are a start, but those alone have over 200 episodes. Maybe the rather long seemingly indefinite sin hiatus since 2010 isn't a bad thing after all. There is a way you can watch them all in order. But still, DAMN! Look at that list! Adding up all the non-"(N/A)" values, that is 22 hours, 11 minutes and 2 seconds of Flash animation to go through. In 2014, The Brothers Chap have announced that new content is coming. Better prepare for a long hard Archive Binge.
  • After 100 episodes, the Red vs. Blue machinima series started with a fresh scenario specifically to avert Archive Panic, specially as Rooster Teeth's website didn't have every episode free for non-subscribers. But now all the episodes are readily available, on RT or YouTube, for an Archive Binge that ultimately surpasses 24 hours of content. The first 15 seasons consisted of around 20 episodes of anywhere from 3 to 15 minutes long. The three afterwards were shorter on the episode count, while still having chapters rarely below 9 minutes. Each season's DVD has all of the episodes cut together into one Compilation Movie, lasting at least an hour and a half each (also available on various VOD services and the show's own YouTube channel). And it gets worse if seeking the PSAs and other special episodes, many of whom only exist through fan uploads.
  • The art blog of the late animator Michael Sporn was regularly updated with literally thousands of pieces of animation artwork, and it managed to reach 2,882 posts total.
  • Pencilmation currently has over 170 episodes (as of January 2018). Note that, since 2017, new shorts come out twice-a-week, unheard of for an online animated series.
  • Flash archives like this have wasted days and days of free time. It doesn't help that many of them are simple loops that one can play for hours upon end.
  • AstroLOLogy has 288 episodes as of the completion of Season 2, though thankfully the episodes are very short, being only around 2 minutes a piece.
  • Revenge Films: As of November 21, 2023, the English channel has 675 videos and counting, while the Japanese channel has a total of 1,852 videos.

    Web Original 
  • TV Tropes. Which, apparently◊, some people have tried to read in its entirety. As of March 29, 2010, there are 17916 tropes on the wiki, and the number is growing very rapidly every day. Even if you just skim each one, it will take you a lot of time... especially considering that there's no page which lists just the tropes — the most you can hope for is either the complete list of articles (which is so long that it will likely break your browser) or reading every single index. Referenced here by xkcd.
  • Several of the longtime wikis take very long to be read in their entirety, and few (if any) have actually attempted that. Wikipedia, in its English language alone, has more than six million articles as of this writing. The Spanish and German versions are no slouches either. That's not even getting into the total number of pages, which are apparently around forty million.
  • To date, Animation Resources has published 425 articles about animation and art since 2004, and it is still regularly updated to this day.
  • The art blog of Dinotopia creator James Gurney has amassed over 4,500 posts, and is updated daily.
  • The 4chan Archives. Whenever a thread becomes considered "epic" on 4chan, it can be voted to go to the Archives. Almost every board has a section in said Archives. Each page has around ten threads on it, and page numbers vary from a few to the infamous /b/'s section, which, to say the least, is huge. Also note that Epic Fail Guy moments, memes, and various other categories get their own sections, and you've just taken out a good chunk of your free time trying to read them all. Oh, and there's always more coming in. Enjoy your lulzy prison...
    • Jason Scott was going to upload an archive of TEN MILLION 4chan threads, but apparently backed out.
    • There are now sites dedicated to automatically archiving whole boards. Anything that gets posted to the majority of Popular boards is now forever archived.
  • Not only is the Protectors of the Plot Continuum a large set of stories, it's really freakin' confusing for a newbie to try and track down them all — especially with the collapse of GeoCities taking out what seems like half of it. The people at the group's board tend to be helpful, though.
  • The Whateley Universe. You're fine when you look at the homepage and see some stories, but then you go find the list of stories in chronological (in-universe) order, and you realize there's a huge amount of text there. The Phase stories alone are nearing the number of words of all seven Harry Potter books combined, and s/he's only one of a couple dozen main characters. This is made all the worse in the new site, since the stories aren't all in order, and even finding them is a chore. It is on the site owners' list to work on, but they have been swamped with more pressing issues. While the fan-produced wiki and 'recommended starting points' pages help, as of mid-2019 there are over 300 stories (with 500+ separate story chapters) for the Gen 1 series alone, some of which qualify as Doorstoppers on their own, for a total of over 13 million words (roughly the size of 150 novels of 300 pages each).
  • Like motivational posters? Here are most of the ones from RPG.net's forum threads. At the bottom of the page? Links to over a half a dozen other archives of different posters. Have fun.
  • Neopets has a self-maintained in side newspaper titled The Neopian Times. While the Editorial and Comics are fairly short, there's also been roughly ten short stories, ten sections of longer stories, and ten articles about the site for twenty issues short of ten years solid, and about 500 issues total. The comics section alone is longer than most of the long-running webcomics here. What's worse? A comic could die mid-arc, before the Neopets Team told people to send in the whole arc at once to prevent that.
  • Damn You Autocorrect, which has only been in existence for ten months, has an archive of, at the time of writing, 3786 images. It adds upwards of 15 images daily. Ulch. Scratch that. Seven months later and it has almost 6000.
  • The SCP Foundation:
    • There are several thousand anomalous items documented, and more are written up every day (even if about half of them quickly get deleted). And once you make your way through the entire list? There's still the Foundation Tales section (as well as the collection of general creepypasta stories). Make sure you have a comfortable chair... and can handle being afraid to sleep at night. Now up to over 5,000, to the point that they had to make Series II to VI SCPs to make space for the new entries. In addition to the standard Foundation Tales, there are now entire alt-continuity hubs, most of which consist of nearly a dozen separate, but intrinsically connected, stories. Get a really comfy chair.
    • In-universe, there's the poor researcher chronicled in SCP-4010, who was assigned to create a Foundation timeline. It takes her over a year, because concealing so many oft-contradictory pages (including the 001 proposals) is tough - and causes unexpected effects.
  • Parodied by The Onion in an "American Voices" interview asking people what they considered the biggest international news story in 2012. One respondant says "Ugh, I have no idea. I've been putting off reading this one article from Feb. 17, 2003 that I started, and I don't want to skip ahead until I've finished it."
  • Not Always Right currently has more than 1000 pages at ten stories a page. And when you're done with them, there are four spin-off sites (though none of them are nearly as long). A couple years ago, they added a comment section to each story, so now they take twice as long to read (a couple minutes to read the story, a couple more minutes to read peoples' reactions).
  • The author of Worm is on a regular schedule of posting seven-to-ten thousand word chapters at least twice a week, frequently thrice. A reader of the story broke it down into an average of 5406 words per update over the course of two and a half years. Worm is 1,535,255 words long as of the last chapter in the story. While the serial nature of the story makes it relatively easy to spread out an Archive Binge over weeks or months, considering that ~150,000 words is more than enough to get a book into doorstopper range, the total length is more than enough to make a shelf full of them. With the completion of the story, it totals 1.681 million words, +-1,000 based on various counts. Wildbow followed that up with Pact which is roughly 950k words written in 15-16 months, and then started Twig, which updated tri-weekly for 30-31 months. Then, wrote a sequel to Worm's, Ward which ended up clocking in at 1.94 million words. His next work, Pale, a sequel to Pact, began uploading just 3 days after Ward had concluded.
  • The Comics Curmudgeon got its start in 2004 and has been updating nearly daily since. And you basically have to read all of it to follow it, as otherwise you'll appear in the middle of a comics storyline (the blog covers a lot of soap opera strips, which have long-running storylines that can run for months) and Josh has a lot of running gags that only make sense if you've been reading since they first came up.
  • The Wandering Inn is over 10 million words long. To contextualize this, the entire Harry Potter series is just shy of 1.1 million words, and The Wheel of Time series, consisting of 14 books, each a Doorstopper in their own right, clocks in at "just" 4.4 million words. As if having all that to try and catch up on isn't intimidating enough, the author also writes two new chapters a week, typically somewhere between 10-25k words long each, meaning that you've got to read a novella worth or so each week just to avoid falling further behind, nevermind actually catching up.
  • The Internet Archive and Wayback Machine have a very large archives of defunct websites, videos, files, you name it, they most likely have it.
  • The King's Avatar, a Chinese online serial novel. At over 1700 chapters, multiple characters belonging to many different guilds/teams, and a whole ton of game mechanics to Glory, it's hard to chronicle all of Ye Xiu's antics without pulling off more than one read-through of the web novel.

    Web Videos 
  • In general, any long-running YouTube channel is likely to have hundreds, if not thousands of videos that they have uploaded over the years, all of which are available for public viewing.
  • There are over 1700 "Drew Pickles Goes To" videos and OVER 220,000 "Secret Missing Episodes", and that's not even including the countless other Barney Bunch videos. In short, you have to be completely insane to watch all of it.
  • Bronies React. You start down the playlist and it seems fine, only ten to fifteen minute long videos. Then they start growing... And growing... Until they're regularly 40 minutes to an hour long. And there are over one hundred of them. Even paying attention to only show reactions and ignoring the bonus content, it's 21+ hours of footage.
  • Pooh's Adventures. Several videos made by several makers, almost all taken down due to copyright. Which video should you start with depends... And most videos tend to split each other in parts, so naturally, depending on the video, you'll be taking a while to watch them all (if so).
  • YouTube LP'er SSoHPKC has over 8000 videos spanned over 3 years, with a lot of games that he has played on release date, and most Minecraft custom maps. If you don't know exactly what you're looking for in his videos, then you're not going to find it. He even has a second account, only with a hundred videos on there.
  • NintendoCapriSun has over 2300 videos spread out over three accounts with more added each day.
  • British Youtuber Tear Of Grace has more than 1700 video game montages and playthroughs, each of them between ten and twenty minutes long, with his longest series having over 300 episodes.
  • YouTube LP'er ZetaPlays has over 5100 videos, most of them singular videos of games that he only played for five minutes because they were too boring. Want to find a game that he played? Good luck.
  • Chuggaaconroy has a over 1600 videos in his solo projects.
  • Games Done Quick has been doing marathons semianually since 2010 (most of them week-long) and has been doing speedrun related content daily since 2019. Good luck watching it all.
  • Stephen Georg of StephenVlog and StephenPlays has a total of over 4000 videos across both of his channels due to having a daily vlog and his let's play channel having at least one video go up every day
  • CO Dblackops PS, a collection of recorded Call of Duty: Black Ops clips, is an extreme example for a YouTube channel with OVER ONE MILLION UPLOADS at its peak. Several videos there have since been deleted, and it's nearly impossible to see all in one sitting.
  • Channel Awesome. Even just catching up to the more popular series like The Nostalgia Critic, The Spoony Experiment, and Atop the Fourth Wall is pretty intimidating by this point...then you consider that as the site goes on there's more and more crossovers and in-jokes between an ever-growing number of contributors, meaning that for everything to make sense you'll need to go all over the site trying to watch everything in chronological order. It's even worse if they happen to have stories that arc over dozens of reviews.
  • LoadingReadyRun has enjoyed a very robust run over the years. In 2023, they are holding their 20th anniversary. They produced at least one video a week for 11 years; even at an average of only of 3 minutes per video, that's 28.6 hours of video to watch. Then came all the bonus videos and spinoffs, which would take you a while to watch them all. (Fortunately, continuity is only important within the commodoreHustle sub-series). After 6 years, LoadingReadyRun struck a deal to produce their shorts for The Escapist, and for the following 5 years of weekly sketch comedy, their videos appeared there. They continued to produce spinoffs for The Escapist after the finale of their sketch comedy. A few months after the end of their sketch comedy, The Escapist had some in-house upheavals and LRR decided not to renew their contract (along with a number of other creators, which is outlined on The Escapist's page). However, after transferring back to YouTube, the archives have grown even deeper for the following eight years, once you count the numerous podcasts, streams, and other series that LRR has put out, died, and sometimes revived in the intervening years. Given that they could be streaming a 3-hour-long gaming session on Twitch while also releasing a 1-hour-long podcast and a 15-minute scripted video on YouTube at the same time, the only way you could catch up on everything is to make LRR more than a full-time job. The way it's OK to skip a lot of it is that their content has become so wide-ranging in topics (Magic: The Gathering, Marvel movies, WWE, video games, young adult literature, old 80s sitcom rewatches, a road trip show in the style of Top Gear, a yearly telethon for charity, how to make coffee better, etc.) that you probably aren't interested in everything they do anyway.
  • Classic Game Room has uploaded over 1400 videos of variable length since the debut of its YouTube channel in late 2007, and new videos gets added pratically every days. And that's not counting the sister "CGR Undertow" channel.
  • raocow has over 10,000 videos in several host websites, and he usually uploads two new videos nearly every single day, each one of an average length of 15 minutes or so. You'll literally spend months just to watch his most emblematic series. His daily video upload schedule increased to three in August 2017, when he started his 'All the MegaMen' project. Even after that ended in May 2019, he promptly moved straight on to a new project: 'All the Sonics'.
  • The VlogBrothers have been making YouTube videos since January 2007 for a rough total of 980 videos, a number that continues to rise at a rate of two per week. That's not even counting the numerous other channels that they have, including Hankgames, The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, SciShow, Crash Course, Truth or Fail, and Hank's Channel, almost all of which have referenced or nodded to each other in various ways and played off of knowledge of events from previous videos, bringing the total number of videos to 2000. While it is possible for new Nerdfighters to follow them without knowing exactly where these injokes came from, the urge to watch the 980 main-channel videos from the beginning can be too great to resist, leading to many a Nerdfighter wasting their summer. They do, however, try to ease this anxiety by providing a playlist of twenty essential videos, including the one that shows the origin of the term 'Nerdfighter'.
  • Internet Killed Television, a vlog series made by Charles Trippy about his daily life, where he put up a 10-20 minute video daily. He's on his 6th year and has done over 2000 days.
  • Smosh with not just the 200+ videos on their main channel, there's also the Ianh channel, which contains several episodes of Ian is Bored, Lunchtime with Smosh, and Smosh pit weekly, the Smosh games channel which has two videos everyday, plus three more every weekend, the El Smosh channel with spanish dubbed Smosh videos, The Shut up Cartoons channel, with several cartoons, and finally, the Watch us live and stuff channel with Anthony and his fiancee Kalel vlogging.
  • Retsupurae reached over 600 videos in 2013. Most are thankfully just 10 minutes long, but they also do quite a few hours-long commentary on full games.
  • The Theorizer: More specifically, Mort Theory. This documentary on the life, crimes, and potential of Mort from the Madagascar franchise is compiled on Theorizer's channel in 20+ videos, adding up to over seven hours in length when put together.
  • Video Games Awesome! has been recording and uploading full-length, unedited playthroughs of games since at least early 2011. That's only a few years, but each episode can last anywhere from three to five hours, and some games have more than ten episodes apiece. They also average four or five shows a week, so their archive is constantly expanding. Watching all their content from the very beginning requires serious dedication, and would probably take several months. Just glancing at their list of episodes is overwhelming.
  • Dungeons & Dragons show Critical Role has episodes that usually run for about 3 to 4 hours, with the longest one, the Campaign 2 finale, being just over 7 hours long. Campaign 1 has 115 episodes, Campaign 2 has 141 and Campaign 3 is ongoing, with a handful of canon one-shots and specials as well. (To facilitate catching up for new viewers, there are podcast versions of both campaigns available, with the announcements, sponsor plugging and the break edited out.) And then there are a few dozen one-shot specials and mini-series, some of which are connected to the main campaigns, but most use different RPG systems, or an entirely different setting and characters, and can therefore be watched independently. And then there are over 150 episodes of the Companion Show Talks Machina where the cast answers questions about their characters and the ongoing story, plus a few earlier, more informal Q&A sessions. And the team also makes a number of other entertaining, but non-fictional shows about various geeky pursuits (video games, drawing, etc.), if you still need more content to fill your time...
  • Ask Lovecraft has been created in June 2012. Four years later, there are more than 600 episodes and counting.
  • The Completionist.
    • Jirard flat out admitted he stopped giving the number episode in the video's title because it was starting to scare potential viewers off. May 2021 brought the 400th episode with Final Fantasy VIII, and that's not counting other video series on the channel like Top Tens, Defend It!, The Hype, and the occasional one off video. Add to that his other channels, and you'll be busy for a while.
    • For his 100th episode, Jirard released a poster that amounted to a giant checklist of his first 100 games, challenging everyone to complete them all. He released another after his 200th episode. Completing all those games yourself is panic on its own.
  • Game Grumps have put up over 8300 videos as of their launch in 2012. Typical length is around 10 minutes, but some surpass 1 hour, and even now that they've bumped their typical video length to between 30 and 60 minutes they've shown no signs of slowing down. It's not helped that they only have a very small cherry-picked assortment of playlists on their own channel and don't bother to number their videos anymore, meaning viewers have to rely on fan-made playlists that are often obsolete or out-of-order, or skim through the fan-made wiki to create their own, just to do an Archive Binge and get caught up.
  • The Let's Play Index attempts to carry out this trope by use of a bot that crawls Youtube in search of Let's Players to add to its ever-growing database.
  • The Music Video Show started in 2013, splitting itself into (mostly) 25 episode seasons. With each episode being 3-6 minutes (sometimes over that) and it being a weekly show, it has over 200 episodes, a bit daunting for those starting out from the beginning. It concluded in 2020 with around 300 episodes.
  • The Webdriver Torso channel on YouTube has uploaded over 600,000 videos. Thankfully, a vast majority of them are only 11 seconds long.
  • Northernlion has over 3000 episodes of The Binding of Isaac split between the original game and its expansion, the remake and all of its expansions, and a few Game Mods. Episodes range from twenty minutes to an hour. And that's just his Isaac series.
  • The videos of MauLer are already very long, but some videos construct a single review that goes on for over three hours, including one talking about The Force Awakens, that when all together, would take over eight hours to watch.
  • Vlog After College has 600+ videos on its main channel dedicated to Ryen's life and later his corgi's. Although each video is less than 20 minutes long on average, it would take forever to watch all of them. Not to mention all the videos on their side channel.
  • With Nijisanji having a large cast, it can be difficult to catch up for people watching a large cast with multiple streams. Worse of all, some streamers can go on for several long hours per-day.
  • Oddity Archive has produced well over 200 episodes since its premiere in the early 2010's and is still going as of 2021.
  • The total amount of Dream SMP content in terms of Twitch streams is over 15,000 watch hours and counting, split across over 30 different perspectives. Good luck trying to get through them all, especially since Twitch vods are deleted two months after they are livestreamed, and many of the content creators don't re-upload the vods on YouTube, leaving the fans to be responsible for preserving them.
  • Stampylongnose:
    • Stampy's Lovely World is a Minecraft Let's Play series with 823 episodes, and has been releasing new episodes once or twice a week (excluding holiday specials and the Series Hiatus it underwent between November 2018 and August 2020) between 2012 and 2023. It would take an estimated 10 days without sleep just trying to get through the first 700 episodes, and that's not counting its spin-off series, Stampy's Funland, or the Behind the Scenes videos, which are implied to be canon as well.
    • Stampy's other series are nothing to slouch at either. Quest takes place over the course of 4 years and numbers at 225 episodes (the first 25 spent trying to kill the Ender Dragon, the next 200 spent... being Cloudcuckoolanders with Squid), and the Dens series with Sqaishey has over 340 episodes over 4 sub-series and almost 7 years' worth of weekly uploads. Oh, and did we mention the Minecraft: Story Mode playthroughs? The challenge series? Building Time? The livestreams, including the Relearning Minecraft series? The non-Minecraft content? Hoo boy, we have got a lot of work to do if you want to watch all his videos... on his main channel.
  • SiIvaGunner has uploaded over 18,000 currently available videos, which can range from less than one second to over FOUR HOURS! Most of these are high-quality music rips, but there are also album announcements, takeover announcements, two whole tournaments, and several video series detailing the channel's lore. There also exists album-exclusive content, as well as hundreds of blocked, lost, deleted, restricted, unlisted, or otherwise missing videos...and that's ignoring the now-deleted spin-off channel Flustered Fernando and countless fan channels. Given the channel's upload schedule has almost always called for multiple uploads every day, you're better off not trying to watch everything. Thankfully, it won't take quite as long to get caught up on the channel's lore, since videos that concern it are very infrequent, averting this entirely.
  • Given that anytime someone was online, they were required to be streaming, there's a lot of content for SMPLive. A lot of it is lost to time.

    Real Life 
  • Human History is pretty long. To give an idea, to compile even four important historical events for every day of a year from the last 2000 years would amount to around 2,300,000 anecdotes total. Compounded by its sheer number of editors, updated continuously for over ten thousand years. Thankfully, though, there are many parts you can gloss over if you just want to focus on one storyline. Heck, there are some storylines you can get into part way through without too much problems. However, while many parts can function independently of each other there are still hundreds of thousands of stories to look at. And with the world's nations becoming increasingly more dependent on each other, glossing over parts can remove some much needed clarifiers. And while the Crisis Crossover World War I and its sequel World War II can be read on their own, to really get the full story you need to read all of the tie-ins. And then of course there's the next sequel, Cold War, not to mention all the Spin-Offs... and how they all come back to play some sort of role in the epic Series Fauxnale The War on Terror... and even more sequels and future arcs are still planned with no end in sight.
  • Family History:
    • It's a leading cause of people giving up on their family history. Some people approach their family history just curious about their family name or recent generations only to find that the farther you go back the number of people and family names increase exponentially. It eventually gets better, due to people marrying (distant, or sometimes not-so-distant) relations. Most geneticists estimate that for any given person, the number of distinct ancestors alive at any one time reaches a maximum sometime around 1200 AD. This is called "pedigree collapse" and it has to happen, because 800 years (30 generations or so) ago there would have been 2^30 ... over a billion ... slots to fill in your family tree, and only around 400 million people on Earth to fill them.
    • In China, anyone not directly related to you in some way past 5 generations is considered to no longer be considered "family" even if they share a common surname. This is because there are so many Chinese people of the same names that if this wasn't a thing, one generation's history can fill a library.
  • Most sports have a long, dense history of epic matches, victories, losses, disappointments and controversies, so even the most dedicated fans of just one player or team might miss the most obscure details. This holds especially true for baseball and association football, because they're among the most widespread in the world. And considering that the biggest sports leagues - the NFL, to give a good example - own the histories of all the competing, semipro and minor-league teams (some of them extremely obscure) that have merged with the mainstream promotions over the years, even a site like NFL.com isn't big enough to hold all that data. Indeed, there are hundreds - perhaps even thousands - of players who could be loosely classified as "pro" who have effectively disappeared off the face of the earth...or disappeared from human memory entirely.
  • Written history has been around for 5,000 years. That certainly seems like a lot, but then you remember Homo sapiens have been around for over 200,000 years. And if you think that's a lot tools have existed for over two million years. We obviously only have fossils to tell what happened then. Measuring the speeds and distances of the galaxies we've calculated that the Universe is 13.7 billion years old, with the Earth itself being 4.5 billion years old. While we have yet to encounter intelligent life on other planets, you could add those in too. Memorably illustrated in an episode of Time Team looking at the oldest tools discovered in the British Isles. Mick Aston and Tony Robinson stood at one end of a football pitch, and Mick told Tony that their end was the present day, and the other end was the period when the tools were made, then told him to take a single step. "You're in the Neolithic."

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