Jokes aside. IT-worker and stand-up comedian Vitalik Kremin has changed his usual occupations to serve in the army, but is developing his own website StandUpHub. How the automatic catalog of Ukrainian stand-up works

However, in his free time from official duties, Vitaliy still found an occupation related to both IT and stand-up — he develops his own website StandUpHub, which is an automatic and, according to the developer, the most complete catalog of Ukrainian stand-up during the full-scale invasion. The site pulls up stand-up videos from all YouTube channels of Ukrainian comedians, and, in addition, according to a given algorithm, forms a rating of stand-ups based on their statistics on YouTube. By the way, Vitaliy himself is in 15th place out of 146 comedians presented in the rating at the time of publication of this material.

dev.ua talked to Vitaly Kremen about his mobilization, military service, and support from his previous employer, GlobalLogic; about the creation of the StandUpHub website and how his «brainchild» is perceived in the stand-up crowd; about the objectivity of the StandUpHub rating and why there are no videos in Russian on this site and there will never be. And also — why the developer used a very direct and unambiguous association with PornHub when creating his stand-up website, for which he is sometimes criticized by some users of social networks, and whether he hopes to somehow monetize his project. Among other things, the IT stand-up artist shared that as soon as the website he (and AI) created began to be indexed normally, an incomprehensible «clone» appeared on it — someone stole the idea. About all this and more — in a large interview with Vitaly Kremen.

«I was morally preparing for mobilization, but it still came as quite a surprise»

— Vitaly, how long ago and how exactly did you join the army? What tasks does the service involve?

I’ve been in the army since around New Year’s, which is about eight months. I can’t say that it was completely voluntary, because I still ended up in the Armed Forces through mobilization.

Currently, I have been assigned to a staff job — the functionality is similar to that of a clerk, but the tasks are a bit more complex. In fact, I serve in the headquarters of one of the military units of the Air Force and spend almost the entire working day at the computer.

— You are a developer. Wasn’t it possible to do professional IT work in the Defense Forces?

— Unfortunately, at the time of mobilization, there was no such choice. There were two options: infantry and the Air Force, which is where I ended up. But without positions specifically in programming.

We have a unit — a kind of repair shop for UAV interceptors. But the guys there are mainly engaged in maintenance and repair, we don’t program anything ourselves and we don’t develop any software for this.

By the way, a stand-up video is coming out soon, where I intend to talk in detail about my service. The video will be released on my website StandUpHub, which parses all Ukrainian stand-up from YouTube, and on our YouTube channel «CherepaHa».

— Tell us a little more about the circumstances of your mobilization. Because now they are completely different.

— I would say that everything was completely within the law. A notification group from the RTCC and SP together with police representatives approached me on the street. They had cameras turned on and asked to check my «Reserve+». I did not have a wanted note in the «Reserve», but I had not passed the VLK either. In fact, this means one of the violations of the rules of military registration, so it is automatically a reason for referral to the TCK. There they immediately give you a referral to pass the VLK, and if you pass the VLK and are recognized as fit or limitedly fit, then this is tantamount to mobilization.

Communication was normal, the only thing was that the notification group promised me that I would just go through the VLK and I wouldn’t be mobilized right away. Of course, I understood that they were saying this purely to reassure me, because it was absolutely untrue. And that’s what happened.

With a schedule where you perform twice a week and are constantly moving around the city, sooner or later it was bound to happen. I understood it, I was mentally preparing myself, but it still happened at one point and quite unexpectedly.

— Your last IT employer was GlobalLogic. Did they keep your salary for a certain period after mobilization?

— If I’m not mistaken, they accompany their employees who were mobilized for a year. For the first few months after mobilization, they receive a full salary, and then some percentage of it, I don’t remember exactly what.

Everything is very clear — they literally send you a statement of how much they will pay you during the year.

But Global is great in this regard. They organized everything themselves, because I was already in the unit. I just sent them a document stating that I was included in the unit’s list and that was it.

So I’m very glad that the company didn’t leave me alone right after mobilization and supported me throughout the year.

— And often IT workers can count on other support from their companies when their divisions are critically lacking something. Have you ever made such requests?

— I did not contact GlobalLogic directly with this, and there are several reasons for this. First, Global has a huge number of employees. And I am sure that some of the company’s employees who ended up in the Defense Forces are right on the front lines. So they need this help much more than I do in my headquarters position.

In addition, I have my own media presence. So, the needs that arose for me or my closest friends, I can still cover through my Instagram. Plus, my colleagues from my stand-up club Lviv City Stand Up and the YouTube channel «CherepaHa» also always helped when it was necessary to cover some collection. I didn’t collect much, but I did collect twice, and tried to implement it on my own.

«Many people write that black and yellow, like on PornHub, is bad manners. Maybe so, but I thought I’d change it.»

— Let’s go directly to your website StandUpHub. I think absolutely all readers of dev.ua understand what the reference is. But doesn’t it seem a bit hackneyed to you, because dozens of different businesses are trying to adapt PornHub’s symbols to their own? Why did they also go this way?

— At the very beginning, it was just a joke — a satirical reference to PornHub: instead of porn videos, upload stand-up videos. But over time, it grew into a kind of information portal, where there is a lot of everything.

And even if you subscribe to all 40+ Ukrainian comedians, it can be a bit of a mess and you will only be recommended one or two big channels at random. And here people who are interested in Ukrainian stand-up just go to the site and see — yes, so many new videos were released this month. Or: «Oh, here’s some completely new dude! I’ll watch him.» Actually, the idea is actually close to PornHub, because everything there is also built on constantly updating content.

My idea: first offer the newest videos for stand-up fans, and below that, provide selections like «best of the past six months» or «forgotten classics.» Here you can watch old videos by Vasya Baydak or Anton Tymoshenko, which have already gained almost a million views each.

Below you can sort by clubs — «Underground Standup», «Wandering Standup», our channel «CherepaXA» and Lviv Standup Battle Club. These will be selections from specific clubs.

So the idea is not just to go to the site and pick up some stand-up video for yourself, but to discover someone new. Because there are comedians with 100 or 200 views, but they have a high percentage of likes. That is, it is clear that the people who watch them like these videos. So why not show this to a wider audience?

Well, as for the name StandUpHub, as I said, it was a joke. Maybe I’ll change the colors over time, because a lot of people write in the comments that the black and yellow color of PornHub is bad manners. Maybe it is bad manners, but it occurred to me to change it all at this stage.

— How long ago did you create this website and what efforts did you put into it?

— I started doing it literally two weeks before I was mobilized, which was December 2025. It started as a standard weekend project. I sat and thought — there are a lot of comedians, but there is no tool or rating that can compare one comedian with another.

I graduated from the Faculty of Applied Mathematics, and as a mathematician, I have always been interested in displaying some numbers, making tables, comparing something, and drawing graphs.

I started researching how such ratings are made. I know that Netflix has a closed rating for internal use. There are many other music ratings, like the Billboard chart. They all take into account a number of parameters.

I think I managed to make a rating of Ukrainian stand-up comedians that more or less reflects the real picture. But this is not a rating of who is funnier, but a rating of audience reach on YouTube.

— Was it vibecoding? Did you use any AI tools? Tell me what they were.

— At first, I just made a request to ChatGPT. He sent me Python scripts that parse YouTube, that is, they go through all the channels through the YouTube API and build JSON with all the comedians — their videos, timing, views, and all the data needed for the rating. ChatGPT wrote this for me, and based on it, I already made a website. ChatGPT also helped me with this, because I’m a C/C++ developer, and I don’t really know how it’s all built, how to host it correctly, how to route all these domain names correctly, and so on.

I hosted it on GitHub Actions — the site is completely static, it is rebuilt every day, but there is no database there. Everything that the scripts parsed is stored on the site, and the next day it is regenerated anew. ChatGPT also suggested that I do this — he said that this is a normal approach for such sites.

Later, when the site grew a bit, I could no longer just dump my old version into ChatGPT and say in the prompt: «add something to me.» Then I started using Copilot: I simply open the project of this site in Visual Studio Code, that is, the repository from GitHub, and it adds new functionality, fixes something, adds something, in the context of my site.

— And how many people are already watching stand-up comedy through your website, visiting it? Am I understanding correctly that the comedians' YouTube views are not affected by this?

— Yes, because it’s essentially an aggregator. Otherwise, I would have to download these videos from YouTube and store them somewhere separately. So the view is credited to the channel from which the video was taken.

It’s hard to say exactly how many people are watching stand-up now through my site. At first, there were very few — Google didn’t want to index the site. For two or three months, I didn’t understand why I wasn’t showing up in the search results, although, again, I followed all of ChatGPT’s SEO recommendations — I set up robots for SEO, made an SEO page, and so on.

Apparently, Google didn’t trust it for a while. But at some point, it cracked and the site started ranking high, including on the first page for individual comedians.

I don’t remember the overall statistics, but if 20 new visitors appear per day, then that’s normal.

Thanks to this, several thousand people come in from social networks at the same time. After Vasyl Baydak or Felix Redka post a link to my site, significantly more people also come from Google search.

That is, once a month I do such PR-actions, I can write something provocative that will attract people to comments on social networks. This allows us to promote the site to a new audience. One way or another, we have no other place in the Ukrainian Internet space where there is such a large collection of our comedians.

— The site parses videos exclusively from YouTube. But there are many other social networks. Or if we are talking about Ukrainian stand-up, is it all focused on YouTube?

— Usually, absolutely all comedians shoot a long video specifically for YouTube, and then promote it on their other social networks, making short video clips from it for TikTok or Instagram. Thus, everything that is on TikTok or Instagram is already basically on YouTube. I am sure that 99% of stand-up content is on YouTube, because it is the main platform. No one else posts anything anywhere, in particular on Vimeo. So, I think, there is simply no point in dragging Ukrainian stand-up from other social networks.

In general, I strive to drive the main audience not from social networks, but from search engines. If a person wants to watch Ukrainian stand-up, they enter this phrase into Google and StandUpHub should be the first page that introduces the viewer to domestic stand-up.

Besides, it’s purely pragmatic — you have to maintain social networks all the time, it requires some work. And my site is completely autonomous — if I leave it now and do nothing, it will still be updated. If a new comedian appears, I will just have to enter his last name and his channel in one file, and everything will be pulled up just like that.

«Many people disagree with the ranking and their place in it. But I don’t create these numbers, I just process them.»

— I understand that you communicate quite closely with other Ukrainian stand-up comedians. Did they all approve of the launch of such a site? Did anyone say, conditionally, what the hell are you doing with this?

— In terms of the fact that I do this, no one said anything like that — because it’s purely my business. I want to do it — I don’t want to, I don’t.

However, many continue to claim that the rating is biased, because, conditionally, Taras Stadnytskyi is in second place, although his last video was released six months ago, and Bohdan Boyaryn’s last solo album was released not so long ago and gained a lot of views. So, it seems, he should be much higher in the rating. But I don’t twist the numbers! I just show what is there.

However, having listened to such comments, I added the ability to form a rating not for the entire period of time, but by year. For the entire period of time — this is from February 24, 2022. Do you know why? Because before the full-scale show, a significant part of Ukrainian comedians performed in Russian. But I have collected only videos in Ukrainian in principle. That is, my site does not pull up the earlier performances of the conditional Anton Tymoshenko in Russian.

So now you can look at the rating by year. And from year to year the picture changes a lot. If in 2022 there were some comedians in the top, then in 2026 there are completely different people there.

— And what are the indicators that actually underlie the rating?

— The rating is influenced by several factors listed on the site — total views, peak views, video count, total minutes. Everything is calculated according to a formula taking into account a special index so that large channels do not «kill» small ones.

In addition, the number of videos and how regularly they are released are calculated. If Taras Stadnytskyi has 40 videos, and someone else has two videos, then Stadnytskyi will be higher, because he releases more videos. Plus, the timing is taken into account. If the conditional Stadnytskyi releases 40 videos of 10 minutes each, and Serhiy Lipko has 7 videos of an hour each, then the total timing also affects the place in the ranking. That is, the final place in the ranking is built from all these factors.

— This site is a cool thing for the stand-up community. Can you monetize it for yourself?

— When I realized that quite a lot of work had already been done, and all of this was creating additional value for the community, I also started thinking about whether there were any options for monetizing it. But for a long time I didn’t have any smart ideas about this.

Again, I started communicating with ChatGPT — I gave him the statistics and the site itself, asked what monetization options there were. The easiest way is to place advertising banners, but on such niche sites it is unlikely to work very well. Not so many people search for stand-up on Google to get some normal numbers from such monetization.

I wrote to ticket operators like Concert.ua, Karabas, and the like. I asked if it was possible to get banners from them specifically for stand-up concerts, and not for all events in a row. They wrote back to me that I should contact them for support and somehow negotiate with them.

But if they pay me for clicks on their banner, then most likely it will also be nonsense. Perhaps it is possible to somehow monetize through a percentage of ticket sales, but for that you need to reposition the site itself a little. Because it is currently purely entertainment and informational, not ticketing.

So I’m leaning towards the idea that maybe it’s worth just making some kind of «partner». Moreover, I either know almost everyone from Ukrainian stand-up personally, or I can find some contacts to talk to them. I think it’s a bit early to talk about it now, but when the site gets more views, we can try to somehow monetize it by collaborating directly with comedians or their producers.

«The commander is aware and always asks: ‘When is the concert, when will the new video be released on YouTube?’»

— Let’s return once again to the intersection of stand-up and your everyday life in the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Is there still room for creativity in the army?

— As for creating some kind of creative work, writing your own stand-up, everything is very difficult.

I completely missed two months and didn’t write anything, and then I did it very sporadically. Even when I see some funny situations, I no longer have the habit of writing them down and somehow developing them into a full-fledged story. That is, in terms of creativity, I «sag» a lot.

Of course, some technique for writing jokes has remained, because I’ve been doing it for a very long time. But the habit of seeing everything as an idea for stand-up disappears over time.

This is a real outlet — if I have a free minute, I try not to scroll through TikTok, but to finish some features for my website that I previously planned.

— You said that a video about army life should be released soon. And your leadership doesn’t allow you to give concerts from time to time?

— My commander knows that I do this. He is aware and always asks: «When is the concert, when will the new video be released on YouTube?» That is, everything is okay with this — theoretically they let me go.

But in practice, everything boils down to a lack of time, so it’s not possible to perform regularly.

When I had 15 days of official leave, I used it to prepare and perform. But if there is no leave, then for more than two days, it is difficult for me to escape somewhere. And to prepare a normal performance, you need a little more than two days. Therefore, it is more difficult with this — and I have to either use old material for the performance, or participate in some improvisations.

Therefore, twice a year, when it’s vacation, you can arrange for a concert to take place at that moment and prepare for it. But beyond that, it’s problematic.

— Has your humor already transformed from an IT stand-up comedian to a military stand-up comedian? Have the optics through which you look at the world and the topics for jokes themselves changed?

— Not enough time has passed since I was in the army to change everything globally. I haven’t been here for two or three years, but only eight months, so I don’t think much has changed.

But it’s hard not to notice some changes. For example, I started talking louder. Why? Because in the army they like it when you speak clearly and factually, not when you tell long and complicated stories.

But still, the things that interested me in civilian life continue to interest me now — technology, computer games, or football. Therefore, if I release a solo concert now, the subject matter will be very similar to the previous one. Perhaps the style of presentation will change a little, but not globally.

Although when I didn’t perform on stage for four months, it also seemed to me that it wouldn’t have any effect, but in fact I was more nervous, and memorizing the text became much more difficult. So something may change — I won’t deny it.

— Is there anything else important you would like to add about your site?

— I want to add not about my site, but about someone else’s. Interestingly, not so long ago someone launched a copy of my site. Well, as a copy, it’s not a complete copy-paste, but I see a similar idea: also selections, all stand-up videos, all Ukrainian comedians, their biographies. And all this is also done as an aggregator from YouTube.

My site doesn’t include everything at once, and for me this is a principled position. The authors of the site, who copied my idea, pull all videos with comedians to their site, regardless of genre.

For me, as a fan of stand-up and someone who has been doing it since 2018, this nuance is important. Stand-up is not equal to all the content on YouTube with the same comedians. Therefore, if someone copies my ideas and developments, then copy them, delving a little deeper into the essence.

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