I significantly reduced watching Youtube after the Youtube channels I watched started optimizing for revenue.
I gravitated to YouTube in the beginning because it felt disestablishment, and less commercialized. Now, it is the establishment. I don't know much about Youtube's payment / incentivization structure, but from the outside, I see YouTubers valuing quantity / frequency over "quality" and things that are not necessarily profit maximizing.
For example, there is one channel that originally produced funny skits. Now, they just talk about "news" and current events. Each of their video nowadays gets less views, but they're able to release more videos because it requires less planning, filming, post-production. They claimed they were producing the news videos as a stopgap to free up time to work on their feature film. 2-3 years later, they've made no progress. Their fanbase complained in the comment section as this happened, and their videos suffered a higher amount of dislikes than likes, in the beginning. Now, their news videos have bounced back to a high high like-dislike ratio. I don't think it's because these news videos inherently got better. I think they've successfully "pivoted" to this content category, attracting the right audience while their original fanbase, myself included, stopped caring enough to go dislike the video.
I see this trend with the majority of channels I watch, too. Here are some examples of "fluff" content to gain views:
- stretching out a simple topic into an unnecessarily long video
- providing a "novel" / hipster / contrarian opinion on something already well covered for the sake of being different
- An unboxing channel that goes from unboxing things people want, to things that are just ludicrous
- Covering a topic subscribers wouldn't otherwise care about. Take my brother for example, whose Youtube channel has 10 million+ views. His channel was originally teaching people English, then he started making VLOGs about aspects of American society such as going to the DMV or buying a used car, and recently he made a video about Gingerbread houses. As someone who traverses Wikipedia, I still think the audience interested in learning English have many other things they find more entertaining than the history of Gingerbread.
I gravitated to YouTube in the beginning because it felt disestablishment, and less commercialized. Now, it is the establishment. I don't know much about Youtube's payment / incentivization structure, but from the outside, I see YouTubers valuing quantity / frequency over "quality" and things that are not necessarily profit maximizing.
For example, there is one channel that originally produced funny skits. Now, they just talk about "news" and current events. Each of their video nowadays gets less views, but they're able to release more videos because it requires less planning, filming, post-production. They claimed they were producing the news videos as a stopgap to free up time to work on their feature film. 2-3 years later, they've made no progress. Their fanbase complained in the comment section as this happened, and their videos suffered a higher amount of dislikes than likes, in the beginning. Now, their news videos have bounced back to a high high like-dislike ratio. I don't think it's because these news videos inherently got better. I think they've successfully "pivoted" to this content category, attracting the right audience while their original fanbase, myself included, stopped caring enough to go dislike the video.
I see this trend with the majority of channels I watch, too. Here are some examples of "fluff" content to gain views:
- stretching out a simple topic into an unnecessarily long video
- providing a "novel" / hipster / contrarian opinion on something already well covered for the sake of being different
- An unboxing channel that goes from unboxing things people want, to things that are just ludicrous
- Covering a topic subscribers wouldn't otherwise care about. Take my brother for example, whose Youtube channel has 10 million+ views. His channel was originally teaching people English, then he started making VLOGs about aspects of American society such as going to the DMV or buying a used car, and recently he made a video about Gingerbread houses. As someone who traverses Wikipedia, I still think the audience interested in learning English have many other things they find more entertaining than the history of Gingerbread.
- "I'm quitting YouTube"