I’ve always wanted to talk to people who make these tools and whether they realize the harm they can cause. A lot of people complain about YouTube videos having lots of fluff, trying to meet certain length requirements, having sponsor spots. Of course they do. They are trying to make a living on something that is free so they can continue to make content. Everything that they do is an adaptation to the fact that people don’t want to pay for content at all.
There will always be super fans who will donate on patreon, buy merch, subscribe to YouTube memberships, do super chats etc. But even larger channels have a hard time doing that without constant calls to action. This is why reacting has gotten so popular. It takes a long time to shoot, edit and upload even a well produced 5minute YouTube video. Linus tech tips talks about how much easier it is to do that type of content in his video explaining why they were thinking of making a react channel. By reacting you get a constant stream of videos you can put out everyday that please the algorithm, and only take 1 take to do.
Other high value content like FreyaHolmer’s video on Splines, which is a high quality, hour long video, get hundreds of thousands of views, take over a year to make, but do very poorly in revenue, making valuable educational content on YouTube that is actually useful unsustainable withought all the other tactics mentioned above.
This is partly YouTube’s fault as people expect it to be free and I don’t think that will ever change. Which is a shame because I know Google would pull the plug if it stoped being profitable and the watch times plummeted, and the creators left. But if we kill YouTube we will have noone to blame but ourselves. I think Substack has a better model for creators, and there is an expectation that creators will monetize their Substack once it gets larger. Casey Muratori talks about this, and says it’s why he puts his educational content there instead of on YouTube for free.
There will always be super fans who will donate on patreon, buy merch, subscribe to YouTube memberships, do super chats etc. But even larger channels have a hard time doing that without constant calls to action. This is why reacting has gotten so popular. It takes a long time to shoot, edit and upload even a well produced 5minute YouTube video. Linus tech tips talks about how much easier it is to do that type of content in his video explaining why they were thinking of making a react channel. By reacting you get a constant stream of videos you can put out everyday that please the algorithm, and only take 1 take to do.
Other high value content like FreyaHolmer’s video on Splines, which is a high quality, hour long video, get hundreds of thousands of views, take over a year to make, but do very poorly in revenue, making valuable educational content on YouTube that is actually useful unsustainable withought all the other tactics mentioned above.
This is partly YouTube’s fault as people expect it to be free and I don’t think that will ever change. Which is a shame because I know Google would pull the plug if it stoped being profitable and the watch times plummeted, and the creators left. But if we kill YouTube we will have noone to blame but ourselves. I think Substack has a better model for creators, and there is an expectation that creators will monetize their Substack once it gets larger. Casey Muratori talks about this, and says it’s why he puts his educational content there instead of on YouTube for free.