YouTube; anyone who has ever done anything remotely online will know of the almighty video sharing website. It is the easiest and most common video site on the Internet showing no signs of slowing down. YouTube will be here for a LONG time, who knows, maybe it will last until the death of the Internet, whenever that’s supposed to happen. During the late 2000s, YouTube’s optimization for community became second to profitability due to establishing revenue streams and competition with other online mediums. Their moves over the years have been hindering to content creators, especially the little guys.
With the integration of YouTube providing an entertainment business for content creators to grow, there became a clear divide between the community and profit-hungry producers. When YouTube started to catch on in the mid to late 2000s, it provided a free service to upload and share content to others like it still does today. Users were contributing to the site’s revenue by visiting the site and watching and sharing. It wasn’t until 2007-2008 where YouTube presented its partnership program where content creators can monetize their videos and make a profit themselves through advertisement revenue. I do this too, but not as active as I used to be years ago. Exponentially, more and more YouTubers started to monetize their videos, with some earning so much revenue; YouTube became their full-time jobs. Multimedia networks formed to further enhance profits for the network and its signed YouTube content creator employees like Maker Studios, which recently was acquired by Disney. More and more networks are being acquired by already large media conglomerates like Discovery. The full-time video maker is now a working member of the media industry, thanks to the YouTube platform.
In the beginning of YouTube, it was mostly community driven. I produced short videos and other users with the same passions as me stumbled upon my work and likewise. I am still friends with a good majority of those YouTubers who are still making videos and some that dropped off. There are reasons that some of these people dropped off and the main contributing factors were loss of interest, no time, lack of community, and lack of viewership due to algorithms that overall hindered views and spread of word.
YouTube’s viewer and subscription algorithms changed dramatically in 2012-2013, resulting in a significant drop in viewer engagement and views. For example, at the time, I had over 1,000 subscribers and on average got about 400-600 views every time I put out a new video. Yes, there are active subscribers and non-active subscribers but about half of my audience was viewing my videos. When YouTube rolled out their YouTube One layout and altered algorithms, I was now receiving about 100-200 views a video from a 1,200-subscriber audience. There was a huge drop in views and ad revenue I was pulling in from videos with a now active audience of 12% my subscriber base. Overtime, it was harder to get my content and myself out there on YouTube with the viewer and subscription algorithms not working for the smaller content creators. Business and profit became the main focus for making their website work but the little ones got screwed. This led to content creators jumping ship and finding other ways to make money or losing interest in video production altogether or working independently of YouTube, only using the platform to showcase their work rather than to build ad revenue from their content primarily.
To consider yourself a somebody on YouTube, it seems like you either have to be strictly consistent with entertaining content, or get lucky and somehow produce a viral hit. Other than that, the community aspect of YouTube seems nonexistent and is merely there for business.
What do you think? Anything I missed? Comment down below or tweet me @MitchGFilms!