liamdryden:
voldey:
willdixonmusic:
I preface this by stating that I really hope I’m wrong. I hope that I either misunderstood what I have been told, or that I was deliberately or accidentally provided with misinformation. In any case, this is a post about why we both should and shouldn’t be worried about YouTube, as creators and their audience members.
About a week and a half ago I attended Summer in the City, the UK’s largest YouTube gathering, this year hosted at the Alexandra Palace in London, and as with all the scheduled performers and guests at the event, I was permitted to use the private ‘Green Room’. It was while I was in this room that I was casually approached by, and introduced to two YouTube employees who had come over from California to speak at the event. For verification purposes I did receive a business card from one of them, a ‘User Experience Researcher’, but don’t feel it’s appropriate to name them. After a little while I found myself explaining to them that while I greatly enjoy creating content for YouTube, times are increasingly hard in the view-getting department, partly because I have been too busy to make many videos this year, and partly because of the problems with the sub box, which I am certainly not the first person to comment on. To summarise, myself and many of my friends have witnessed serious drops in views, often up to 50%, since the last few updates to YouTube’s homepage. These updates have gradually reduced the efficiency and prominence of the subscription feed, moving it to the sidebar. Surely YouTube is aware of the problems being caused by their broken coding, and are working to fix them to help out the people who make them money?
I regret that I did not record the conversation, and so can not directly quote the employee, but to paraphrase, his response was ‘oh yes, well the sub box hasn’t technically existed for about three years anyway, we just haven’t been able to communicate that properly to creators yet.’ Spoken as if this is common knowledge.
Again, that wasn’t a direct quote, and I hope I misheard, but the conversation did continue along those lines. The YouTube employee went on to say that the direction YouTube is taking is focusing more and more on the company’s “What to watch” and “Recommended video” algorithms alongside a complete and entirely deliberate disregard for subscriptions as a function. The message was clear: YouTube thinks it knows what people want to watch better than the people themselves, and it has no intention whatsoever to ‘fix’ the subscription boxes. While this has been suspected for a long time, the fact that these YouTube employees were so openly confirming many peoples’ worst fears about the website is quite deeply disturbing. What’s even more disturbing is that apparently, though I was not around to see YouTube’s keynote, the company’s representatives (presumably not the same people I was speaking with) were spreading the opposite message.
So what if this is true? If the efficiency of subscription boxes continues to decline, channels will, or have already, become useless. In theory the number of subscribers you have should directly correlate with the base number of views each new video gets within the first day or so; a nearly guaranteed regular audience as a number to grow and use as a launchpad. Clearly, at least among my peers (I have 8,400 subscribers and barely manage 1,000 views if I’m lucky after a couple of weeks), this is no longer the case, and it never will be again. The same video could be uploaded to any channel and have the same view-based prospects - channels don’t matter anymore, subscribers don’t matter anymore, all that seems to matter anymore seems to be, sadly, views. It is now the content creator’s presence on other social networks like twitter, facebook, and tumblr, which generate the YouTube views, it is their ability to market each video individually and independently which gives them the edge. For creators, this means potentially altering their content to make it more ‘viral’, and therefore likely to be spontaneously shared by their viewers. It also means an increased interest in networks like ChannelFlip and Fullscreen, as well as alternative sites like Subbable and Patreon (the latter of which was unknown to the ‘User Experience Researchers’ I was speaking with) for further revenue streams as they see their previously reliable sub box-based views decline. For audiences, this means seeing less of what they have chosen to watch, and more of what YouTube wants them to watch: the super high-end channels that are already raking in the most views.
Basically, this is a horrendous confirmation, but it is not the end of the site, and all we have to do now is be smart about what we make and what we watch. Sharing really is caring.
If anyone has any additional information to add to this, please do either comment with it or message me directly at willdixonmusic@gmail.com so I can add it.
Cheers,
Will
This, coupled with youtube getting rid of video responses on the 12th, just means nobody can rely on youtube anymore as the platform it was meant to be. I guess because only “0.0004%” of people watch video responses, they don’t matter anymore.
This is absolutely crippling.
Well it was fun while it lasted
:(