YouTube Has Lost Its Way

So I've been a fan of YouTube for like 15 years and every year it's gotten better and better and more sustainable and better for money and everything. This year is the first year where I actually think it's gotten worse. And so as someone whose entire livelihood is built around the creator economy like this house was bought with money earned from working on YouTube, it's really important to me to be working for a platform that does keep getting better and better. So as a result I've put about 100 hours into trying to figure out why YouTube is bad and how to actually do something about it and make it good. So that's what this episode of the podcast is about. So give me about 15 to 20 minutes, I'll give you the full conspiracy theory that I've written up and how we can act on it so that we actually still thrive at a time where YouTube is not good. So you're probably wondering who I am and let me give you the TLDR. So I've been a creative director and a strategist on YouTube for about five years now. I did three years working with the author Mark Manson and now I'm head of content for a company called Say Como Say. We work with thought leaders like Jesse Etsler, Daniel Pink, David Epstein and the Hidden Brain podcast. These are people who I work with on a day to day basis and it's my job to make sure that YouTube is in a good place for them so that they continue growing. If YouTube is in a good place, it makes it easier to bring in new clients to help those clients grow faster. And if it's not in a good place, which is the state of the world right now, we need to find ways to continue to make it beneficial for our clients. Everything that I studied boils down to this single tweet. This comes from Todd Boepri and in my opinion, he's the most important person in the creator economy. If you don't know him, he is the person who leads the algorithm at YouTube. He's been doing it for 10 years and he's done an excellent job. It's the reason why YouTube is a great sustainable place to grow and build a career in the creator economy and why Instagram and TikTok are far less good. YouTube, its value prop as a whole is that viewers can come and click and watch and enjoy and build relationships with the creator and the creator can also monetize on their videos. This is done through pre-roll ads, mid-roll ads, 60 second ad segments. This is stuff that is actually really challenging to monetize with Instagram and TikTok. With Instagram, it's a swipe-to-watch feature, which means the viewer never really knows that you're coming up next. Also you're spending significantly less time with the creator and so you don't really build that kind of rapport that you would with an 8-10-minute video otherwise. Advertising is just as tricky because you can put an ad in between a 10-minute video somewhere in between and the viewer is likely to stick around because they click to watch that video and they want to watch to the rest of the video as long as the video is good. With short form, that lure isn't there, like if I see an ad in between my two shorts, I'm not going to watch any further. This tweet from Todd is important and I'm going to read it to you now. If you could introduce one improvement to YouTube that would substantially and sustainably increase value to viewers, what would it be? Todd does this from time to time and people leave their feedback and the responses never have a ton of likes. What's important about Todd is that the people who follow him aren't fans of YouTube, they're not people who aren't monetized on YouTube, these are people who are building their entire livelihood around YouTube and as a result, they need to know the stuff that Todd says. You'll notice a trend from some of the responses here. Give more settings controls over filtering out shorts. Remove shorts mixed from suggestions. Separate shorts feature buttons like YouTube music and YouTube kids. What's interesting is not that people dislike shorts, what's interesting is Todd's response. Todd is a database person. He's a computer nerd and every time he responds to people on Twitter, he does it in a calculated way and I've always agreed with his logic, but his logic this time is kind of weird. Have you tapped the three dot menu and selected show fewer shorts? See, this is kind of backwards from what I would expect for a number of reasons. Firstly, YouTube's main value prop for the past 21 years has been long-form videos and also YouTube is a platform that needs to satisfy both viewers and the creators. If the creators are saying shorts is actually bad for YouTube, then you would expect Todd to say something like, "Okay, I'll take this back to my team and we'll recalibrate or try and figure out what the better balance is." What he's actually saying is just a solution for one single person. Click the button that says show fewer shorts. Then that one user sees fewer shorts, but the majority of the platform still gets the same experience. That's weird to me. Shorts are not good for the creator economy because they're hard to monetize. They might be good for getting your follower count up, but think about with TikTok. There are TikTokers out there that have 30 and 40 million followers and nobody really knows anything about them because we only watch them for 60 seconds at a time. Mario Jews, who's another important figure in this space, has said that shorts are infesting the homepage on YouTube. When I agree, I remember just a year ago or two years ago, if you go to youtube.com, you would get eight or nine long-form videos presented to you and the recommendations were usually so good and I think that's why organic growth was so awesome on YouTube. But now you see maybe three long-form videos at the top and then you see a whole carousel of shorts and then randomly you get a bunch of games mixed in there. It's not clear what people are going to YouTube for. They're trying to satisfy everybody and the creators are paying the penalty for it. I saw a statistic that said 97% of people who work in the creator economy are making under $100,000. I mean $100,000 is a decent amount of money, but if 97% of them are not making at least that much, it's actually not a very sustainable industry and it's not a very inviting place to come in. If you want to work in this industry, either as a BTS person or as a non-camera talent, you need to be able to make $100,000 or more and it's really, really tough right now. I think that's largely because YouTube is prioritizing shorts. It begs the question, "Why is YouTube prioritizing shorts so much?" To get the answer of that, we have to go to the CEO. For the majority of YouTube's life, the CEO was this incredible woman named Susan Wojiki and she built the creator economy from basically nothing. She took it from a fun place on the internet and she introduced the partnership program that allowed people to monetize and she grew it into what it was until she eventually stepped down. It was replaced by Neil Mohan. Now, think about Neil at that exact moment in time where he took over as CEO. Susan did such a great job. The company was in such a healthy position that you have to wonder as Neil, "What am I going to do to continue to improve the company to leave my mark on this incredible asset that is YouTube?" If you're backtracked to Neil's background, he founded a company called DoubleClick which was eventually acquired by YouTube and it helped introduce ads to YouTube. My hypothesis when he took over was that we were going to see increased ads and we've definitely seen that. In the past couple of years, we've seen that little symbol show up that says, "We're showing you longer ads so that we can show you fewer ads. I don't buy it. I think it's weird. Ads have become far less skippable, but it's probably helped YouTube's bottom line." Now Neil joins YouTube as CEO and he's trying to find ways to leave his legacy. Maybe increasing, earning through ads is one way, but another way that we've seen him prioritize is by making YouTube competitive against channels like Netflix and Disney Plus. If you look at the headlines, if you go to the conferences, you'll see YouTube is so proud to report that they're getting more views than Netflix, more views than Disney Plus, more views than the majority of the streaming world combined. Why do you think that is? Well, perhaps it's because of shorts. The way that they measure shorts is by swiping if you see it for a single frame it counts as a view. Now if you measure it by hours, shorts is a very addictive feature and you just continue to watch it and watch it and so the hours actually build up and so they're taking something that's actually not valuable for the majority of creators on YouTube and they're holding it as like a point of pride for themselves. So YouTube is actually not incentivized to go back to its original value prop of being long-form content. So that's kind of scary, right? And so as a result, if you look across the internet, creators that have been around for five or six years are seeing a decline in views. Mr. Beast used to get like 400 million views of video. Now he's getting about 150 million views of video. My clients, you know, particularly when I work with Mark Manson, we could reliably count on each video getting a million views. Now they're getting about 300,000 views. The quality of the videos didn't change, but the total opportunity changed and it feels like particularly in my little corner of YouTube that we're all kind of fighting over the same 300,000 views. If you look at Ali Abdullah, he's a great case study because Ali was the face of YouTube education for a very long time and he would average, I don't know, a couple million views of video. Now he's struggling to get 100,000. Look at Ramit Sedi who wrote the book I will teach you to be rich. He's an interesting one because he's a client of Patty Galloway and in my opinion, Patty Galloway is the best strategist in the world he's significantly better than I am. And even Ramit is struggling to hit 100,000 views every single time. So something has changed and people are not watching YouTube long form as much. Even my own viewing habits, I'm not watching YouTube long form as much as I used to. So something weird has gone on. I actually think that short form is in a bit of a bubble and I think everybody is kind of competing, you know, to be the number one spot for short form. But I ultimately think that short form will kind of go on to decline soon because it's kind of like empty calories, like calling it some ear, have called it that before, where you watch and you consume, but you don't really like ingest anything. There's a really popular video from the creator on Instagram cat GPT. And she challenges the viewer right off the hop. She's like… What was the real you watched two videos ago? And it's funny because you can't actually remember which you've consumed, but that's not the same with long form because long form we're spending more time and we're choosing to watch these videos rather than appearing in front of us. So we're in a place where creators need long form videos, but YouTube isn't really interested in giving that to them. And as a result, I think YouTube's gotten worse for the creator economy. It makes me hopeful that a company like Spotify will improve its discovery and kind of take over long form because I do think it's like the backbone of the creator economy. The question now becomes, okay, how do we thrive in this world where things aren't as good as they used to be? Well, interestingly enough, one of my data points from all of this research comes from this podcast itself. And one question that I always ask every single guest is who is a creator that's on your radar that deserves some kind of shout out. And if you think back to like 2015, 2016, everyone had a favorite creator, Casey Neistat, Gary Vaynerchuk, Roman Atwood. But nowadays, it's not as easy to answer that question. And when I ask that question, we cut it out of the episode, but people often think for like 30 seconds at a time, like pause to think about who your favorite creator is right now. Is it clear? Do you have a distinct person that you'll watch anything from and can you bring that person to the top of your mind at a blink like this? For me, I definitely can't. And that to me is an indication that people are choosing to follow topics rather than following the people themselves. We used to watch Casey Neistat and whatever he did, we would watch him. But now we pick a bunch of topics. And our favorite topics change over the course of a week. Some stick around for longer, some fade away. But we follow topics. And so people who we watch more regularly are the ones who are expert in that topic. Like if I need to know about the new iPhone, I'm going to be turning to MKBHD. If I want to learn about some current event that's happening in the world, if it's a financial current event, I'm going to go to Graham Stephan. So the topics are actually the things that we're building our interests around. And because of that, I actually think that creating evergreen videos, especially in the education space, is kind of like a dead end. The value prop for the last couple of years with YouTube has been, if you create evergreen videos, YouTube will continue to push your good videos even years after they've been made. And so you can be making money on something you made once, two years ago. But what I'm actually seeing is people in the education space are trying to create these evergreen videos, and they're really only fighting for 300,000 views. Meanwhile, people who are choosing to follow topics are getting a million views in like two or three days. There was a video that I recently watched about the Artemis space shuttle going around the moon. And it was a great little video from Hank Green. And after two or three days, it had already earned two or three million views. If Hank had instead decided to make some kind of evergreen video, even after two years, it might not have earned two or three million views. And so one of the strategies that I'm deploying with my clients is like, hey, let's get more topical. And let's just embrace the fact that a video is gonna die after a month, and we're just gonna own it. It's gonna be okay. You know, we don't need that evergreen long-form lifespan. I remember speaking to Sam Godette, who is the head of content for Dan Martell. And he specifically said, hey, I'm making evergreen videos. But if you look at what Dan Martell is making, it's all AI. And AI is very not evergreen. It's very topical because it changes by the day. It's just a very, very big, big, wide trend. Like AI is very popular right now. In two years, it'll still be popular. I doubt it'll be as popular. I don't know, actually don't know. I think we're kind of like, that's a whole other aside. And I don't wanna get into it in this point. But I don't think AI is actually evergreen content because Dan's opinion on which is the best AI changes, right? So I actually think chasing evergreen topics is a dead end. Even if you look at like Johnny Harris versus Veritasium, these are two channels that I compare to each other a lot when I'm creating my content. Johnny often picks things that are really topical. He's got geopolitics and that's the stories that he presents, whereas Veritasium is much more evergreen. And what's crazy is they both earn, you know, four to six million views per video, but Veritasium has like 20 million subscribers and Johnny has like six. So I actually think that following topics and making videos around topics is the best play. Now, I have a rule, I've got a rule book and it's got 108 rules in it and it's something that, you know, I'm offering to people who reach out to me and you know, if you want it, it's cool. It's built around all of the episodes that I call an insomere and things that Mario Jews has set on Twitter and Patty Galloway. It's a bunch of rules from every strategist that I've ever consumed content from. And one of the rules is that for every rule, there is a video that both proves it to be true and proves the opposite to be true. So for example, if you look at Leila Hermosi, she made a video called The Psychology of Money and it quickly raised to a million views. That goes against this whole theory that evergreen content is bad, but you have to look at things from a bigger picture. And even with Leila, most of her videos are not seeing a significant number of views. She did hit that one outlier. It is an evergreen video, but it's not like every single evergreen video is hitting a million views. That used to be the case in like 2023. With Mark Manson, we used to be able to put out a video that just had a really great title and get a million views every single time. It was a lot easier than it is now. But if you look at people who are following the topics, you know, people like Hank Green, people like Johnny Harris, they are actually getting an abnormally high number of views. So that's why I think that's how you win on YouTube in 2026. Now fortunately, this comes at a time where lower lift is also widely accepted. Like I've seen some creators really reduce the amount of editing that goes into their videos. Viewers are much more willing to, you know, sit through videos that are longer, that have more breaths and pauses. You don't need like hyper stimulation, like the beastification of everything like we used to. And so as a result, that allows you to upload more frequently. And so I think the winning recipe for educators on this platform is follow the news, find ways to make it relevant to your area of expertise and then just upload as frequently as possible. Ironically MKBHD who has got one of the longest lifespans of any creator on YouTube. He's been doing this for like literally over a decade now. And every single time he puts out a video, it's exceptionally topical because it's usually the release of some new tech tool. And then it kind of dies over time, like no one's ever going back through MKBHD's back catalog and looking at, you know, the release of the iPhone 13 from three years ago. But he embraces the topicality of it and gets four or five million views and then he moves on to the next one. I actually think that's the play. Like we used to be able to make a video called Seven Ways to Be More Productive. But now you can just ask AI for different ways to be productive. And you get the response in like 30 seconds versus, you know, a 15 minute video. So what I instead think is right is waiting for a news article to come out that's relevant to productivity. And then adding your commentary on top of it, throwing in a list of like Seven Ways to Be More Productive, maybe talking about a personal moment and then shipping that video as quickly as possible and collecting your million views and then forgetting it even exists and moving on to the next one. YouTube is a tough place to talk about because on one hand, you've got Mr. Beast videos. On the other hand, you've got very, very niche specific how-to videos for people taking their MBA. So it's hard to put everything onto a spectrum, but this is just the corner of the world that I live in. It's the educational niche. And for the first time ever, I think YouTube is actually worse than it has been in the past couple years. I'm hopeful that this short form mania that's happening where everybody's competing to be the best short form platform. I'm hoping that it's a bit of a bubble. And the evidence for that is people turning off their phones more frequently. Redusher just put out a newsletter article saying that people are using social media less this year than they were last year. You're seeing Gen Z host no phone parties. You're seeing trending topics like in-person events, being much more popular. And I think that's largely because we're getting fed so much garbage through short form content. I see a resurgence in long form content soon. And I hope that YouTube gets better at it because that's when YouTube is at its best. And in the meantime, I'm just gonna do it I think is best for my clients and then wait for that to happen. If you enjoyed this episode, thank you so much for sitting through my rambles. If you're new here, please consider subscribing or leaving a review on the audio platforms. It really helps us out in the early days of this show. We'll get back to interview content next week, but in the meantime, thank you and so long. (gentle music)