For those of you who are not as familiar with why I have dived into video-making and other audio/visual projects with such enthusiasm over the past year, this post should serve as a bit of an explainer about that as well as how I view the state of internet media. For the rest of you, well, let's talk YouTube.
It seems to be that in the last year, the term "content creator" has surged as a new buzzword for the people who make all of the things that are earning money on the internet. A quick search of this and some related terms reveal that it hasn't risen so much in that timeframe as it has plateaued into a slowly rising peak over the last year, but I digress. Content creation could mean via blogs or digital sales of music (or a plethora of other things), but it has also expanded extremely quickly into video, mostly by way of YouTube. The same dorky people who were talking alone in front of their cameras before have now started to see some monetary success and, in limited scope, cross-platform convergence. A slew of YouTubers have written or are writing books, not without some controversy, many have moved to Los Angeles in the pursuit of other media ventures, many work in more traditional television-style formats sponsored by networks or cable TV, and there is now one outright YouTube-to-television crossover that will be popping up on cable TV in the spring. It's become an internet industry, and the days of videos being a nerdy pastime are long gone.
Beyond the big names and glamor shots, though, real people are watching and consuming what is being put out, inflating numbers that are used to determine how much money flows into, out of, and then invested back into the world of internet content. That is the basic idea behind the "shift to digital" that often seems talked about ad nauseam but perhaps isn't so visible to people who still mostly watch their cable TV and skim headlines in line for coffee each day. Part of this is generational: people set their habits and tend to stick to them the further in life they get, so the kids flooded with the internet (starting somewhere around my generation) are more likely to use it as a primary resource than older people who can remember times when even such things as computers were not standard household (or personal) items. However, because that is the case, there is a rising number of people who exclusively consume their programs, be they individual videos or whole TV shows, in front of a computer or internet-connected screen.
I began to migrate to no longer actively watching TV shows (that is, deliberately sitting in front of the television to watch or find a program to watch) around mid-2010, five years after YouTube popped up and became one of the primary locations for video on the internet. At the time, there were fewer big-name YouTube "celebrities" ("YouTube star" is an oft-derided term that is synonymous) with fewer instances of viral success to propel them to that status. Some people had gained a name for themselves as community figures because of their activity in the first wave of the site getting popular, while others adapted well-trodden formats to the online sphere and found their own success. By the time I started earnestly watching, there were enough kinds of videos already out there to satisfy anyone, and their quality was steadily rising in production value: better editing, focus, cameras, and microphones.
I have used the internet daily for an absurd number of hours at a time—I reckon easily half of my waking, living hours have been spent in front of an interactive screen—since I was a young child first getting a grasp on how to write properly. I learned my first HTML when I was six or seven, and tinkered with creating things on computers and the internet from that point on. I am very much a digital youth, and I don't think I'm different to a large number of my peers. Yet I hadn't gotten aboard the YouTube wagon as it was starting, so my point of entry to the YouTube world was comparatively mainstream. I watched the biggest, most viral people consistently making YouTube videos, binge-watching until there were no more hours of their stuff left, and then let it be and continued on with my other routines. As Google integrated YouTube into its infrastructure and made it easier to link accounts and activities between its services, I took that opportunity to start really engaging and made a small list of people I would subscribe to. They were still the big names around, but occasionally a similar video would pop up by someone who didn't seem as viral, or big. My roots in the world of YouTube remained shallow for a while.
For reasons relating to moving around to different countries and different schedules with enough frequency that it became hard to keep up with shows, I dropped them altogether and ended up turning to YouTube to fill the entertainment void left by not having familiar TV for background noise. In the process, finding new videos and people to watch became easier and I started to find people by chance who had (and still have) interesting things to say or good, well-executed ideas for videos. At that point, my switch to the internet was complete. The YouTube culture had also advanced to a point where cross-promotion by way of simple challenge or "tag" videos made it easier to map out a bunch of similar people who made similar kinds of videos. Collaborations (collabs) increased in frequency to fuel increasing demand for them by watchers and for creators to capitalize on that demand and increase their numbers. The distinction between content creators and consumers had also become more clear by that point, although the rise of screaming fangirls took its time to pop up at YouTube conventions.
As I mentioned, I grew up experimenting with creating things on the internet. I would start a blog and write 14 posts and forget about it, record a beat that never made it to becoming a song, open up Photoshop and doodle around for an overly expensive domain that I had hosted for several years. I never focused my energy into any one specific outlet in part due to not knowing specifically what I wanted to do, in part because I wasn't sure of how to go about it. This blog has been the result of the full realization of those energies, a landing page for all of my experimental activities that started as a study abroad journal for friends and family when I spent a month in France one summer. (You can take a trip into the past and read those posts starting here.) The deeper I got into YouTube, the more I began thinking of making my own videos and leaping into becoming a creator myself, not content to just be a viewer and appalled by the idea that I would just be an anonymous number to sell things to if I didn't get proactive. But, as with most things, I let the idea stew around for a while before acting on it. I watched increasingly more people, more kinds of videos, more of everything to get a better understanding of how this whole video-making process worked and how people did it so consistently. I had a lot of conversations with friends about how it might be if I made videos.
Around the same time is when people started popping up in large numbers earning a living exclusively through their YouTube videos and the various sources of money they found by way of them. I have never been motivated to make videos by a desire to live off of YouTube—none of my videos are currently monetized, nor do I have the sort of audience to warrant it—but it had certainly become a big factor for new people starting to make videos, and one that people started talking about. They're still talking about it. I watched a lot of people who, if they hadn't geared their channels to being their primary source of income already, were in the process of doing it, or at least faking their way until they made it. I don't hold anything against people who make money off of YouTube, nor their desire to pursue that, let's be clear. If you have the success and you know how to build it, more power to you for doing it.
At the same time, I also started to feel like what I was watching were a small bunch of channels that were snowballing into ever-bigger numbers and less interesting videos. That hasn't stopped being the case, and I periodically find myself unsubscribing from people whose videos I used to enjoy but now find to be more vacant, mostly advertising, or somewhere in between the two. Like most people, I don't mind being sold a product or a service if it's straightforward and honest. In some cases, the pursuit of money and the (in many cases) Los Angeles dream has seemed to make those things less straightforward and less honest. If the entertainment is cheap, then the value I place on it is similarly low; for each person pouring themselves into excellent videos, there are a dozen of them making videos devoid of much at all to say and monetizing them by views and through sponsorship deals anyway.
Making videos has been, as I wrote about for the New Year and made a video about on my channel, a fun and rewarding activity. I've managed to learn a lot of technical things while also learning a lot about myself as a person and aspects of my character that I wasn't as in tune with before I started making them. Even better has been meeting other people making videos for similar reasons on YouTube, but with different results and different stories. The diversity of voices and ease of accessibility to them is what makes YouTube (and the internet at large) so wonderful, but also such a challenge. My early videos were pretty terrible, as most peoples' are, with bad sound quality, a worse haircut, at times plugging things I would have been better off not plugging, and so on. Yet to do the same thing with other people has made the experience worth continuing on with. I was very excited to learn about the Little YouTube project and made a video about it to connect with other small video-makers and also share some of my own favorites. I've since continued to slowly but surely find new, diverse voices who are in a similar position on the spectrum of the YouTube sphere.
YouTube's industrialization has caused it to become infinitely more difficult to find and reach out to people in such a manner. This is objective; the site's algorithms are designed to point the uninitiated to the content that will make the site the most money from advertising in the most consistent way it can. People often complain that their subscription boxes (the 'My Subscriptions' link, as opposed to the 'What to Watch' homepage) are broken, and sometimes the site deliberately alters its design to make it appear to be the case. YouTube wants to make money and wants to give money to people who are good at making it for them. That's fine and well, and it's no accident when people with millions of subscribers continually end up with millions more. However, the tension I had begun to feel from watching larger YouTubers but disconnecting to their content is related to this same greater push toward better advertising efficiency. When those people make the same silly or less thoughtful videos after getting big that endeared them to people before they were, I'm not inclined to watch them. It feels much more important to listen to the banal thoughts of people who have fewer subscribers because they are more accessible. Their replies to comments are more in earnest and are more likely to lead to the kind of connections between people that will get everyone more views, new friends, and spark fresher ideas for videos—content—in the way it should ideally spread forth. That level of personal connection is not possible from someone whose videos are guaranteed to receive dozens, hundreds, even thousands of comments. It can't be.
Elevating a small slice of video-makers to stratospheric recognition and popularity is not a bad thing. Those who end up somewhere on the higher side of the middle, and thus end up suffering from distance to their viewers for roughly similar reasons (it's a matter of scale) represent the aspirations of so many people who have to put their time in, building connections, and fighting through the thick of new ways to grab people's attention. Yet, in my experience as both a viewer and content creator, that same status puts them in a position that feels frustrating. These are people you want to connect with and that you enjoy on what feels like a personal level, yet logically speaking it is very unlikely that either of those things can or would happen. The rise of the content creator seems to come at the cost of the video-maker, and the distinction is the difference between the community feeling of #littleyoutube and the distance that comes with large numbers. It's a distinction with a poorly-defined difference, and that's why it's uncomfortable.
I continue to make videos and disregard the monetary aspect of that, but it would be a lie from anyone in my position to say that numbers didn't matter. Numbers are always relative, and what seems like a lot of views for one person's channel may be insignificant for someone else. Yet even we small video-makers have an idea of who is probably watching what we're making and how much interaction we will probably get from doing that. If numbers are particularly low, it can be disheartening and reduce the desire to make videos. If the goal isn't money, but rather interaction and community, we have to work harder to keep the community alive and always be connecting with each other, letting ideas flourish. Industry and community are not the most compatible partners. I, and many other people who I have come to know, make videos because I love to make things, and video is a special kind of challenge. It's fun. But I don't want to get too caught up in the sparkling lights of industrial production.
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