Why YouTubers Quit
Why do YouTubers leave and what does this say about the overall health of the platform.
Many YouTubers are quitting, and I want to talk about it. While I am a nobody on the internet, I have been a long-time student of this platform. I've seen hundreds of controversies, and many creators come and go. Because of this, I've gained a good sense of why YouTubers leave. The reason stems from YouTube's incentive systems. The platform uses two core drivers, Investment and uncertainty, to keep people creating.
It takes a huge time investment if you want to grow on YouTube. If you're not posting, your channel dies. No one will see your videos, and your metrics will suffer. This disincentivizes you from ever slowing down on the amount of content you produce. But uploading isn’t a guarantee for channel growth. You could post every day for three years and still not see a boost in viewership. It’s like a Gacha game, but the only reward for consistency is avoiding punishment. A system like that would be too exploitative in any other context. But on YouTube, it's normal. People continue to make content by investing hours of their time in making videos. It can take weeks of research to put out something decent. You use up time you could have spent elsewhere. Then, when you finally post your video, you have to hope people will like it. You can spend hours refreshing a page looking for a bump in metrics. It's easy for this to get extreme, but it keeps people pulling the YouTube slot machine.
The road to success is also paved with booby traps. There are three career-killing challenges that every creator must face. The first is the omnipresent threat of becoming irrelevant. Every year, a dozen notable creators seem to disappear from the platform. They aren't actually gone, but because they stopped showing up in our feed, we forgot them. Once you stop watching a channel often, their uploads become hidden. This includes if you subscribed. The implication is that all it takes is a few unlikable videos to cause a death spiral. The subscriber count is a vanity metric. It's only useful for gaining your initial one thousand subscribers for monetization. All that matters is gaining viewer retention on a video-by-video basis. This is especially harmful to the egos and pockets of older YouTubers. Since reach was no longer subscribers-based, older channels experienced a loss of revenue.
Next, a YouTuber looking for longevity must avoid controversy. I’m incapable of listing every way a creator can get canceled. YouTubers will be de-platformed for something as small as a bad joke to as large as an abuse scandal. You don't have to be guilty for your livelihood and reputation to get destroyed. The perception of wrongdoing is all it takes to ruin a career. The best example of this is the tragic situation involving the YouTuber ProJared. The outrage towards him stemmed from accusations that he abused and cheated on his wife. The internet jumped at the opportunity to shame and ridicule Jared. Naked pictures of Jared leaked online, and his appearance was mocked. The ridicule and humiliation lasted for three months until The internet moved on. ProJared, on the other hand, couldn't move on. With his life in shambles, he tried to pick up the pieces. He managed to gather evidence to prove his innocence, but for the internet at large, it was old news. ProJared’s channel never recovered, and he is still dealing with the trauma of this event to this day.
Finally, the most damaging reason is changes in the YouTube algorithm itself. YouTube is always theorizing ways to keep users on-site. This causes developers to change the algorithm every so often to accomplish that. Sometimes, changes are small, and other times, they're radical and uproot the ecosystem. In the latter cases, changes are extinction events wiping away an era of YouTube. When the algorithm favored views, shorter form, higher quality content thrived. Animation and other channels were at the top of the food chain. When the algorithm changed to favor watch time, longer, lower-quality videos dominated. This started the vlogging and commentary era of YouTube. These changes caused a complete paradigm shift. What viewers liked had little to do with what became popular. And one day, years of hard work were instantly erased for no fault of their own.
YouTubing takes a lot of skill but also has a lot of random elements that are far outside your control. The closest comparison I can find is the game of poker. In poker, randomness is part of the game, and skilled players can lose it all because of a bad hand. But over the course of several hundred or thousands of games, the more skilled player is likely to win. It takes a lot of hard work and knowledge of the game to achieve this, but it’s possible. The downside is the constant fear of losing it all on one bad hand can be too much for some players to handle. This causes even some of the best pros to quit the game because the stress is too much for them. The situation with YouTubers is very similar. It takes a lot of skill and hard work to be able to keep a channel relevant over the long haul. Creators get burned out by the burden of avoiding controversy, irrelevance, and the algorithm. As Matt Patt said in his announcement video, he spent most of his nights working. Pushing himself harder and harder to make sure that his video performed well. But as a man with a family, he had to sacrifice time they could spend with them to keep working. A lot of creators have to make this sacrifice to keep up. Their content suffers as a result. Also, since falling videos are a financial risk, creators don't try new things. Things start to get stale, and people no longer enjoy the content they are creating. No matter how much you get paid, doing something you hate or that compromises you is the path to misery. So, given these challenges, it makes sense that so many creators would leave. A platform can only change so many times until it feels unrecognizable. There is also no incentive for YouTube to change anything. As long as there are enough new creators to replace old ones, why would you want to change what's making you billions?
As the platform progresses, the best we can hope for is that YouTube watches this shift. That's because while they may be making money off this system now, if things get too bad, content will suffer. If content suffers, then audiences will leave for other platforms. But that is something I perceive happening far into the future. Until then, we'll wait as YouTube stars fall and the platform becomes unrecognizable.