YouTube vs. The World

This is an idea I’ve had knocking around my head for quite a long time, but with the slate of YouTubers quitting YouTube to either retire or, in the case of Watcher, launch their own paid streaming service, I felt compelled to discuss my thoughts in detail.

YouTube is my favorite streaming service. It is the only one I directly pay for, as my fiancée gets about two for free with her cell phone plan and otherwise pays for a couple others. It is also the streaming service I by and large use the most. Whether it is to listen to The Weekly Planet podcast every Monday morning or to watch Good Mythical Morning every weekday before work over breakfast, I watch hours and hours of YouTube every week. Since I have been paying for YouTube Premium for many years, I get to do all of this ad free. I never get annoyed by ad roll. And I can download YouTube videos to my phone should I know I am going somewhere without reliable 5G or WiFi.

I have been a paying member of YouTube Premium back when it was known as YouTube Red. Largely to watch two things that no longer get made on YouTube. Rhett & Link’s Buddy System and Cobra Kai. The former was cancelled after two seasons, while the latter was bought out by Netflix starting with the third season.

Around the time I got into it, the WSJ instigated the Adpocalypse against the platform after the Boomers of that publication were angry that PewDiePie was a more recognized figure among the youth than virtually anyone else. Who is this doofy Swedish bastard and what is a “Bro Fist”? Painting a target on the back of, at the time, the most subscribed and watched content creator on the platform, advertising firms and brands fled the platform in droves in a way that the platform never truly recovered from. But it is owned by Google, so YouTube doesn’t really even have to turn much of a profit for Google to care. Google Search makes the company so much money, their risks are diversified enough for YouTube to lose billions and still not bother the parent company Alphabet.

Now that Mr. Beast fills the role of biggest name on the platform with the newest generation of youths, the media goes after him regularly too. Even all the charitable work he does. I don’t expect Mr. Beast to still be top dog a decade from now. He’s using his videos that hundreds of millions watch a year, if not billions, to make the world a better place for people that really need it, like Africans without access to clean drinking water and blind people with a curable disability. How are either of those things bad?

But under the topic at hand, why are so many YouTubers leaving? YouTubers fading from relevance and, thus, fading from ad revenue income was happening all the time well before this. YouTubers get fifteen minutes of fame with one viral video and are able to keep the steam going with a bevy of new subscribers and sponsored content sometimes for the better part of a decade. But without a consistent upload schedule and a consistent audience, YouTubers will eventually stop posting regularly enough to keep YouTube as their primary source of income and/or promotion. A lot of video game Let’s Players who started on YouTube make more of their income from Twitch and/or Patreon these days even if they still post regularly to YouTube, such as The Yogscast.

They are leaving because they either made enough money to retire and/or to refocus their efforts on something else they’d rather do, like making movies or music or some such, or have been lured by the succor of an idiot (sometimes themselves) to start their own paid streaming platform. The latter is usually a very dumb idea, but let’s tackle the former first.

The YouTubers that fade from relevance merely just go away, likely to a basic job mostly out of the spotlight, like reality television stars or retired porn stars. The ones that retire with some measure of a warchest are the lucky ones. MatPat of The Game Theorists channel is retiring as he’s happily married with children and has made a buttload of money off of not only his many YouTube channels and Twitch streams but also from consulting work with other YouTube creators. Charles Trippy from way back in the early days of YouTube had a similar venture. I have no idea what he’s doing these days. Will MatPat be able to transition after YouTube into other ventures that will be either as successful or at least successful enough to pay his family’s bills? Time will tell, but I wish him the best of luck even though I haven’t watched a new video from him in many years, as I previously mentioned in that FNaF article from a few years ago. (He even got a cameo in that movie!)

People like Watcher are the silly ones. A large chunk, if not an outright vast majority of any successful YouTuber’s audience, is not subscribed to the YouTube channel itself. Why does this matter? When you launch a paid streaming service, everyone who is able to watch your content are not only subscribers, they are paid subscribers. It does not cost anyone a thin dime or even a red cent to subscribe to a YouTube channel. You just need a YouTube account. And a lot of people don’t even go that far and just search YouTube for what they want to watch when the mood strikes them. By switching over to a paid model, you are cannibalizing most likely a majority of your audience. In the hopes that enough of them start using your new streaming service that will likely provide only your content to them and nothing else.

Are you starting to see the problem? I may pay for YouTube Premium as a YouTube power user, but that’s not most people. Most people who use YouTube weekly probably watch less than five hours a week, assuming they don’t have one of the other paid services of YouTube such as YouTube TV. This means they’re not really watching content unique to YouTube, and that’s only the people who use YouTube weekly. There are plenty of people who use YouTube occasionally, like a few times a month. To watch a new movie trailer or check out a new music video from their favorite artist instead of using Spotify or whatever. But the people who use YouTube infrequently still account for millions if not billions of views every month.

The casual viewer pays a lot of bills, in other words. The committed may pay extra, say for merch or tickets to see a live show, as I do with Game Grumps and Ninja Sex Party and Good Mythical Morning and others, but asking people who may only watch your account once a week or month to pay money for the privilege seems insane.

Watcher as a YouTube channel is one I am only familiar with for their rankings of chain restaurants, usually in a collab with other YouTubers, and travel videos where they try different cuisines across America (and possibly the world.) They clearly tour for some reason, but I know little about that. Their content is fun, but not the kind of thing I’d pay for a standalone streaming service for. It is very niche.

No one seems to remember the failure of Screen Junkies Plus, back when Defy Media seemed to be unstoppable. At the time, Defy Media owned Smosh (the most subscribed YouTube channel on and off during this period until PewDiePie exploded in popularity,) worked with a ton of different YouTube channels from Jeremy Jahns to the Warp Zone, ran The Escapist (where Yahtzee worked until very recently,) and owned Screen Junkies. Screen Junkies, which now only makes Honest Trailers and a couple off-shoots that are similar like Honest Game Trailers, at the time seemed on top of the world when it came to movie news and other nerd analysis. It had a weekly show hosted by Hal Rudnick called the Screen Junkies Show, did a weekly Honest Trailer, and even did a weekly hour plus livestream called Movie Fights that was a debate program.

Screen Junkies Plus was an endeavor to double down on this content with a commercial free app that only cost $5 a month. This project lasted about a year before being shut down. A lot of what they already did was posted early to the app before ending up on YouTube a day or so later. Why did it fail? They made a bunch of content right at the beginning and when the audience just wasn’t there, the content slowed to a crawl but the cost stayed the same, leading to a bunch of the few subscribers they had left jumping ship. As it was only five bucks, I actually stayed with it the entire time it existed. But I noticed how little content was being pumped out eventually. Around the time I thought about pulling the plug myself, they did it for me. Most of the extra content Screen Junkies was doing before Screen Junkies Plus also went away. Movie Fights and the Screen Junkies Show both no longer exist.

This failure, one of many Defy Media would start to collect like Infinity Stones before that company imploded, should be studied in business classes the world over. It didn’t kill the brand, but it didn’t end up growing it at all either. Leaving aside the #MeToo scandal surrounding co-creator Andy Signore, Screen Junkies posts essentially one video a week now, an Honest Trailer. They technically post one other, a writers’ commentary for that week’s Honest Trailer, but basically no one watches them.

I don’t see how opening a paid streaming service as the sole source of your content will work out. Let’s peep an example of doing it right: The Mythical Society. Rhett & Link, whose secondary channel Good Mythical Morning became their main channel at some point within the last decade or so, are YouTuber OGs. They’ve been with the platform since nearly its inception. They started with skits and comedy music videos, usually with small sponsors to keep their paltry incomes working for them while they had full time jobs as engineers. With Good Mythical Morning, they now have a staff in the several dozens if not into three figures. A far cry from where they started with one additional employee at the start of Good Mythical Morning. Mythical Entertainment, as it is now called, is a multi-media YouTube empire, with Rhett & Link both being millionaires. Hell, they bought Smosh from Defy Media for $10 million back when it collapsed. The creators of Smosh eventually bought it back recently, but two YouTubers who started Good Mythical Morning with $400 or so sponsored videos being able to swing an eight-figure acquisition within a decade seems deftly insane to a casual observer.

What is the Mythical Society? It is a paid extra content service that Rhett & Link operate. With four tiers, one of which is non-paid, they produce additional content on top of what they do every weekday on Good Mythical Morning. Rhett & Link do so much more for free on YouTube and otherwise other than this, such as several different podcasts and at least four other YouTube channels, three of which they also post at minimum weekly to. But the Mythical Society content is rarely necessary viewing. I am a super fan of them, but I don’t pay for it. I just don’t think I’d have the time to make the expense worth it. I have an account at the lowest tier when they occasionally post a free episode available to said non-paying accounts. They market the Mythical Society very well, letting me know in the middle of a Good Mythical Morning episode that there’s some new thing I might like. Masters of branding, those fellas.

I am only slightly annoyed by the paid content as some of it is music, which was the first thing I came to watch Rhett & Link for all the way back in 2006 or 2007. If you pay enough, the top tier, and pay it quarterly or yearly (or monthly all four months in a quarter,) you get a quarterly collectible four times a year. Every year, they do a vinyl pressing of something, usually an old song of theirs re-recorded with the original track or tracks included. What they don’t do is make these songs available to anyone else. Those who receive the vinyl get a digital download of all the songs, none of which seem to appear on YouTube or anywhere else. I refuse to pay $60-100 (whatever it costs quarterly) to get a vinyl (as I do not even own a record player) just to get approximately six to ten dollars’ worth of MP3s. I have bought a lot of their music over the years, including within the last week, and I am pissed those songs are gatekept from me forever. But enough of my minor griping…

I was one of the first people to watch their first attempt at Good Mythical Morning, Good Morning Chia Lincoln. I have been a dedicated fan of theirs for nearly two decades. And even I won’t pay for the extra stuff. Even if it is stuff I may want. The price and value proposition just isn’t there for me. But enough people do to make the Mythical Society a successful operation. The case study of Screen Junkies Plus vs. the Mythical Society should be studied for how to capitalize on one’s YouTube audience, for good or ill.

Best of luck to Watcher, but abandoning YouTube completely seems like an insane mistake. Even Screen Junkies didn’t do that. If it does fail, I did bloody well tell you so.