Why YouTube Sucks If You're Small

Have you ever heard of the fox, chicken and corn problem?

The gist of it is, you have a YouTube channel and the following types of viewers:

• Let's Play viewers will watch any Let's Play video, but won't watch anything which isn't a Let's Play.
• Comedic documentary viewers will watch any comedic documentary, but won't watch anything which isn't a comedic documentary.
• OpenTTD viewers will watch absolutely anything that has OpenTTD in any form, but they will have an absolute toys-from-pram meltdown if you do anything which isn't OpenTTD.

If a reasonable proportion of your subscribers is made up from people in each of these categories, how do you satisfy them all with just one channel?

Answer: you don't.

If you got this far and you don't have one homogeneous subscriber base, you failed at YouTube. That's not how YouTube works. YouTube's entire content discovery approach is based on the assumption that you can 1:1 map a particular piece of content to a particular YouTuber and that's it, that's the only thing they ever get to do. It's why TechMoan quickly gave up on the "moan" part of his moniker. You're not allowed to have a channel that's both retro tech and observations on daily life.

You may be thinking at this point, "why don't they just allow tags, so people can subscribe only to the things a creator does they find personally interesting?" This is because you do not work for YouTube, or if you do, you're being ignored even though you should not be.

For each topic, YouTube's approach is to pick a small number of winners who will be the face of that content. I have a lovely person who follows me whose Let's Plays struggle to get even to 10 views. They're no worse than the ones out there which have 100k views, it's just they have the misfortune to cover games where YouTube has already picked the "winner" for that category.

And here we get to my problem. I became one of the "winners" for OpenTTD. If you went to YouTube using DuckDuckGo's browser or an incognito window and searched for "OpenTTD", you'd consistently get Timberwolf's Stuff videos in the results. Yay. Often the ones of pretty dubious technical quality, Particularly the ones which were sinks for "well ackchyually" comments, because Engagement.

I did not want to be just The OpenTTD Guy. (Well, let's be realistic. The Other Other OpenTTD Guy, If You Discount The One Who Does Holocaust Jokes)

So my reaction was, "fine, I'll just start doing other stuff, and people who are here for me will stick around and other will drift away, and eventually the new stuff will dominate search results and people will be like, 'Timberwolf does general retro stuff with a bunch of OpenTTD content'". Y'know, the way things used to work in the world of blogs and personal websites.

Well, that was dumb.

• People in the 2020s believe they have a right to what you do as a creator. I started to get aggressive dislikes and comments simply because things were Not OpenTTD.
• YouTube will purposefully bury the content you produce which is not your "thing". I could upload excellent videos which I'd poured days of effort into, videos with 30% like-to-view ratio and 65%+ engagement, and it'd respond with "yeah not OpenTTD tho'" and not show it to anyone.

This is why YouTube sucks if you're a small creator. Because unless you figure out exactly what you want to do on Video Number One, you get picked as one of the "winners" for that category, and you still want to be doing that thing a year later... your channel will have a brief moment in the sun and then fall into that vast morass of people who had a couple of promising viewer numbers once but never kept up the momentum.

And from YouTube's point of view? They don't have to care in the slightest about this, because you are only one of thousands of people uploading a video for the first time, and it only has to pick a couple of winners each day to keep the platform sustained with creators to cover any conceivable topic.

Except... I think they're wrong.

In 2010, I think this was a valid approach. The only big competitor was Vimeo, and that was mainly because Vimeo had surprisingly lax enforcement of people uploading entire series of anime to it.

In 2022, someone who has a great personality but can't be pigeonholed into one type of content might give up and go to Twitch instead. Or maybe they'll get fed up with the penalisation of short but highly engaging content and go do TikTok. Platforms which have their own problems, but that's not the point - the odds that the next Technology Connections or Tom Scott are getting their channel right from video number one are astronomically low. (Tom Scott himself admits quite openly that it took him a decent chunk of experimentation before settling on Things You Might Not Know).

If other platforms allow creators to experiment more, they are going to end up with more of them working out those early kinks and making it through to the top tier, and thus more and better content overall.

Perhaps YouTube is big enough and dominant enough that it doesn't need to care about this, but the half-arsed attempts at me-too products like Live and Shorts suggest they really worry about the encroachment of streaming and short-form video on the traditional on-demand market.

Which is fine... but broadcast TV isn't dying because it's broadcast TV, it's dying because it's still showing repeats and copies of 1970s sitcoms, panel shows full of Avalon comedians and refusing to admit gaming exists as a hobby. Fresh ideas and fresh approaches are vital to the continued success of a platform, and I think YouTube's "pick a winner who does one single thing" strategy is mired in the early 2010s and an assumption users want to binge a single topic.

Which sucks for them, and also sucks for you if you're a small creator trying to figure out what works for you, without the infamous algorithm pigeonholing you into whatever your first popular video was about.

So how do you deal with this, assuming you're not going to flounce off to Twitch?

• Sadly, this is why everyone tells you to "subscribe and ring that bell". Most people won't, and for those that do you'll have to live through dislike-unsubscribes every time you do something different, but it is the most effective way to get a loyal audience who view everything you put out.
• Establish a strong visual identity, so people can see a video is yours instantly in their feed. YouTube tries to downplay the individual, so you need to compensate.
• Convert things you don't want recommended any more to unlisted videos, so YouTube can't recommend them. (But keep them on playlists so people can still watch them)
• Build your audience outside of YouTube. But don't be obnoxious about it.
• Hard mode: Create a platform which actually works for small creators in 2022. I'd provide content for it!

I hope YouTube change. Even as a consumer and not a creator, it's noticeable how few new creators are coming through, and how often it will just straight-up run out of content in a category because I've burnt through everything the 3-4 "winners" in that category have produced and it doesn't know what to do next. And how rare it is to find someone who's just generally interesting, and does lots of things across lots of topics.