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YouTube's Top Creators Are Burning Out and Breaking Down En Masse (polygon.com)
Polygon reports of several prominent YouTube creators who are struggling with burnout. The cause can be attributed to "constant changes to the platform's algorithm, unhealthy obsessions with remaining relevant in a rapidly growing field and social media pressures [that] are making it almost impossible for top creators to continue creating at the pace both the platform and audience want," reports Polygon. From the report: Three weeks ago, Bobby Burns, a YouTuber with just under one million subscribers, sat down on a rock in Central Park to talk about a recent mental health episode. One week ago, Elle Mills, a creator with more than 1.2 million subscribers, uploaded a video that included vulnerable footage during a breakdown. Six days ago, Ruben "El Rubius" Gundersen, the third most popular YouTuber in the world with just under 30 million subscribers, turned on his camera to talk to his viewers about the fear of an impending breakdown and his decision to take a break from YouTube. Burns, Mills and Gundersen aren't alone. Erik "M3RKMUS1C" Phillips (four million subscribers), Benjamin "Crainer" Vestergaard (2.7 million subscribers) and other top YouTubers have either announced brief hiatuses from the platform, or discussed their own struggles with burnout, in the past month. Everyone from PewDiePie (62 million subscribers) to Jake Paul (15.2 million subscribers) have dealt with burnout. Lately, however, it seems like more of YouTube's top creators are coming forward with their mental health problems. In closing, Polygon's Julia Alexander writes: "YouTube offers no clear support system for creators, nor is it clear if the company has offered professional help to some of its top creators who've made their burnout public. Instead, YouTube's only direct reaction is a playlist dedicated to burnout and mental health. The creators are essentially working until they no longer physically can, and apologizing to their fans after believing they've failed. Polygon has reached out to YouTube for more information about services that are provided to creators. The only way to beat burnout is to take breaks. Unfortunately, for many YouTubers, those breaks are rarely planned."
If you get to 200K subscribers you are making an INCREDIBLE amount of money. A million is so far out there to make the 1% seem like the minimum wage. If you are burning out, you are just getting greedy. YouTube does not owe you anything.
Dream on! With 200K subscribers, you would be lucky to get 4K views (2% of subscriber base) per video. Pewdiepie has 60M subscribers but gets 1M to 3M views per video. You need 50K to 200K views per month to make $100 from advertising revenues. The most successful YouTubers make more money in merchandise and brand deals than they earn from advertising revenues. You don't need a big subscriber base to make more money for less work.
Yeah, Google's army of security guards are doing it. Not the creators themselves nor the faceless masses watching the videos.
What kind of "support" are these millions of viewers giving their beloved content creators... a single dollar from each would solve most if not all the creator's problems.
For Google, it's just not enough that they provide each of these with a voice, distribution channel, bandwidth, and basically permanent content storage... on top of payments.
Boohoo "Think of the creators." Sorry my smallest violin just broke.
Anyone whose livelihood depends on youtube ads, should look for alternative streams of revenue.
That includes, IMO, taking a regular job and releasing only one video per week. In most cases, there's not more than one good video per week anyway and the rest are just trivial vlog-fillers.
Windows 2000 - from the guys who brought us edlin
Okay so I have 33,000 subscribers BUT I do have 15 million views and 1400 videos so I feel I can comment on this. They're lazy, entitled, greedy, egotistical assholes who have clearly never worked a day in their life. I've worked shitty industrial jobs, customer service, and some VERY bad IT jobs. I still work a full time job in addition to Youtube but guess what. In order to get money, you have to do work. I don't care what people think of me. I don't care if a big video flops. I just do my job, realize it won't be perfect, and if I absolutely need a day off I do it and come to terms with the fact that it'll probably lose me $100 or so.