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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."
Anyone working for a company that makes sudden drastic changes to your livelihood on a regular basis is going to be stressed.
Youtube doesn't need to provide professional help for these attention seeking assholes. And no one is compelling them to create content. Take a break. Take that Youtube revenue and pay a doctor/therapist. Youtube doesn't owe you shit. What's next? They didn't make your favorite dinner? They didn't tuck you in at night? You made content, they paid you. Fuck off!
For professionals, the solution is obvious - find another job.
For YouTubers... not so much. There's few viable alternatives, all look like very transient phenomena.
Dunno what those dudes making a living there think.
There is a name for this. It's called work. Welcome to the club.
Don't get me wrong I think that companies should provide healthcare for employees -- frankly thats a topic for a different time -- but I don't really see how this would qualify. Uber probably comes the closest but they are officially on company payroll, go through a background check, are offered a deal of fleet leases, et al. There's much more of a employer/employee relationship than the contractor status which has been turned down by several courts.
In contrast, Youtube doesn't hire people to create content. They sign up and get no money until they hit XXXX views or followers. Even then it's not them responding to a hail, but rather it's them trying to attract people to their channel.
Google providing some options would be great and get themselves some much needed positive PR. Not sure if Youtube was ever designed/bought to let external users generate money off of it. I definitely wouldn't plan my income around something where the compensation was 100% at the whim of someone else without an employment agreement.
When we all have jobs that are as bad or worse. Everybody is getting squeezed. Learn to love it or start building guillotines. Those are pretty much the options.
Those with mental health issues are drawn to be âoeYouTube starsâ
Is YouTube forcing these people to put up content? Do they enforce deadlines when something needs to be posted? In what way is YouTube anything but a way for these people to post something?
It's difficult to have any sympathy for these folks when they're the ones who made the decision to "create" and post it. They're the ones who think they have to get more and more viewers. They're the ones who are driving themselves down the rabbit hole.
If this is too stressful for them, perhaps they should find a job at McDonald's.
I can't find an article about this and it doesn't seem to be mentioned in the Polygon article, but the Content ID system that Youtube uses to flag copyright violations is apparently going to have significant changes this month. This is per Matthew Patrick (MatPat/The Game Theory)--who is basically as close to the company as someone can be without working there--in a recent livestream of theirs.
Other long-running issues he address in that same 15-ish minutes are Youtube tools being confusing, a severe lack of response from Youtube support (and conflicting responses, even when that person has better access than xXxStoneddGamer567xXx), and he's talked in the past about how Youtube extremely over-reacts to controversies. Their "solutions" rarely take care of the original issue and instead punish a significant number of other creators.
Youtube has been relying on critical mass for years now.
In the last few years Youtube has increasingly been courting "mainstream" outlets, including launching their Youtube TV service, and these outlets have pushed original creators more to the sidelines. While MatPat doesn't explain what these Content ID changes will be, my expectation is that the system will become far, far less lenient toward infringements real, imagined, or claimed (thanks, DMCA!). If so, there will likely be a "purge" of creators.
If that is the case, I'm hoping that some company can step up to with a video-focused service that caters to smaller creators (or creator groups.) Vimeo might be able to branch into this, but their current (apparent) focus on completely-original content (and content not too far removed from television or film festivals) makes me think this is unlikely. Twitch's focus on live-streaming really limits content, and the platform serves gaming and some creative setups only which will make it a non-starter for people looking to move. Vine could make a comeback, striking while the iron is hot. Outside of those two I simply don't know of any other alternatives, either established or up-and-coming. Most of my video consumption these days comes from small creators, and I would really hate to lose this kind of access to what they create.
Maybe PornHub could take a stab at it, they've taken many interesting actions already. (Snowplowing, alerting users about tracking by their country, etc.)
Maybe practically everyone living in the 21st century is stressed, insecure about their livelihood, and feels like they're pushing the proverbial boulder up a hill every day? Maybe the major difference here is a Youtuber has a soapbox to complain about it, whereas most other people don't even have a therapist?
Now, consider that "Youtube Content Creator" is one of the few jobs you can decide to stop working at will, and still expect to have a job waiting for you when you decide to come back. It's also one of the few where your customers are inherently sympathetic to the condition of your mental health.
If anyone could just stand up in their cubicle, announce to the office that they weren't feeling enthusiastic about the work, and take a few "mental health" weeks, the world would burn. I question if any of these Youtube burnouts are self-aware enough to realize any of this.
Anyone working for a company
Which these people aren't doing.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
But nobody blamed oil paints and canvas for the mental problems of artists.
Anyone working for a company
Which these people aren't doing.
This... YouTube creators are not YouTube's customers, they are the product. The customers are the advertisers, and thus the only ones YouTube cares about.
Some days I get the sinking feeling Orwell was an optimist.
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.
I think it's more nuanced than that. Viewers are product, for sure.
Creators... they're livestock.
I think a lot of these creators probably could have dealt with the pressure from their audiences (and from themselves) to produce relevant content. But when you add in changing algorithms, changing community guidelines/demonetization, and fewer advertisers who are increasingly critical of where their ads go; then it doesn't surprise me in least bit that many creators are starting to break down. Imagine spending 40-60 hours on a single video, 3-4 years ago you could be safe in knowing that it would bring in a lot of viewers and a lot of ad revenue, but now you have to worry about whether your subs will even see it or if it'll even get recommended. Then you have to worry about whether it'll get demonetized/flagged which requires you to wait to get it manually reviewed. God help you if you made it public immediately because now you are losing ad revenue during the time period when you'd be getting the most views.
When I look at this new environment on YouTube, its hard for me not to believe that YouTube has purposefully 'poisoned the well' in an attempt to drive some of these larger YouTubers out and let the platform get taken over by big media outlets. Just look at Trending, its largely filled with Music videos, late night show clips, and the occasional news clip from like CNN or MSNBC.
Which they are totally doing, even if the company won't admit it for legal reasons.
It's really no wonder these people are stressed, they've been watching the demonetization line creep up and up over the past couple of years and know that it's only a matter of time until theyr'e effectively out of a job. They've been working themselves to death to try to keep the subscriber and hour counts up but it's literally killing them.
I read the internet for the articles.
It's all that non relational database bullshit. They can't give you complete, correct, or consistent results because their data is all in a big, meaningless heap.
Amazon has the same issue. You can't get a fucking simple price filter working on an Amazon search, for example.
When I was a contract programmer and got burnt-out, nobody came to hold my hand or tell me how I deserved to be treated with more respect and love.
But I never expected them to. I was a big boy (with big-boy pants and everything) so I took responsibility for my own destiny.
Now I'm a full-time YouTube content creator and I still don't expect anyone to hold my hand or tell me how I deserve to be treated with more respect and love.
Still wearing the big-boy pants!
Yes, YouTube and it's constantly changing policies make life very hard -- but so did all those project managers I used to code for.
Life can be tough... get over it. Take a teaspoon of cement and harden up -- or find something else to do.
Anyone working
Cutting it down to that. The top producers are people at the top of their game. That's really bloody hard work and the result of really hard work is often burnout. As someone who suffered severe burnout I can really sympathise.
It's got little to do with youtube though and more to do with people who are driven to work.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Creatives don't have a right to making a living from their creativity. Only the best of the best of the best creative output is worth money. The rest is dreck. YouTube's value proposition was not originally supposed to be everyone turning themselves into ad revenue streams. It was originally a way for people to get their ideas out there. YouTube is already giving you a free platform to spread all the dumb shit that pops into your head. They don't owe you shit.
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.