Right. I don’t think it’s dead, but I think it’s off its peak, and many things are in danger. I look at YouTube videos all day long (sometimes almost literally so). But I highly doubt that YouTube in its current form will be around much longer. And once it’s gone…
She is an intentional polemicist, blah blah type. It’s like eating Drano— all exiting in the beginning— then leaves you with an empty feeling inside.
I just looked. Yes, I was subscribed to her channel for a brief time. She’s a smart and interesting person, but I found her videos to be overly long and unfocused. She seems to be making content more for herself than for her audience.
I agree: I believe this may even be central to the problems you point out. I would submit (impopular opinion) that this is also due to the deeply entrenched expectation that everything on the Internet should be free or really cheap. That makes it hard to cover the actual costs of quality products.
Streaming, for instance, is still mostly a losing proposition for either the streaming company or the artists.
We’re currently seeing a bit of a correction to the free Internet, in that providers and platforms are raising prices. The era of cheap Internet was partly driven by unsustainable large amounts of venture capital, which is drying up due to rising interest rates. The flood of nonsense AI content is the last remnant as there is an overflow of investment money into AI, whereby the use of AI currently is still far below actual (energy and development) costs.
For me the interesting question is how the Internet is going to develop under those circumstances. Will it become basically a bookshop where you can mostly only access content if you pay, or a combination of walled gardens and in between open access areas? Will there be room for voluntary projects and/or small commercial websites, or will the large platforms crush all competition?
Te comments in this thread do not make me hopeful.
- The increase of regulation is indeed, as pointed out, mainly to the benefit of large corporations and may spell the death of all smaller initiatives.
- And furthermore Google and similar corporations have effectively a chokehold on the access to websites/content providers: it appears that many people simply won’t find websites if they are not guided there by Google.
- Finally I’m not sure the advertisement model will continue to serve as a sufficient basis to cover costs/provide income for smaller websites.
I should add that I like to read Cory Doctorow, who writes trenchantly and extensively about these issues (he coined the term 'enshittification) and from who I’ve learned a lot about underlying causes. The nice thing is that he is also optimistic in proposing an alternative to retake power, what he calls the federated Internet (instead of focusing on platforms, let the end users keep the power over the connections they make).
Anyone who has a favourite LED is OK in my book. Ymmv
That’s the point. The audience has their nose glued to the algorithm. If you make content to chase that, you become part of the problem that this thread is all about.
Maybe the Social Interaction part of the Internet is dying, but the mechanism isn’t. My company’s marketing department uses Google Analytics to analyze response to our promotions. Adobe is about to release GenStudio, which not only provides the same services, but enables marketers to create campaigns on the fly using image-generating AI. They can change headlines and copy themselves and redistribute new ads to their customer base instantly. It’s essentially putting the monkeys in charge of the zoo.
I meant that she makes content that doesn’t seem to take into consideration how her audience might like to view it. This is true of a lot of creators: I don’t need a 20-minute video when a 5-minute video will suffice. I think her videos would be better if they were shorter and more succinct.
To the point about the algorithm, however, yes, it’s a huge problem on YouTube and one that I see creators complain about more and more. E.g., they’ll say something like, “I know this video isn’t going to get a lot of views because of the algorithm,” etc. etc. So we perceive the same thing in that regard, it seems.
Maybe, but it is a genuine, non-fallacious slippery slope to start to tinker and tweak the content to the expressed preferences of the audience, especially when those audience preferences are already conditioned to the point of banality by the churn of existing content. It is a journey toward just becoming another creator of vapid, click-hungry, but ultimately unsatisfying bilge.
I would edit tighter than Fran does, but it’s her channel. She’s the artist. I’m the punter - my choices are to stay and appreciate it, or move on and find something that suits my tastes.
I don’t expect my preferences to provoke an artist to change their art for me, indeed, I think it’s wrong to want that.
Yes, I plan to make a post about late-stage capitalism and the rise of global dissatisfaction. A lot of things don’t add up any more economically that used to do so. I’m not an economist, but I don’t see any economists doing this kind of work (I’d be happy to read any links that posters should care to provide).
Right. And the corps went along with this for a long time under the rubric of, “Hey, the ads will pay for it–ads, baby!” but now are pissing and moaning and blocking ad blockers, and wow, talk about ingrained incompetence and a lack of vision on their part.
Yeah. Apparently Disney lost $2.5 billion in 2023 on streaming but will turn a profit this year. Many other services won’t be profitable, however.
Good point. And this is affecting business investment and “innovation” across the board.
They also seem to be hitting a wall in terms of how good this stuff can get, which I wrote about in this post back in February:
What has been needed forever is a general subscription to a bunch of news sites, etc. It’s so obvious a solution that I think it has to happen eventually. When it does, I think everything except things like ecommerce will go to pay-to-access.
I think YouTube will go pay-to-access with ad and no-ad tiers a la many streaming services sooner rather than later.
Yes, only the biggest will be able to shoulder the compliance burden. OTOH, maybe smaller entities can buy into a shared compliance program, buy compliance insurance, etc. None of that is going to be fun, of course.
While there are a lot of things about which I have said above, “This will never be built again,” with respect to Google and their monopoly, I think there is enough money in the pot to attract competitors/disruptors eventually. Especially since dissatisfaction with Google seems to be on the rise.
It doesn’t now, does it?
Yes, he’s great.
Well yes, I basically agree with you. I was just explaining why I don’t actively seek out her content any more while acknowledging her virtues as a creator.
All to create marketing content that no one cares about. The world of advertising used to be fun and glamorous. Sigh.
It already has exactly that - called ‘YouTube Premium’ - it was introduced ten years ago.
Edit: oh, wait, did you mean pay either way, but pay more for no ads?
Fair enough. I think the actual problem is that many other creators of Fran’s era (which would have offered choices that vary) are gone, or have become awful.
Agree again on this.
Yes, pay either way. They are cracking down so hard on ad blockers, that they are close to doing this anyway.
I feel like that would be shooting themselves in the foot. Not that this means they wouldn’t try it, but I think for now, they’ll probably try harder and harder to defeat the ad blockers
I just realised this was quite a weird thing for me to say, since a lot of my videos are way longer than Fran’s
I have been saying something similar for quite a while, but then I realize that’s what my Apple News+ subscription is for. In terms of bang for the buck, it’s probably my most effective use of media access spend, but there’s still something fundamentally broken (possibly in me) about how it works.
What happens often is I will stumble across a paywalled link here, on FB, from an email, whatever, and I will find myself locked out. Many times, that same story will be available to me through News+, but typically once I go bouncing off a paywall, unless I really want to see the link, I don’t bother to look if it’s available in my News+ app.
Ugh. Substack, Medium, Patreon. Just ugh. I’m a firm believer that people making content (hate the word but it fits, so…) that I really enjoy deserve a chance to make a little money for it. But I can’t reconcile my belief with how quickly these subscriptions add up.
The stuff I pay for is genuinely high quality and valuable to me. Think of things like extended lessons in guitar techniques, as well as news and opinions about specific industries I follow - news that can require travel for trade shows, interviews, product releases, etc. I get more value out of these creators than from my Netflix or Max subscriptions for sure. But holy hell they add up fast. I periodically have to prune my list which always makes me feel bad. But ending up north of $50 a month or more to read some blogs is not where I want to be.
I agree that it’s not going to happen just yet. I would bet $100.00, however, that they have a plan in place to pull that trigger and are analyzing when and if they should do so.
The problem, I would conjecture, is that they are kind of effed either way. I’ve heard that YouTube is more or less a break-even Google division/business/whatever they call it. But it’s big, right? So it’s a big risk to carry a huge division that could go red, go south at any time, and it’s bad for ROA not to make money on it all. At the same time, it’s a prestige business, and Google will look bad if they have to shut it down. Plus, once they shut it down, it can never come back.
So they can keep the behemoth going as is and not get much out of it, or they can pull that trigger and maybe lose a megaton of viewers and creators but wind up with a smaller but profitable business. It’s all a very tough thing to game out.