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YouTube Has Lost Its Way · Gimbal Podcast

• 0:00
  So, I've been a fan of YouTube for like 15 years and every year it's gotten better and
• 0:05
  better and more sustainable and better for money and everything.
• 0:09
  This year is the first year where I actually think it's gotten worse.
• 0:13
  And so, as someone whose entire livelihood is built around the creator economy like this
• 0:18
  house was bought with money earned from working on YouTube, it's really important to me to
• 0:23
  be working for a platform that does keep getting better and better.
• 0:26
  So, as a result, I've put about 100 hours into trying to figure out why YouTube is bad
• 0:30
  and how to actually do something about it and make it good.
• 0:34
  So, that's what this episode of the podcast is about.
• 0:36
  So, give me about 15 to 20 minutes.
• 0:38
  I'll give you the full conspiracy theory that I've written up and how we can act on it so
• 0:43
  that we actually still thrive at a time where YouTube is not good.
• 0:47
  So, you're probably wondering who I am and let me give you the TLDR.
• 0:51
  So, I've been a creative director and a strategist on YouTube for about five years now.
• 0:55
  I did three years working with the author Mark Manson and now I'm head of content for
• 0:59
  a company called Say Como Say.
• 1:01
  We work with thought leaders like Jesse Etzler, Daniel Pink, David Epstein and the Hidden
• 1:06
  Brain podcast.
• 1:07
  These are people who I work with on a day-to-day basis and it's my job to make sure that
• 1:12
  YouTube is in a good place for them so that they continue growing.
• 1:15
  If YouTube is in a good place, it makes it easier to bring in new clients to help those
• 1:19
  clients grow faster and if it's not in a good place, which is the state of the world
• 1:23
  right now, we need to find ways to continue to make it beneficial for our clients.
• 1:28
  Everything that I studied boils down to this single tweet.
• 1:32
  This comes from Todd Boepri and in my opinion, he is the most important person in the
• 1:36
  Creator economy.
• 1:37
  If you don't know him, he is the person who leads the algorithm at YouTube.
• 1:41
  He's been doing it for ten years and he's done an excellent job.
• 1:45
  It's the reason why YouTube is a great, sustainable place to grow and build a career in the
• 1:50
  Creator economy and why Instagram and TikTok are far less good.
• 1:55
  YouTube, its value prop as a whole is that viewers can come and click and watch and enjoy
• 2:01
  and build relationships with the Creator and the Creator can also monetize on their videos.
• 2:09
  This is done through pre-roll ads, mid-roll ads, 60-second ad segments.
• 2:14
  This is stuff that is actually really challenging to monetize with Instagram and TikTok.
• 2:20
  With Instagram, it's a swipe to watch feature, which means the viewer never really knows
• 2:24
  that you're coming up next.
• 2:26
  Also you're spending significantly less time with the Creator and so you don't really
• 2:29
  build that kind of rapport that you would with an 8-10 minute video otherwise.
• 2:34
  Advertising is just as tricky because you can put an ad in between a 10 minute video somewhere
• 2:39
  in between and the viewer is likely to stick around because they click to watch that video
• 2:43
  and they want to watch to the rest of the video as long as the video is good.
• 2:46
  With short form, that lure isn't there.
• 2:48
  If I see an ad in between my two shorts, I'm not going to watch any further.
• 2:54
  This tweet from Todd is important and I'm going to read it to you now.
• 2:57
  If you could introduce one improvement to YouTube that would substantially and sustainably
• 3:01
  increase value to viewers, what would it be?
• 3:04
  Todd does this from time to time and people leave their feedback and the responses never
• 3:08
  have a ton of likes.
• 3:10
  What's important about Todd is that the people who follow him aren't fans of YouTube.
• 3:15
  They're not people who aren't monetized on YouTube.
• 3:18
  These are people who are building their entire livelihood around YouTube and as a result,
• 3:23
  they need to know the stuff that Todd says.
• 3:26
  You'll notice a trend from some of the responses here.
• 3:29
  Give more settings controls over filtering out shorts.
• 3:32
  Remove shorts mixed from suggestions.
• 3:35
  Separate shorts feature buttons like YouTube music and YouTube kids.
• 3:38
  What's interesting is not that people dislike shorts.
• 3:41
  What's interesting is Todd's response.
• 3:43
  Todd is a database person.
• 3:45
  He's a computer nerd and every time he responds to people on Twitter, he does it in a calculated
• 3:51
  way.
• 3:52
  And I've always agreed with his logic, but his logic this time is kind of weird.
• 3:58
  Have you tapped the three dot menu and selected show fewer shorts?
• 4:01
  See, this is kind of backwards from what I would expect for a number of reasons.
• 4:05
  Firstly, YouTube's main value prop for the past 21 years has been long-form videos.
• 4:10
  And also YouTube is a platform that needs to satisfy both viewers and the creators.
• 4:17
  And if the creators are saying shorts is actually bad for YouTube, then you would expect Todd
• 4:23
  to say something like, okay, I'll take this back to my team and we'll recalibrate or try
• 4:27
  and figure out what the better balance is.
• 4:29
  But what he's actually saying is just a solution for one single person.
• 4:33
  Click the button that says show fewer shorts.
• 4:35
  Then that one user sees fewer shorts.
• 4:38
  But the majority of the platform still gets the same experience.
• 4:41
  That's weird to me.
• 4:43
  Shorts are not good for the creator economy because they're hard to monetize.
• 4:47
  They might be good for getting your follower count up, but think about with TikTok.
• 4:50
  Like there are TikTokers out there that have 30 and 40 million followers and nobody really
• 4:55
  knows anything about them because we only watch them for 60 seconds at a time.
• 4:59
  Mario Jews, who's another important figure in this space, has said that shorts are infesting
• 5:04
  the homepage on YouTube.
• 5:07
  And I agree.
• 5:08
  I remember just a year ago or two years ago, if you go to youtube.com, you would get eight
• 5:12
  or nine long-form videos presented to you and the recommendations were usually so good.
• 5:17
  And I think that's why organic growth was so awesome on YouTube.
• 5:21
  But now you see maybe three long-form videos at the top and then you see a whole carousel
• 5:26
  of shorts and then randomly you get a bunch of games mixed in there.
• 5:30
  Like it's not clear what people are going to YouTube for.
• 5:33
  They're trying to satisfy everybody and the creators are paying the penalty for it.
• 5:37
  I saw a statistic that said 97% of people who work in the creator economy are making under
• 5:42
  $100,000.
• 5:43
  I mean $100,000 is a decent amount of money, but if 97% of them are not making at least that
• 5:49
  much, it's actually not a very sustainable industry.
• 5:52
  And it's not a very inviting place to come in if you want to work in this industry either
• 5:57
  as a BTS person or as a non-camera talent.
• 5:59
  You need to be able to make $100,000 or more and it's really, really tough right now.
• 6:03
  I think that's largely because YouTube is prioritizing shorts.
• 6:06
  So it begs the question, why is YouTube prioritizing shorts so much?
• 6:10
  And to get the answer of that, we have to go to the CEO.
• 6:13
  For the majority of YouTube's life, the CEO was this incredible woman named Susan Wajiki.
• 6:18
  And she built the creator economy from basically nothing.
• 6:22
  She took it from a fun place on the internet and she introduced the partnership program
• 6:27
  that allowed people to monetize and she grew it into what it was until she eventually
• 6:32
  stepped down and was replaced by Neil Mohan.
• 6:34
  Now, think about Neil at that exact moment in time where he took over as CEO.
• 6:38
  Susan did such a great job.
• 6:40
  The company was in such a healthy position that you have to wonder as Neil, like, what
• 6:45
  am I going to do to continue to improve the company to leave my mark on this incredible
• 6:51
  asset that is YouTube?
• 6:53
  If you backtrack to Neil's background, he founded a company called DoubleClick, which
• 6:57
  was eventually acquired by YouTube and it helped introduce ads to YouTube.
• 7:02
  So my hypothesis when he took over was that we were going to see increased ads and we've
• 7:06
  definitely seen that.
• 7:08
  In the past couple of years, we've seen that little symbol show up that says, we're showing
• 7:12
  you longer ads so that we can show you fewer ads.
• 7:14
  I don't buy it.
• 7:15
  I think it's weird.
• 7:16
  Ads have become far less skippable, but it's probably helped YouTube's bottom line.
• 7:21
  Now Neil joins YouTube as CEO and he's trying to find ways to leave his legacy.
• 7:27
  So maybe increasing earnings through ads is one way, but another way that we've seen
• 7:31
  him prioritize is by making YouTube competitive against channels like Netflix and Disney
• 7:39
  Plus.
• 7:40
  If you look at the headlines, if you go to the conferences, you'll see YouTube is so proud
• 7:46
  to report that they're getting more views than Netflix, more views than Disney Plus, more
• 7:50
  views than the majority of the streaming world combined.
• 7:54
  Why do you think that is?
• 7:55
  Well, perhaps it's because of shorts.
• 7:58
  The way that they measure shorts is by swiping if you see it for a single frame it counts
• 8:02
  as a view.
• 8:03
  Now if you measure it by hours, shorts is a very addictive feature and you just continue
• 8:07
  to watch it and watch it and so the hours actually build up.
• 8:10
  And so they're taking something that's actually not valuable for the majority of creators
• 8:14
  on YouTube and they're holding it as like a point of pride for themselves.
• 8:19
  So YouTube is actually not incentivized to go back to its original value prop of being
• 8:24
  long-form content.
• 8:25
  So that's kind of scary, right?
• 8:27
  And so as a result, if you look across the internet, creators that have been around for
• 8:31
  five or six years are seeing a decline in views.
• 8:34
  Mr. Beast used to get like 400 million views of video.
• 8:38
  Now he's getting about 150 million views of video.
• 8:40
  My clients, you know, particularly when I work with Mark Manson, we could reliably count
• 8:44
  on each video getting a million views.
• 8:46
  Now they're getting about 300,000 views.
• 8:48
  The quality of the videos didn't change, but the total opportunity changed.
• 8:54
  And it feels like particularly in my little corner of YouTube that we're all kind of fighting
• 8:59
  over the same 300,000 views.
• 9:01
  If you look at Ali Abdullah, he's a great case study because Ali was the face of YouTube
• 9:05
  education for a very long time.
• 9:07
  And he would average, I don't know, a couple million views of video.
• 9:10
  Now he's struggling to get 100,000.
• 9:12
  Look at Ramit Sedi who wrote the book, I will teach you to be rich.
• 9:15
  He's an interesting one because he's a client of Patty Galloway and in my opinion, Patty
• 9:19
  Galloway is the best strategist in the world he's significantly better than I am.
• 9:22
  And even Ramit is struggling to hit 100,000 views every single time.
• 9:25
  So something has changed and people are not watching YouTube long form as much.
• 9:28
  Even my own viewing habits, I'm not watching YouTube long form as much as I used to.
• 9:31
  So something weird has gone on.
• 9:33
  I actually think that short form is in a bit of a bubble and I think everybody is kind
• 9:37
  of competing, you know, to be the number one spot for short form.
• 9:41
  But I ultimately think that short form will kind of go on to decline soon because it's
• 9:45
  kind of like empty calories, like call in and some ear have called it that before, where
• 9:49
  you watch and you consume, but you don't really like ingest anything.
• 9:53
  There's a really popular video from the creator on Instagram, cat, GPT.
• 9:57
  And she challenges the viewer right off the hop.
• 9:59
  She's like, what was the real you watched two videos ago?
• 10:02
  And it's funny because you can't actually remember what you've consumed, but that's not
• 10:05
  the same with long form because long form we're spending more time and we're choosing
• 10:08
  to watch these videos rather than appearing in front of us.
• 10:11
  So we're in a place where creators need long form videos, but YouTube isn't really
• 10:16
  interested in giving that to them.
• 10:19
  And as a result, I think YouTube's gotten worse for the creator economy.
• 10:22
  It makes me hopeful that a company like Spotify will improve its discovery and kind of take
• 10:27
  over long form because I do think it's like the backbone of the creator economy.
• 10:31
  The question now becomes, okay, how do we thrive in this world where things aren't as good
• 10:35
  as they used to be?
• 10:36
  Well, interestingly enough, one of my data points from all of this research comes from
• 10:40
  this podcast itself.
• 10:42
  And one question that I always ask every single guest is, who is a creator that's on your
• 10:47
  radar that deserves some kind of shout out?
• 10:49
  And if you think back to like 2015, 2016, everyone had a favorite creator, Casey Neistat,
• 10:53
  Gary Vaynerchuk, Roman Atwood.
• 10:55
  But nowadays it's not as easy to answer that question.
• 10:58
  And when I ask that question, we cut it out of the episode, but people often think for
• 11:02
  like 30 seconds at a time.
• 11:04
  Like pause to think about who your favorite creator is right now.
• 11:07
  Is it clear?
• 11:08
  Do you have a distinct person that you'll watch anything from and can you bring that
• 11:11
  person to the top of your mind at a blink like this?
• 11:14
  For me, I definitely can't.
• 11:15
  And that to me is an indication that people are choosing to follow topics rather than
• 11:20
  following the people themselves.
• 11:22
  We used to watch Casey Neistat and whatever he did, we would watch him.
• 11:25
  But now we pick a bunch of topics and our favorite topics change over the course of a week,
• 11:29
  some stick around for longer, some fade away, but we follow topics.
• 11:33
  And so people who we watch more regularly are the ones who are expert in that topic.
• 11:37
  Like if I need to know about the new iPhone, I'm going to be turning to MKBHD.
• 11:41
  If I want to learn about some current event that's happening in the world, if it's a financial
• 11:46
  current event, I'm going to go to Graham Stephan.
• 11:48
  So the topics are actually the things that we're building our interests around.
• 11:54
  And because of that, I actually think that creating evergreen videos, especially in the
• 11:58
  education space, is kind of like a dead end.
• 12:01
  The value prop for the last couple of years with YouTube has been, if you create evergreen
• 12:05
  videos, YouTube will continue to push your good videos even years after they've been made.
• 12:11
  And so you can be making money on something you made once, two years ago.
• 12:14
  But what I'm actually seeing is people in the education space are trying to create these
• 12:18
  evergreen videos, and they're really only fighting for 300,000 views.
• 12:22
  Meanwhile, people who are choosing to follow topics are getting a million views in like
• 12:27
  two or three days.
• 12:28
  Here's a video that I recently watched about the Artemis Space Shuttle going around the
• 12:32
  moon.
• 12:33
  And it was a great little video from Hank Green.
• 12:36
  And after two or three days, it had already earned two or three million views.
• 12:40
  If Hank had instead decided to make some kind of evergreen video, even after two years,
• 12:44
  it might not have earned two or three million views.
• 12:46
  And so one of the strategies that I'm deploying with my clients is like, hey, let's get more
• 12:49
  topical.
• 12:50
  And let's just embrace the fact that a video is going to die after a month.
• 12:53
  And we're just going to own it.
• 12:54
  It's going to be okay.
• 12:55
  But we don't need that evergreen long form lifespan.
• 12:59
  I remember speaking to Sam Godette, who is the head of content for Dan Martell.
• 13:03
  And he specifically said, hey, I'm making evergreen videos.
• 13:06
  But if you look at what Dan Martell is making, it's all AI.
• 13:09
  And AI is very not evergreen.
• 13:12
  It's very topical because it changes by the day.
• 13:15
  It's just a very, very big, big, wide trend.
• 13:18
  Like AI is very popular right now.
• 13:20
  In two years, it'll still be popular.
• 13:21
  I doubt it'll be as popular.
• 13:22
  I don't know.
• 13:23
  I think we're kind of like, that's a whole other aside.
• 13:26
  And I don't want to get into it in this point.
• 13:27
  But I don't think AI is actually evergreen content because Dan's opinion on which is
• 13:31
  the best AI changes, right?
• 13:33
  So I actually think chasing evergreen topics is a dead end.
• 13:36
  Even if you look at like Johnny Harris versus Veritasium, these are two channels that I
• 13:40
  compared to each other a lot when I'm creating my content.
• 13:43
  Johnny often picks things that are really topical.
• 13:45
  You know, he's got geopolitics.
• 13:47
  And that's the stories that he presents.
• 13:49
  Whereas Veritasium is much more evergreen.
• 13:51
  And what's crazy is they both earn, you know, four to six million views per video, but
• 13:57
  Veritasium has like 20 million subscribers and Johnny has like six.
• 14:00
  So I actually think that following topics and making videos around topics is the best
• 14:06
  play.
• 14:07
  Now I have a rule.
• 14:08
  I've got a rule book and it's got 108 rules in it and it's something that, you know,
• 14:12
  I'm offering to people who reach out to me and, you know, if you want it, it's cool.
• 14:15
  It's built around all of the episodes of Colin and Samir and things that Mario Juice has
• 14:19
  that on Twitter and Patty Galloway.
• 14:21
  It's a bunch of rules from every strategist that I've ever consumed content from.
• 14:25
  And one of the rules is that for every rule, there is a video that both proves it to be
• 14:30
  true and proves the opposite to be true.
• 14:33
  So for example, if you look at Layla Hermosi, she made a video called The Psychology of
• 14:37
  Money and it quickly raised to a million views.
• 14:39
  That goes against this whole theory that evergreen content is bad.
• 14:43
  But you have to look at things from a bigger picture.
• 14:46
  And even with Layla, most of her videos are not seeing a significant number of views.
• 14:51
  She did hit that one outlier.
• 14:52
  It is an evergreen video, but it's not like every single evergreen video is hitting a million
• 14:58
  views.
• 14:59
  That used to be the case in like 2023 with Mark Manson.
• 15:01
  We used to be able to put out a video that just had a really great title and get a million
• 15:04
  views every single time.
• 15:05
  It was a lot easier than it is now.
• 15:06
  But if you look at people who are following the topics, you know, people like Hank Green,
• 15:11
  people like Johnny Harris, they are actually getting an abnormally high number of views.
• 15:15
  So that's why I think that's how you win on YouTube in 2026.
• 15:19
  Now fortunately, this comes at a time where lower lift is also widely accepted.
• 15:24
  Like I've seen some creators really reduce the amount of editing that goes into their
• 15:29
  videos.
• 15:30
  Viewers are much more willing to, you know, sit through videos that are longer, that have
• 15:34
  more breaths and pauses.
• 15:36
  You don't need like hyper stimulation, like the beastification of everything like we
• 15:40
  used to.
• 15:41
  And so as a result, that allows you to upload more frequently.
• 15:43
  So I think the winning recipe for educators on this platform is follow the news, find
• 15:50
  ways to make it relevant to your area of expertise, and then just upload as frequently as possible.
• 15:55
  Ironically MKBHD who has got one of the longest lifespans of any creator on YouTube, he's
• 16:00
  been doing this for like literally over a decade now.
• 16:03
  And every single time he puts out a video, it's exceptionally topical because it's usually
• 16:07
  the release of some new tech tool.
• 16:09
  And then it kind of dies over time.
• 16:11
  Like no one's ever going back through MKBHD's back catalog and looking at, you know, the
• 16:15
  release of the iPhone 13 from three years ago.
• 16:17
  But he embraces the topicality of it and gets four or five million views.
• 16:21
  And then he moves on to the next one.
• 16:22
  I actually think that's the play.
• 16:23
  Like we used to be able to make a video called Seven Ways to Be More Productive.
• 16:27
  But now you can just ask AI for different ways to be productive.
• 16:29
  And you get the response in like 30 seconds versus, you know, a 15 minute video.
• 16:34
  So what I instead think is right is waiting for a news article to come out that's relevant
• 16:39
  to productivity.
• 16:41
  And then adding your commentary on top of it, throwing in a list of like seven ways to
• 16:44
  be more productive, maybe talking about a personal moment and then shipping that video is
• 16:50
  quickly as possible and collecting your million views and then forgetting it even exists
• 16:54
  and moving on to the next one.
• 16:55
  YouTube is a tough place to talk about because on one hand, you've got Mr. Beast videos.
• 17:00
  On the other hand, you've got very, very niche specific how-to videos for people taking
• 17:06
  their MBA.
• 17:07
  So it's hard to put everything onto a spectrum.
• 17:09
  But this is just the corner of the world that I live in.
• 17:11
  It's the educational niche.
• 17:12
  And for the first time ever, I think YouTube is actually worse than it has been in the
• 17:15
  past couple years.
• 17:16
  I'm hopeful that this short form mania that's happening where everybody's competing to
• 17:22
  be the best short form platform.
• 17:23
  I'm hoping that it's a bit of a bubble.
• 17:25
  And the evidence for that is people turning off their phones more frequently, Redusher
• 17:29
  just put out a newsletter article saying that people are using social media less this
• 17:34
  year than they were last year.
• 17:35
  You're seeing Gen Z host no phone parties.
• 17:37
  You're seeing trending topics like in-person events being much more popular.
• 17:42
  And I think that's largely because we're getting fed so much garbage through short form content.
• 17:47
  I see a resurgence in long form content soon and I hope that YouTube gets better at it
• 17:51
  because that's when YouTube is at its best.
• 17:54
  And in the meantime, I'm just going to do what I think is best for my clients and then
• 17:57
  wait for that to happen.
• 17:58
  If you enjoyed this episode, thank you so much for sitting through my rambles.
• 18:01
  If you're new here, please consider subscribing or leaving a review on the audio platforms
• 18:05
  it really helps us out in the early days of this show.
• 18:08
  We'll get back to interview content next week, but in the meantime, thank you and so long.