“Views are down!”, proclaims the thumbnail from FD Signifier‘s latest video. He digs into reasons why a lot of channels are currently struggling in this clip from one of his recent streams.
- Runtime: 21:38
- Why to watch: if you’re interested in a loose summary of recent trends in YouTube viewership and monetization, or behind-the-scenes commentary about the shifting economics of being a YouTube creator.
FD starts by noting that streaming clips (like this one) are faster, cheaper, and easier to produce than video essays by an order of magnitude, and that the economic incentive for creators seems to be trending in this direction; many established channels like his have started supplementing their long form, fully produced video essay content with a secondary channel for stream clips like this. He makes no specific conclusion here, but it does dovetail nicely with another topic I’d like to broach here later — the leftist streaming ecosystem clustered around Hasan Piker. Dropping a bookmark.
FD continues, mentioning the period over the past summer when view counts seemed to drop off for a lot of creators across the board. This is a topic I’ve seen addressed in greater detail in other videos (and I might post one of them here when I come across it again), but the gist is that it seems YouTube stopped counting views from people using ad blockers as part of a video’s total view count. This has had negative effects on ad revenue most directly, but also on sponsorships, particularly for smaller channels, and is on top of other algorithmic incentivization toward recency and short form video that YouTube seems to be employing of late, all of which hurt newer and smaller creators in the essay space particularly.
Finally, FD names politics fatigue as a reason why people might not be tuning in as much for essays specifically related to current events, which seems real in my anecdotal experience. Overall it’s a tough time to be a creator on YouTube, and a lot of bigger and older voices have been leaving the platform in the past few years as a result (again, not to mention the smaller creators who many never get the chance to see, before they give up because the economics just don’t work out).
FD has a brief tangent where he notes that the new “soothing voice” meta (which some ascribe to him) has replaced the old “big boobs” meta from 10 years ago, which makes this follow-up recommendation from Susu a bit of a funny pairing. She bemoans the recent rise in AI-generated content flooding the platform, and cites examples of faulty AI-powered channel moderation that have been erroneously nuking legitimate, human-powered channels with little recourse. Skip the comments section on that one.
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