The state of YouTube's content

At the beginning of YouTube, things were different because the purpose was to fill stream time. YouTube was advertised as a different site to what it is now. The thing is that video streaming does not conforms to traditional TV conventions. On TV broadcast you know roughly how many TV sets are sold, you know how many people more or less own a TV. And you know that almost all of them will have an open air antenna and you can know how many own a cable subscription with which channels. So it is easy to access this data of how much content and to which target. And since you control the broadcast you know that you only need to fill up to 24 hours at a time. And that was well understood but it doesn't apply to video on demand because your potential stream time to fill is always theoretically infinite. Your audience is the whole of mankind, well realistically, any person with access to a device with internet connection. Even if they don't have an account on your site you know anyone can watch. And then, since the user chooses the watching experience, you have an infinite amount of time to fulfill. Maybe every single person will want to watch just this one video. Maybe every person will watch a different video each. Maybe someone will want to watch the same video thousands of times in a loop.

Tv is supposed to be on it's way out anyway.

So the first hurdle for YouTube was to overcome the need to fill an infinite amount of stream time. This is what led to the surge of viral videos and video blogging. Because YouTube was a place for anyone to share their videos to the world. So people used it for that, and it gave us some amusing pieces of entertainment that everyone felt compelled to share with all of their friends. Then there were the people who uploaded their thoughts and opinions and their personal life's happenings which brought the vlogs scene with people with decent amounts of views and moderate followings.

Unfortunately this model was unsustainable, specially from a financial point of view. There is no way to monetize such a small viewing or such short burst of viral views. Much like what happened to justin.tv, it is just random people streaming variable quality and quantity of content that it's hard to sell to advertisers. This is why the gaming scene became such a huge success for YouTube. They realized that the site's original motto broadcast yourself really didn't fit. The people who came looking for a place to showcase their videos are the minority, everyone else is here to see what's new. Nobody uploads their vacation's slideshow anymore, the average user only wants to consume content, because making really good and consistent entertainment is hard, and complex.

This means that the new calling of YouTube is to compartmentalize their viewing. You have gaming, Vevo, song covers, funny short videos, news sections on multiple sub categories, vlogs, etc. And the people making this content had become YouTube celebrities as the popular channels hog the revenue and the small or too inconsistent channels fade away from memory having achieved a hundred views per video or so. Everything else disappears. so much that the original slogan is not even visible on YouTube's main page anymore.

It really isn't, go check yourself.

Such is the state of online video on demand content entertainment. It no longer suffices to fill the space, now you have to bring meaningful content with you or you'll get lost in the background noise. Today's struggle is to achieve a little niche with a stable amount of viewers. Take for instance Cinema Sins, Lindy Beige or Extra Credits. All three are successful channels, not because of their subscriber base but because their content feeds a particular interest on the viewers.

Yes, maybe not everyone in the planet wants to hear ramblings on medieval weaponry and ancient warcraft, but those 20 thousand people that do will consistently go over to Lindy Beige's channel to flavor every new video because there are only three or four channels with quality content on related topics.

Extra Credits is an interesting one. It is about gaming but since both it's format and focus is so different from let's plays it has a strong appeal. Its 300 thousand subscriber watch every one of their video because they function as a developer's digest for those who like to learn and discuss video game design. Something that other channels might do but in a diluted manner within their formats. So between the over saturated sea of gaming channels they manage to stand out, because they do something that others don't.

Then there is Cinema sins. Before 2012 it was hard to pinpoint some video in the same vein than this channel. Making fun of Hollywood blockbusters in interesting comedic sketches was done before but never before someone achieved their balance of detail and comedy. The fame of Cinema Sins brought the raise of 'How it should have ended' and Screen Junkie's 'Honest Trailers' which hadn't succeeded so massively before but found their bout of viral promotion when somehow the three channels synergized into a sort of category of their own. Every person I have talked about these videos has always watched them together in mini marathons without realizing that they are made by completely different creators and uploaded to different channels. And that's a good thing because collectively they manage to get each other massive amounts of views everyday.

So this is the state of a difficult scene. YouTube is today a widely different beast from what it was conceived back in 2005. Today's channels have to find an audience, entice them enough to have them return for every new video, and they also have to balance a certain flow of amount of content uploaded and consistent quality. Every YouTube channel now is more like their own TV channel but with none of the commodities that traditional TV marketers had 20 years ago.