Late night thoughts, cross-posted from Twitter, expanded.
I was revisiting a YouTube channel that I used to watch - it was huge back in 2013, they were the next big thing in the vlogging community, I remember reading in the VidCon pamphlet that they seemed genetically engineered to take over YouTube. That channel hardly uploads now - its creators seem to have moved on in a lot of ways, and its audience has too.
I’ve only been actively watching YouTube content since 2012/2013, yet somehow that’s been enough time for an entire crop of big YouTube channels to have come and gone. When I think about 2013 and the channels I watched and the conversations that interested me and what I thought of the digital landscape, and then compare it to what I’m seeing in YouTube / digital now in 2016 - it all just feels a bit like I’m looking at fun house mirror reflections.
And I probably should have expected this more - digital has always evolved at a scary-fast clip, and it’ll only keep doing that. In fact, that was the thing that first drew me to it - the wild west-ness of it.
In that regard, I feel like Kathleen Kelly in You’ve Got Mail monologuing on the nature of change in New York City. Highly recommend watching that clip (above), because it’s relevant but also because it’s just a really good bit of movie. In a year, some of the YouTube channels I watch will just be a memory. Or something really depressing. Like a Baby Gap.
Of course there are channels that have proven their staying power and grown exponentially. Then there are those channels that are still around, but seem to have trapped themselves in a period of arrested development - making the same content they did in 2013, chasing the same audience over and over. Maybe it’s not even the same audience - it’s just the same demographic, incoming freshmen replacing the graduating class. Jack Howard discusses that a bit in this vlog.
I feel like YouTubers have had to learn how to mature their content / rebrand gracefully much more quickly than creatives in other fields. Which is hard enough when you’re Taylor Swift with a whole army of brand strategists* at your command (**not sure that’s an actual thing). It must be even more difficult when you’re someone who found success on the platform at a very young age and have to figure out your business in a spotlight. Granted, it’s a spotlight you created for yourself. But what I’m realizing more and more is that it’s impossible for YouTube creators in 2013 to know what 2016 will look like and how to plan for it. No one can really say they know what they’re getting themselves into.
I’m still genuinely excited by digital and its potential, but it’s changed so much from when I first started - which feels like it was just two seconds ago. Not only in the vlogging community, but across the board - in the webseries community, the YouTube filmmaking community, etc. Some of that chalks up to tastes evolving / techniques refining. If you look at the whole history of film, that’s all that’s ever been happening, decades at a time, since the silent film era. In the world of YouTube, it seems like an epoch is just the span of 2-3 years.
I keep meaning to make a what am I doing here? video on my channel - figure out how I want to shape my content/channel as more and more of my projects have started to migrate towards other platforms and longer formats. I’ve said this before and it’s still true - I always want to maintain my YouTube channel, as it’s one of the few spaces that’s uniquely mine. I feel like I’ve been watering and maintaining this little square plot of land, and as things keep changing around it, this little square plot has just been really reliably there for me to sit in whenever I needed it. One of the most appealing things to me about writing / creating is that it’s a chance to talk without being interrupted, which, as an introvert with some social anxiety, is a precious thing. As my projects have gotten bigger and more people are involved, it’s started to feel like my YouTube channel is one of the last places where I can still do that in its purest form.
But I haven’t made that what am I doing here? video yet, because it requires me to figure out an answer to that question - which I don’t really know, to be honest. Which isn’t a bad thing, but it’s been a difficult thing for me to express until now. Bless late night think-trains and being bedridden with a cold granting me the time to mull this over.
I’m probably being dramatic. Whenever I see my younger cousins and their friends, I’m always surprised to see they’ve grown up significantly since the last time I saw them. For some reason I expect kids to always stay the same age as when I first meet them. And I get irrationally upset, probably because they’re reminding me that I’m growing old and irrelevant.
Anyway. None of this is particularly revelatory. People have said all these things before. I guess I just didn’t totally get it until now.
Ending on a question, since many of you reading this have probably followed me for an entire YouTube epoch. What channels / content do you watch on YouTube these days? How does that compare to what you watched in 2013?
