YouTube Shorts are gonna kill YouTube, and your favorite creators are likely going down with it.
Hello, Internet! Welcome to Game Theory, where it's the end of the year, and that means one thing and one thing only.
Our annual review of the digital video landscape, a state of the YouNion, if you will.
You get what I did there? I made the U of union into the You of YouTube.
No, no, no, no, no, no. Hey, hey, please don't click off. I'm so sorry. I get it.
The pun was really bad, but trust me.
The stuff that we're gonna be talking about today is too important to let a dumb joke like that just scare you off.
You see, it's been a weird year on YouTube, my friends.
To casual viewers, it probably seemed like business as usual,
but under the hood, this year has been the single biggest year of upheaval the platform's ever seen.
And it all has its roots in one word, Shorts.
Shorts officially launched on YouTube at the end of 2020, and after a lukewarm intro on the platform,
YouTube decided to just outright pay people to make them.
No one really took them seriously still, which is why this year, in 2023, YouTube started pushing them hard.
Now when you open your homepage on desktop, you see Shorts.
When you open your phone to pick a video, oh, you just randomly showed up in the Shorts Feed.
Sometimes when you're watching YouTube on the TV and it's like,
here, would you like to watch a Short on a TV with a totally different aspect ratio?
Sure, why not?
To creators, this surge has had some devastating ripple effects.
When you go to the homepage and suddenly 50% of the screen is dominated by short-form video,
it means your long-form content gets shared less.
At the top of the year, YouTube basically mandated that if you want your channel to continue to be successful,
Shorts have to be part of your video strategy.
That's kind of an issue when it's a format that takes time and effort to make, but basically earns you zero dollars.
I cannot overstate how these changes are currently devastating the mid-sized channels of YouTube.
The number of creators that I personally know who've repeatedly said how scary this year's been for them
because of these unexplained view drops, who've dedicated their lives to build small businesses around making long-form videos,
but are now struggling to get by as their views disappear overnight.
Channels who don't have the money or resources to just work in a couple of extra spare videos so that their views return to normal.
That right there? It's a big issue.
But while mid-sized creators are feeling it now,
I suspect that all creators will likely be suffering similar consequences in another year or two.
And that is what I want to talk about today.
Now, normally, this would be a dramatic MattChat on the couch, but I've already got that one penciled in for January.
So it's just PNGTuber MatPat today talking about the bigger issue here.
Because I don't think people have truly thought through the long-term effects of this change.
The forceful push into short-form content affects you as an audience,
it affects the platform of YouTube,
and honestly, it affects how all of us are engaging with videos, whether or not we realize it.
And ironically enough, despite Shorts exposing you to more creators than ever before,
if things continue going down this path,
I suspect that they'll be the thing that kills off the entire idea of being a creator in the first place.
So let's just start by pulling off the band-aid early, friends.
Shorts aren't just there to be another super fun creative outlet for channels or a fun new experience for the viewer,
they are here to compete with TikTok.
Full stop, end of sentence.
Back around 2015, YouTube was measuring video success based on watch minutes,
which meant the longer your video was, the more likely you were to rack up minutes on the platform and win big.
People who didn't want to make long video essays counting animatronic toes or listing every editing mistake in Suicide Squad,
they lost out in this sort of system.
Sketch comedy and animation both suffered hard in this era,
because, well, neither of them are particularly long-form genres.
They're expensive to make, and they're difficult to script for 10, 20-minute periods.
But you know who else was suffering during this era?
The viewer.
People who only had a few minutes at a time to watch videos between classes at school,
or during breaks at work,
they couldn't do that using YouTube.
It's not like you're sending your bestie a 25-minute video for the LOLs.
Which meant that there was a very clear gap in the marketplace.
People wanted short videos and needed a place to watch them.
Luckily, there was one platform ready to fill that need,
Vine.
But when Vine just completely dropped the ball with a series of repeated self-imposed errors,
TikTok was there to pick up that ball, run with it, and then just score all the touchdowns.
TikTok landed in the US in 2016 and became a social video juggernaut by 2019.
It understood that people wanted short, cheap, easy-to-produce content that was shareable.
You know, the stuff that made YouTube so popular back in the mid-2000s.
Huh, it's almost like history's repeating itself.
Anyway, by 2020, TikTok had all the cool songs with no copyright striking.
It had all the view numbers that looked way bigger than YouTube.
And most importantly of all,
they had the viewers between the ages of 13 and 18.
The most important demographic on the planet for any social media platform.
And you see, it's that last point that has YouTube so scared.
If you're a viewer between the ages of 13 and 18,
congratulations, you have the world's largest corporations all fighting for your attention.
Why?
Well, I want you to think back to some of the things that you were a big fan of in your life.
The biggest movies, the best music artists, your favorite anime.
When did you first become a fan of those?
The truth is that you can become a fan of anything, anytime.
I'm a huge believer in that.
But statistically speaking, many of our most memorable fandoms emerge when we're teenagers.
This isn't just because we're all so young and impressionable at that age either,
there's actually a lot more science to it.
There's a whole field of study dedicated to adolescent identity,
so I'm just gonna be grazing the tip of the iceberg here.
But the TLDR of all of it is that adolescent brains between 13 and 18
are working real hard at crafting a persona for themselves out of the vast universe of things they can be.
It's really hard work, actually.
Which is why when we're teenagers, our brains compel us to do really cringy things,
like going through weird style phases,
deciding that we hate people overnight,
filming TikTok dances in public places.
These people just haven't figured themselves out yet, okay?
One way for the brain to fast-track this identity building is to attach to a celebrity that you admire,
or a band that you love listening to,
a show you love watching, or a creator online that you like.
Instead of having to build your identity all by yourself,
you can start with a character who already exists,
and then use them as a kind of scaffolding for yourself.
Now, it is normal to have fandoms all throughout your life,
but the ones we participate in as tweens and teens become wound up in our actual real-world personalities.
And not just for a little while either.
A healthy fandom lasts, on average, about nine years.
So if you become a fan of something at the age of 14,
on average, you could be a fan of that thing until you're 23.
This is exactly the huge and important time in your life
that all social platforms and entertainment franchises want to tap into,
because if they get you early, they get you for a huge bulk of your prime spending years.
Doesn't it feel great to know that your life is just reduced to a series of dollar signs?
Regardless, a decade of loyalty?
That right there is a lifetime in the world of online video.
Hence why this battle is so heated.
Which brings us back to Shorts.
YouTube decided over the last couple years that they needed to bring the magic of TikTok to YouTube,
and they've made it very clear to audiences and creators alike
that this is the thing that you need to be engaging with.
But is that so bad?
I mean, I found a lot of Shorts that I like this year.
I think a lot of them are really fun.
And if I'm being completely honest about making them,
doing something that's shorter than a theory feels like a lot less pressure.
It allows me to loosen up a bit.
It's given us the chance to explore lots of topics that I wouldn't get to do otherwise.
So what is the big issue?
Well, outside of the fact that they lose money,
don't translate to long-term viewers,
bury expensive long-form content and feel like a pay-to-win model on YouTube,
it's that having them on YouTube changes the platform in a way that doesn't help viewers.
Making YouTube more like TikTok?
It isn't just about changing the length of the videos.
TikTok and YouTube function totally differently.
And when you try to turn one into the other,
there's gonna be a lot that happens under the surface.
Let me just take you through what I mean.
At its core, YouTube has always been a search engine.
Historically, the second largest search engine in the world behind Google itself.
Because of this, making videos on things that people search for,
like movies, games, food,
it's always worked fairly well.
It's also worked well because you can search for specific creators that you're interested in.
You go to their channel page and find a whole bunch of videos that you get from the same channel.
But notice how I said that you, the viewer, have to do something to watch the videos.
You have to open YouTube, obviously,
but you also have to, at minimum, choose a video from the homepage.
If you're not gonna do that, well, now you have to search.
Which means that you have to know what you're searching for.
You get a page of results, you scroll until you find the one that you want,
you click it, and then you hope that you like it.
After you watch that one video, you choose the next one from a suggested video feed,
or maybe you opt for the autoplay video, but let's be honest,
are you really gonna sit through yet another Skillshare promo at the end of that video?
YouTube is an active watch experience.
Viewers are constantly choosing what to watch.
To be honest, it's actually a lot of work on you guys.
Now compare that to TikTok.
What do you do on TikTok?
You open the app.
That's it.
For the vast majority of people, the activity actually stops there.
The most you gotta do from that point is a little thumb flick when you wanna move on to the next video.
A video that the TikTok algorithm has pre-selected for you.
This is a passive watch experience.
TikTok isn't designed for you to choose what to watch,
it's designed for you to either like or not like what you're being served up.
You can choose to search on TikTok,
but it's not a super easy experience and it just sends you to another passive scroll.
So what we're dealing with is an active platform of YouTube versus a passive platform of TikTok.
What happens when YouTube now introduces Shorts,
a passive watch experience, into an active watching platform?
Well, a few things.
First, it's hard to blend the two experiences together.
As a viewer, it's great to be able to do less work and make fewer decisions when I wanna be entertained,
but once I'm in the Shorts feed, there's really no off-ramp to that.
If I wanna switch, I have to basically go back to the homepage and start back from square one,
which is just a really jarring, poorly designed experience.
But okay, other than being a little clunky, why is this so bad?
Well, the issue is that when we're in a passive watch experience,
we're still watching content, but we're missing a lot of the things around that content.
And those things are the secret sauce that's made YouTube so successful for the past decade.
Let me illustrate what I mean by telling you a true story from over here at Team Theorist.
We recently hired a social media producer to produce social media.
It's pretty self-explanatory.
Shout out to our various TikToks, by the way.
They totally slap, and they're only gonna get better from here.
Anyway, in that process, we interviewed dozens of candidates,
and everyone who made it to that round was asked to tell us a couple of accounts that they love on TikTok
that we wouldn't have heard of before.
The point is to gauge the awareness of the platform.
It's a question that we've asked for years when it comes to YouTube,
and everyone that we've hired on has always had great answers.
It's how I first became aware of the web design commentary of Juxtaposed
or the mayonnaise jello of Liam Thompson.
Everyone has always had an answer.
But when it comes to TikTok, a lot of the best interview candidates just couldn't do it.
They could tell us everything that happened in individual videos,
but they often had to really think in order to come up with the name of who made it.
Kind of like some sort of bizarre digital amnesia.
This happened over and over again in the interviews.
And you know what? They're not alone.
When we like TikToks, we tell people,
I have to show you this TikTok.
Or, have you seen that one TikTok where the guy does the thing?
We're not trying to de-identify the people as creators.
Instead, the way the platform works takes creators out of the equation.
It doesn't really matter who made the TikTok.
I didn't choose it.
It was over pretty fast.
And for better or worse, the platform pushed me on to the next video.
If I truly wanted to see who made it, well, it's available.
It's just teeny tiny over here, right down in the corner.
We know YouTube creators we love because we actively have to search for them.
We actively choose them from the homepage or suggested feeds.
Their logo appears in lots of different places.
We subscribe to them.
We don't just follow them.
Heck, they even have their own channel page.
And while that might seem like a meaningless word, it really is YouTube's secret sauce.
The channel pages make YouTube into a glorified web host.
Each creator is their own website.
Their own channel that you visit to watch videos.
The banner is theirs.
The thumbnails are theirs.
The titles are all chosen to fit their personal brand.
But as soon as someone else or an algorithm is doing that choosing for us,
we're separated from all that information.
It's not important anymore.
So the problem with placing everyone in a Shorts Feed isn't just that now they're segregated on the platform.
It's because it's removing the identity of the people who make the content.
Historically, YouTube trends can spread over a huge number of creators.
But the biggest creators in a trend tend to be memorable.
100 Layers Challenge?
Simply Nailogical.
Fidget Spinners?
Collins Key.
Elephant Toothpaste?
Mark Rober.
Unboxing Toys?
Ryan's World.
Giving Away Lots of Money?
Mr. Beast.
TikTok trends though, they're not based on creators.
They're based on de-identified formats.
Trending audios.
Meme templates.
Personal style hacks.
Recipes.
Weird clothing.
Actually remembering creator names on TikTok takes an incredible amount of thought and active watching.
Something that TikTok, and YouTube Shorts for that matter, are trying to discourage you from doing.
And this actually makes a significant difference.
In 2022, TikTok sponsored VidCon.
One of the largest digital video industry events of the year where fans can have meet and greets with all their favorite creators.
In years past, when the appearances were coming from YouTubers, the lines were packed.
But in this particular year, many of the lines were empty.
Despite the creators having hundreds of thousands to millions of followers on TikTok.
As SimplyNessa15 put it,
And that right there is the big point in all of this.
While YouTube is busy winning back the 13 to 18 demographic from TikTok right now,
the trade-off of those views could be steeper than anyone thinks.
Remember what we talked about at the beginning of the episode?
About how those teen fandoms end up sticking with you for a long time?
What happens when your platform doesn't foster those fandoms anymore?
When you don't know who any of the creators are because you've never picked any of the videos that you're watching?
When there's no channels with no communities around them?
There's no people associated with the trends?
It just becomes the scroll, the feed.
Without fandoms and channel communities, YouTube can pull in all the viewers it wants,
but it won't be making any new fans.
In our social producer interviews, almost all the candidates said at one point or another,
I'm a fan of TikTok.
Which sounds like a pretty normal thing to say, but think about that.
Like, isn't it kind of weird?
They're fans of the platform, not of any specific creator.
When you talk about YouTube, it's relatively rare to hear someone say,
I'm a fan of YouTube.
You know, the website.
That's probably how it should be.
I love this platform.
I've dedicated over a decade of my life to it, but I'm more a fan of the people who are on it.
Right now, I'm a big fan of Max Fosch and Moist Critical.
Steph is a fan of Caroline Winkler and The Dumb Dads.
Real people doing real content that they deserve credit for.
Being a fan of a platform, on the other hand, it's being a fan of a corporate entity.
Maybe at best, a fan of an algorithm.
Going back to our job candidates again, who have apparently now just become a bunch of unwitting test subjects,
a huge proportion of them said unprompted,
I'm a fan of TikTok, and it is super unhealthy.
Or, I'm totally addicted to TikTok.
It's definitely bad how much time I spend on there.
Haha!
Over here at Team Theorist, people who use TikTok are pretty open about the fact that they like the platform,
but it's also less of a fandom and more of an addiction.
Except again, notice the words that are being used.
Being a fan of something and being addicted to something, they're not the same.
The fact that we as people don't always seem to be able to tell the difference there,
it's pretty unsettling, but that's neither here nor there.
What this all shows is that in absence of having the ability to get you emotionally invested,
platforms are having to use psychological hacks to make you dependent on them.
We spent a whole video talking about addiction pathways and TikTok content a couple months ago.
If you haven't seen that video, definitely check it out after this,
where I basically talk about the way that your brain feels addicted to scrolling content
and receives little boosts of dopamine every time you see a new TikTok.
The problem comes, though, when we mistake being a fan of something for just being hooked on it.
That's a lot to lay at the feet of YouTube when it comes to Shorts,
so it's only fair to acknowledge the boat that they're in.
In order to stay relevant and continue growing the viewership of YouTube over the years,
there have to be more new people watching the platform.
For its long-term survival, YouTube needs to win this battle against TikTok
and earn back some of that 13 to 18 demographic.
From a creative perspective, I'm rooting for them,
but I also speculate that YouTube is trading off short-term gains for long-term loyalty.
Sure, in the short term, Shorts seems to be a great idea for the platform.
Using Shorts, you directly attack TikTok's main format.
You get the same music deals, you mimic the functionality of the app,
you even create a For You Page that definitely reads as a little desperate,
but hey, it probably works.
You set all of that up, and suddenly, you're bringing in new viewers.
You start addicting them.
You start training them to care less about individual creators.
And you know what?
At first glance, that seems like a big ol' win for YouTube.
Guess what creators do?
They get cancelled.
They burn mattresses in their yard.
They make inappropriate statements,
and then YouTube has to answer for all their problems to advertisers.
Creators also stop uploading.
They burn out, they take breaks, and they always inevitably go out of style.
But you know what doesn't burn out?
The scroll.
The passive feed never stops updating.
No one cares if one of the creators they've been scrolling past gets in trouble,
or does something bad,
because there's just another one behind them.
Any problematic behavior gets erased,
because no one ever knew the creator's name in the first place.
But the long-term picture is less rosy here.
People don't develop fan relationships with the passive feed.
They develop addictions to it.
That doesn't bode all that well for the long-term health of TikTok and YouTube Shorts,
for the people watching them,
or for the people making them.
In the end, no one ends up winning.
YouTube's secret sauce when it comes to content
has always been its direct creator-to-viewer relationship,
and the ability to form deep communities that grow overnight and can last for years.
When the scrolling stops,
what's left are the channels and creators and shows that have made a difference in your life,
who related to you in a way that was memorable,
and who put you in the middle of a community of people where you felt like you belonged.
Wherever you find that,
or whatever platform that is,
that's valid.
And if you found it here,
either this year,
or last year,
or ten years ago,
thank you.
I cannot express to you just how important that's been to me,
as a creator,
as a viewer,
as a friend.
As always my friends,
remember,
it's just a theory.
A GAME THEORY.
I'll see you in 2024.