DIRE STATE: This man has 1.2 billion subscribers.
What channel does he run? Well, he runs our favorite channels 5 Minute Crafts, 123 Go!,
Bright Side, Slick Slime Sam, La La Life, and Baby Zoo just to name a few. All of these channels are
owned by a corporation called The Soul Publishing which is run by our protagonist Pavel Radaev.
The company was only founded 7 years ago, but given that they post hundreds of videos per day
across 21 languages, they’ve essentially been able to brute force their way to the top. But
while things look good on the surface, underneath the hood, things aren’t going that great. In fact,
they’re looking pretty bad. Take 5 minute crafts for example. The channel has a whopping 80 million
subscribers but a lot of their videos can’t even break 100k view. It’s even worse at Bright Side.
A total of 45 million subscribers but many videos can’t even break 20k views. Zooming out a bit,
Bright Side used to pull in 150 to 200 million views per month back in their hayday but now
the channel is down to 40 to 50 million views per month. Not a bad amount but given that they
post 3 times a day, it’s very possible that this operation is now unprofitable. A similar story can
be seen with their subscriber count as well. Since last October, Bright Side has had multiple months
where their net subscriber gain was straight up 0. Clearly things aren’t looking great from a
business perspective but there’s more to it than just that. You see, it’s easy to dismiss the Soul
Publishing as just some soulless content farm that’s looking to milk social media for views.
But, when you take a deeper look, a much darker agenda becomes more evident. Their quirky content
is actually laced with politics and pro Russian versions of history. One of their now deleted
videos for example, claimed that Ukraine is part of Russia back in 2019. Another claimed that
Alaska was a gift to the US from the Soviet Union. And when you consider that the company is run by
a bunch of Russian nationals, this all starts to make sense. This means that the Soul Publishing
may not just be the world’s largest content farm but also the world’s largest propaganda
machine. So, here’s the controversial rise and fall of the biggest YouTube empire of all time.
SHADY BEGINNINGS?:
Taking a look back, the story of the Soul Publishing indeed only dates back to 2016,
but the story of the company behind the company, AdMe, dates back to the early 2000s to two men
named Pavel Radaev and Marat Mukhametov. AdMe started off as a media platform that seeked to
offer serious informational content. But, over time this evolved into being more light hearted
content focused on entertainment as this simply appealed to a far larger audience. They basically
became the Russian BuzzFeed and would eventually transition this style over to their dozens of
YouTube channels which brings us into our first controversy: the timeline of the Soul Publishing.
After being a Russian focused media organization for over a decade,
AdMe decided to launch the Soul Publishing in 2016. This has prompted some to theorize that
the Soul Publishing was created to influence the 2016 election. At one point even Forbes
and Business Insider explored the idea but these claims don’t hold up against further scrutiny.
For starters, many of the Soul Publishing’s most popular channels were actually created after the
election. 5 Minute Crafts for example was created a week after the election and Bright Side was
created months after the election. Also, even for channels that were created before the election,
they simply didn’t have much time to gain momentum and influence the election even if that was their
goal. The reality was that the Soul Publishing was just putting out a bunch of corny videos
like these. 35 unbelievable cooking hacks. 29 things we do wrong every day. And 5 Minute Crafts
Compilation. To be honest, these videos carried no real value whatsoever as most of the time the
hacks didn’t even make sense. I mean like what even is this? The lack of functionality didn’t
really hurt the channels though. They had some great titles and thumbnails that got people to
click and back in 2017 and 2018, that was really all you needed. Also, they were posting dozens of
videos every single day so even if 99% of videos went nowhere, as long as 1% went super viral,
that was all they needed. It didn’t take long for reaction channels to start clowning on Bright Side
and 5 Minute Crafts but this simply gave them even more publicity and exposure. Before you knew it,
each of their channels were racking up tens of millions of subscribers. Bright Side was able to
reach over 30 million subscribers within a matter of 3 years and 5 Minute Crafts was able to reach
over 60 million subscribers within the same time period. Also, it wasn’t just YouTube that
they were blowing up on. They also had a massive presence on Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat,
and even Pinterest. By the end of 2019, they were publishing 1500 videos per month with the help of
550 employees. This was literally the epitome of a content farm but I mean who could blame
them. They were making millions posting useless but also harmless content. Unfortunately though,
this hayday didn’t last long as the company’s first tribulations were just around the corner.
THE ALGORITHM SHIFTS:
The company’s first major challenge came from none other than YouTube’s infamous algorithm. As we
moved into the 2020s, YouTube started an internal campaign against clickbait. For obvious reasons,
YouTube was not exactly a fan of clickbait as it simply gave the entire platform a cheap tabloid
vibe. Not to mention, it likely led to people spending less time on the platform. This wasn’t
originally a major concern as YouTube’s user base was simply growing so much. But, as the platform
started to mature, maximizing revenue from current users became a larger priority than trying to
attract new users. So, YouTube started focusing on a new metric: average view duration. The longer
people watched your videos, the more likely it was to be seen by more people. So naturally,
videos that were based around stories and payoffs started taking off, and we say creators lean
towards longer and longer videos. This, however, was terrible news for the Soul Publishing.
Virtually all of their content was centered around a gimmicky hook similar to what we see on TikTok
today. So, once viewers clicked on the video and saw the hack they came for, they clicked off.
They didn’t care about the other 20 hacks in the video. This meant that while channels like
Bright Side had a great click through rate, they had awful viewer retention. As such, the Soul
would decide to change up their content with a new channel called Actually Happened. Most of you have
probably completely forgotten about this channel as it has since been deleted so let me remind
about the cringe content they posted. My BF has 74 GFs. I Date Only Psychos. BFF Broke Her Own Leg so
She Can Be The Center Of Attention! Now, these videos are actually from another channel called
MyStoryAnimated but Actually happened posted the some sort of stuff. While this is no doubt cringe,
it’s once again effective at getting people to click. People like hearing about drama and gossip.
Combine this with a storyline and characters and boom people are more suddenly invested in the
videos than their own financial futures. This deadly combination of super high click through
rates and ridiculous watch time allowed Actually Happened to basically blow up overnight but it
wasn’t all sunshines and rainbows. You see, the channel was so cringe that it was successful at
creating a hate club also over night. People loved to clown on just how fake their stories were and
honestly you can blame the critics. I think I remember a video where the kid didn’t want the
dad to drop them off at school because the dad was gonna drop them off in a helicopter or some crap
like. Yeah, it was really weird. There were also complaints that the channel was a bad influence as
it sometimes glorified abusive relationships and cheaters. I mean just listen to this. "I Was Going
To Marry My Gf Until I Met My First Love. I'm A Cheater". But out of nowhere, the Soul decided
to wipe this channel completely off the face of the planet as they deleted literally every
single video on the channel. There was never an official explanation for this but it was probably
just because it got the company too much bad press. Viewers quickly moved on and forgot about
Acutally Happened but the Soul was back to ground zero and YouTube was about to evolve even more.
LEFT BEHIND: As YouTube started focusing
on average view duration, creators naturally started trying to play this system as well.
They would artificially increase the length of videos to skew the watch time. They would hide
gift cards throughout the video so that people would to watch the video over and over again even
if it sucked. Again, this is not what YouTube had in mind when they started focusing on watch time.
If YouTube really wanted to maximize the time that people spent on YouTube, they had to focus
on promoting videos that people actually liked not just videos that people watched longer. So,
YouTube implemented yet another key metric into the algorithm which is of course viewer
satisfaction. The most blatant implementation of this is the smiley face surveys but that’s just
1 of likely thousands of variables. For example, they probably measure how long we watch a video
before getting distracted and scrolling down to the comments. They probably also measure how our
viewing behavior is different between videos and who knows what else. The bottomline though is that
what YouTube is looking for are happy viewers which the Soul doesn’t really have. I mean,
there’s virtually no one that’s actually excited to watch a new video from Bright Side. At best,
people are looking to burn time. So, I can’t imagine that the Soul’s viewer satisfaction
metrics are all that great. This wasn’t too big of an issue back in 2020 when YouTube still had
an emphasis on watch time and the Soul was able to engineer watch time. But, as YouTube has shifted
more and more towards viewer satisfaction, the Soul started seeing their viewership drastically
decline. This was also around the time that short form content started to explode and
everyone was jumping on the band wagon especially becuase of the pandemic. YouTube launched shorts,
Instagram launched Reels, and TikTok, well TikTok was TikTok. Much of the demographic that watched
the Soul shifted over to short form content which makes sense given that it feeds into the same
tendencies. Instant gratification, quick tricks and tips, and a bunch of dopamine. Not to mention,
with short form content, you usually got a splash of personality as well as opposed
to some random voice actor working for the Soul Publishing machine. For obvious reasons,
viewers started ditching the Soul’s channels in the masses leading us to where we are today.
NO SOUL:
Today, the Soul Publishing isn’t exactly doing bad as they still have ridiculous followings. 600
million on Facebook, 1.2 billion on YouTube, 90 million on TtikTok, 70 million on Instagram, and
20 million on SnapChat. But with that being said, the company’s hayday is definitely behind us and
their insane follower counts are starting to mean less and less. The reality is that their followers
are simply no longer converting into viewers. And thanks to the YouTube algorithm, this effect will
simply get worse with time. As their newer videos get fewer views, YouTube will promote their future
videos even less which will simply make it even harder to get views. So, it definitely seems like
it’s just a matter of time until this content farm or propaganda machine or whatever it is becomes a
blip in internet history and that’s the story of the 1.2 billion sub YouTuber that’s losing
it all. Someone else that’s at risk of losing it all is short form platforms. If you’d like
to see why companies are already giving up on short form content, check out this video.