Welcome to How To Cook That I'm Ann Reardon and today I thought it would be
fun to look at one of the most successful baking channels on YouTube ... no
it's not my channel 😂 They have four and a half million subscribers and over 100
million video views a month. They had 115 million video views last month and they
started less than a year ago!! So that's pretty impressive ... just to put it in
context a hundred and fifteen million views that's more than let's say liza
koshi plus superwoman plus Rosanna pansino put together that doesn't add up
even to 100 million ... all of their video views combined! This is crazy good this is
huge this channel so it's gotta be good right cuz YouTube recommends good
content quality content is king good videos get views right? 🤪 yeah ... so let's
take a look... all their videos are in the same format. It's a compilation of lots
of short fast forwarded cooking clips put to music. The videos actually look
like they've been made for Facebook or Instagram not for YouTube I only say
that because all of the videos are square in square format and YouTube
usually in the HD wider format so it looks like they've made it for Facebook
or Instagram and then just repurposed it. Let's look at the first video on their
channel this one has 36 million views and I think looking at that it's one of
their most viewed videos so let's watch this one ... so ice-cream. That's a
lot of ice cream.
Wouldn't it have been easier to melt that in the microwave
rather than over a double boiler anyway...
How is melted ice-cream plus extra sugar supposed to whip into a frosting that's
nice and thick like that??? Okay let's try that.
Let's keep going ... now they're using the frosting to put together a cake but my
frosting is liquid so I guess I'll just make up some Italian meringue frosting
and color at the same pink as the ice cream so it kind of looks like ice cream
frosting 😉
The cake looks fine, there's nothing new here ... checker board cakes have been done
so many times all over YouTube there's nothing amazing about that it
was the ice cream frosting that was amazing ... too good to be true maybe! Let's
move on... Ice cream hacks.
the second kind didn't even have a hole in the bottom of it. Okay cooking hacks.
So 2 empty soda bottles ... there's barely any drips of juice coming out and
magically now there's a whole jug of juice
that looks like it's being bought from the store! Basil ... Jedd
growing heaps of basil in the garden so we should try this one ... okay so
basically you take some basil chop it up put it in a bowl with more basil chuck
it in the microwave for 60 seconds take it out and their's is magically dried
basil. Mine is still damp and soft warm basil ... let me put it in again.
now it's fairly dry but it doesn't look anything like theirs does and it doesn't
taste or smell of basil anymore ... oh wait I think I must have missed a really
important step in this recipe let me just do that. There we go now we can put
that in the microwave pull it out and dried basil ready to go in my jar
beautiful ... see it works it works 😜
Again the same video another thing about this channel is they only put up three
minutes of new footage and then they just reshuffle and repeat old footage so
they can extend the video out to be 10 or 14 minutes which is what content
farms do so this is a bit like a content farm I guess so they can keep up with
the constant upload schedule which the algorithm seems to like... constant lots of
videos every week. I thought YouTube had a rule against
that like no duplicated content rule??? never mind
Gummybear hacks... this is gonna
be useful.
this doesn't even look like it would work! I'm going to try it...
My spoon can't get into the gummy part because it's like a gummy bear! How am I
gonna get this out without breaking the glass? How did their spoon just slide
right through the gummy part and mine doesn't? I must have done it wrong it
must be my mistake oh I'll just go make it again with some jello did I misread
the recipe? Was I supposed to use jelly or jello? There you go now
it's working. So let's face facts ... ordinary YouTube bakers are being pushed
out of existence by content farms who upload so often that genuine baking
videos just can't seem to get through all of that content farm content
anymore! Here's the views per month from the top 5
baking youtubers for the last 2 years and here's content farm views. The whole
how-to area has just been overtaken by these ones. I get comments week after
week saying please don't stop uploading that I should actually share with you
why people are stopping uploading ... and why genuine youtubers aren't doing it anymore
because they actually can't justify the cost. Some of the videos I make take more
time to film and cost more in ingredients than we're getting back in
Adsense from YouTube. So it just makes it really hard to justify continuing to do
it. So it's up to you guys ... I don't know if you'll make a difference, share this
video with the hashtag #SaveYouTubeBaking and tweet YouTube
let them know you're not happy let them know you want to see more of the genuine
YouTube creators sticking around and not just going off the platform ... maybe they
might do something about it they might actually listen to viewers instead of
not listening to youtubers and do me a favor I'm gonna list up some genuine
YouTube creators on the screen go look up some of the names of these channels
search them up watch some of their videos comment, like, share ... help them out
and hopefully you can keep them on the platform for a bit longer. Next year I'm
only going to be uploading every second week instead of every week ... if you'd like
to support the channel and help keep it going, if you've loved watching it over
the years and you like having a family-friendly Cooking Channel with
recipes that actually work then head on over to patreon/h2CT and show
your support there. Thanks so much, love you all, make it a
great week and I'll see you Friday 😁