Bet you didn’t know there are a mess of YouTube accounts by YouTube. Click to see “On the Rise,” designed to spawn more creators with 100K subscribers, and see “other YouTube channels” (on left) for an assortment of channels created by YouTube employees.
I have videos that get lots of views, but very few subscribers.
They almost have more accounts than I do!
“On the Rise” is designed to appease content creators who are currently getting raped by not being allowed into YouTube’s promotion slots.
It works by creating the illusion that all content creators have a chance of appearing on the browse page, in the same way that lottery tickets give people the illusion that one day they might get rich and should keep buying lottery tickets (the Idiot Tax) instead of taking control and improving their own circumstances.
On the outside it appears that YouTube is giving YOU personally something, but in reality YOU personally have been given nothing. It is such a big inside joke that the people running it are not taking the trouble to watch new videos to fill the slot with, the Editors are throwing in videos that they “made popular” years ago.
Let me give you an example from the current “On The Rise” picks.
Two of the videos were featured in 2007, the PBRnow one and the photoanimationguy one (Kitty Said What). In 2007 featuring a video meant it got over a million views. When YouTube introduced the auto-featured video selection feedback loop (rich-get-richer) these videos became stuck as the featured videos on the watch pages for videos containing associated material. That means these old videos have built up a huge number of views even though their channel’s Editor-triggered 15 minutes was long over. To make that point painfully clear, photoanimationguy kept making clone videos until people got tired of the format stopped watching the new ones. He stopped making videos in September 2009 and the channel has been coasting on the YouTube rich-get-richer feedback loop since then.
The videos currently have their statistics on display so you can go and look for yourself and see that the views are growing steadily as you would expect to be the result of an algorithm based promotion, (for every x watch page features you get y clicks and views).
The channel’s have tiny subscriber numbers in comparison to the views the selected videos have, which shows that the views are not as a result of grassroots YouTuber interaction, but are instead an aberration caused by the Editor’s involvement.
To be absolutely clear, a YouTube-run channel that purports to be promoting YouTube’s “latest rising stars” is in fact being used to secure the position of “stars” that the YouTube Editor’s created years ago and the channel is making it even more difficult for new talent with a grassroots following to get a break.
It is hard for anyone to get their head around the stupidity and laziness exhibited by YouTube employees because on the surface the site’s model is successful. The crappy YouTube employees are being carried by the bits of the site that do work (because WE make those bits work).
If you, Nalts, were asked by a client to design a new ad campaign to boost their profits and you handed them a photocopy of something that barely scratched the public’s consciousness three years ago, do you think they would pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to run it?
Ask how much it costs to buy one of the spots in the browse-page banner and you will get an idea of how much money absentee YouTube Editors are burning every day.
YouTube employees operate in a bubble. They don’t have to meet the needs of their content creators because we are willing to rework and repackage what we are given until it fits in with the real world.
We may even blog about what YouTube employees have done without expressing an opinion on it so that we don’t get blacklisted.
I don’t think another video sharing site will find the pin than pop that YouTube bubble. I think its going to slowly deflate like a two week old rubber balloon as individual Partners just give up.
The would be stupid not to. LOL
Will youtube ever be replaced as the video site that matters? Kind of like what happened to myspace…
I’m not sure but I think you just might have gotten totally spanked by 1000lurkers.
OMG sukatra don’t tell marilyn but 1000 lurkers’s comment was longer and more insightful than my posts.
1000 lurkers always cracks me up. So cynical and serious. The long winded conspiracy theory comments are hilariously kooky (even though there’s a good deal of truth in them).