I have the feeling the author is elevating presentation over content. His definition of terrible is different than mine.
I mean, I think "Transformers 3: Pixels Making Grinding Noises" has insanely great production value, and made a bajillion dollars, but honestly I'd rather watch two hours of Jenna Marbles videos, and I don't even like Jenna Marbles all that much.
Totally agree. The author, Ryan Holiday[0], here is conflating production value with something else entirely.
Then again, he's also the media strategist behind Tucker Max[1] and the Director of Marketing for American Apparel, so it doesn't exactly surprise me that his cultural taste is not in line with the Youtube viewer population, or anything outside of mainstream Hollywood-esque production style and content, with a pinch of misogyny.
I would similar expect that he would also not like sxephil or pantlessknights, but they are not in the title of his article. And I think it's ok if someone like him just doesn't "get" Youtube, user-generated content, or cats on the Internet.
I agree by like, a million. What is he calling "good" anyway? Are you looking for day long Game of Thrones marathon, or an entertaining 3-5 minute comedy spiel from a reasonably attractive girl? It's really two completely different mediums. I bet the author of this blog post loves overly auto-tuned pop music... and yellow Camaros...
I think she's kinda cute. If I uploaded kittens playing with string people would feel safe admitting they're watching solely because they're cute, but we must pretend that young men watching a cute young woman must solely be watching for her amazing pair of literary values and production quality.
There is an obvious blind spot relating to narrowcasting in both your examples. Both hollywood action sequels and youtube videos have the hidden assumption that they're the dominant form of media, they are our culture, everyone participates, they're what makes us, us. The national pastime, or whatever. Insinuating that they're not would get a extremely harsh reaction from those socialized to respond that they are. Kinda like religion but I'm tryin to keep on topic.
In both examples, 99% of the population won't watch either for free. You can be rejected by 99.75% of the US population yet get a youtube gold plaque for 1 million views. Given those real world facts, its no great surprise that the Venn diagram of a microscopic fraction of the US population who are Jenna fans does not have much coincidental overlap with the small and shrinking fraction of the US population who watch hollywood movies.
If your advertising message is you're the best individual example of the self described dominant form of modern media, admitting the truth that no one in the general population watches, even for free or near free, would really screw up the message.
Its a fun self awareness hack to evaluate someones worldview by asking them what percentage of the US population watches "Survivor" for example. Strongly bimodal, with the wrong answer being "almost everyone because it defines modern pop culture" and the right answer being "almost no one".
Another peculiar observation is I can walk down the street and notice that plenty of young men admire the young ladies with no hollywood production values at all
> In both examples, 99% of the population won't watch either for free.
FWIW, Transformers 3 took about $350m in north America, which at $10/ticket (is that reasonable?) is 35 million viewers. Not all of those are in the US (but I think "north America" in context might just mean "US and canada", which is like 90% US), and some of them would be repeat viewers, but probably 5-15% of the US population paid to see that film.
That's what I mean. "fifth-highest-grossing film of all time" means ignored by over 90% of the population.
What we are told defines our culture, does not. Whatever the heck over 90% of the population did instead of watching Transformers 3 for two hours, defines our culture.
I don't know that this author has his ducks in a row.
For example, in the USA, The Bell System provided an amazing quality of phone service. Uptime of the system was just astonishing, voice quality beats cell phones hollow. But clearly, the voice quality and reliability of the system wasn't all that necessary. Cell phone systems don't provide anywhere near the reliability or voice quality that The Bell System used to, and we're all overjoyed with it. It's just that a regulated monopoly could use some of it's wealth to provide geographic diversity, lots of human support and other things now considered crazy redundant.
Why not believe that the Media Monopoly (ABC, NBC, CBS) used their monopoly rents to make programming with lots of flourishes and quality? Just like The Bell System, radio and tee vee networks used to try to provide some reason for their continued existence.
Now that we can vote with our mice, we can pick the funny/weird/interesting content. We can choose the stuff that really matters to us, instead of just watching The Brady Bunch because the Thursday evening 7pm timeslot had 1 show that was bad, and 2 that were even worse.
> Why not believe that the Media Monopoly (ABC, NBC, CBS) used their monopoly rents to make programming with lots of flourishes and quality?
It did for a certain definition of 'quality'. For a while, it raised the sitcom to a level of perfection few art forms ever reach, but if you don't like the traditional sitcom that means nothing to you.
Certain kinds of stories were told as well as they could be told, but the limitations of the funding model (mass media, so you can't piss off too high of a percentage of the general public; ad-funded, so you can't piss off too many potential advertisers; FCC regulated, so you can't piss off the vocal minority who whines to the FCC) prevented any other kinds of stories from being told well, or told at all.
prevented any other kinds of stories from being told well, or told at all.
Exactly my point. Jenna Marbles and Ryan Higa and all the others with millions of hits and zero production sort of prove that point. Youtube viewers watch the stories they like, rather than choosing from the least bad ABC/NBC/CBS show that's on right now.
I think the article overlooks a large segment - that is, very popular YouTube producers who genuinely make cool videos with (what I think are) professional graphics and production quality like freddiew, wongfuproductions, ryan higa, kevjumba, mysteryguitarman and kurthugoschneider
The article also misses what traditional TV lacks that YouTube producers do - audience interaction. They will make videos based on their fans' comments, hold meetups in their location and actually respond on twitter/instagram.
The author assumes that there is a linear relationship between the amount of money that a creator has at their disposal and the resulting "production quality". So, once Jenna Marbles starts making some real bank, out come the camera crews and director and post-production effects and...
No. There is no path from Jenna Marbles to the traditional kind of television that the author is used to. They're just...different. Jenna has a specific way that she likes to create things and more money doesn't necessarily change that.
To make the kind of TV that the author imagines, you need to drop some money up front. Let's be charitable and say $300,000 for a pilot. Needless to say this is out of reach for almost 100% of the content creators on Youtube, so it's unsurprising that the content that has risen to popularity within Youtube has its roots in methods that cost essentially nothing.
Now, there are some interesting exceptions. The Lizzie Bennet Diaries [1] was nowhere near a "real" TV show in terms of budget but it had writers, production staff, and hired actors. Vice produces a lot of content that seems like it could fit into a normal TV program [2] -- almost. There are some other interesting shows that are sort of half-way there (well, more like 1/10th of the way there) in that they actually have production crews and do things like post-production (see: Wil Wheaton's Tabletop series [3]). I'm sure there are a ton of other examples.
So, the community is sidling up to high-quality content, but it's still unclear exactly how they're going to get there. By my estimation, to create a "TV-ready" drama, you'd need at the very least 100k subscribers paying $3/mo. Obviously no one is going to sign up for something if they're never heard of you, so you've got to make some free content that people love, then maybe make the jump via a Kickstarter? Or will true "channels" appear that bring the money and the subscribers and that then fund the shows of their choice? This is a really fascinating time for video content -- I'm excited to see how the economics end up playing out.
I think what you're really saying here is that these current YouTube stars will not make the jump from their current content to TV-ready content. But they do play an important role in creating the ecosystem, bringing the viewers, and showing that there is a market for content through this distribution medium. Hopefully that will make people more willing to drop the money on a good pilot, but it won't be the current generation of creators that will be doing it.
It's not that they won't make the jump, but that they're not trying to. Videos of the kind "YouTubers" make have evolved into a distinct media genre separate from episodic television. Your statement is analogous to saying "comic book authors won't jump to writing novel-ready content" -- of course not, or at least, not in a way that implies the latter is a progression from the former.
And a corollary: genre is distinct from delivery mechanism. "House of Cards" is a TV show and Jenna Marbles videos are (for lack of a better term) YouTube-style videos, even though both are delivered via the Internet.
> "but it's still unclear exactly how they're going to get there."
Technology is a good bet. Camera technology as well as cost has come down by orders of magnitude in recent years - the Canon 5D Mark II was the turning point (the first DSLR capable of shooting 1080p video at acceptable frame rates), but we're way beyond that now.
And we're not talking about "making cameras cheaper so anyone can throw one on a tripod and make amateur videos", we're talking about the democratization of previously very capital-intensive equipment. There are now cheap steadycams almost as good as the expensive real thing, follow focus units, and a massively growing segment for cheap cine lenses that are suitable for video work, but don't cost $20-30K a pop like traditional cinema lenses.
We're dramatically lowering the cost of entry for effects that were previously associated with high production value (thin depth of field, follow focus, smooth camera movement, etc).
The entertainment world of the future is a friggin' exciting place.
The author is Ryan Holiday, who makes a nice side living as a professional rage-click generator.
It's likely that his only purpose with this post is to piss off thousands of Jenna Marbles fans so that they will come post angry comments (and receive ad impressions).
Please, I have written pretty extensively about the problems with the ad impressions model--I think it's the root of the YT issue and most the low quality blogging we see.
I don't get paid by the pageview and if I did, it would be an inconsequential part of my annual income at this point. I write columns about ideas I find interesting. If I wanted pageviews I'd probably publish it somewhere other than the Observer
Agree with you, but it saddens me that people will listen to her just because she's "attractive." She's not that good looking, she just wears a lot of makeup. I'd have a conversation with her in a bar, but since she's hundreds of miles away from me I don't have to pretend that she's interesting because I don't get anything out of it.
Blaming the rules of the game is sometimes appropriate, but not in the case. This is a free market for entertainment if there ever was one. Much freer than TV or movies.
The high-volume clicks that the author reviles? These consist of millions of individual consumer choices. The viewers decide what they want to watch. Apparently, this is what people like. Maybe old media didn't realize that and was wasting their money all along, or maybe tastes have just changed. But either way, if you don't like what's popular on YouTube (which I don't), you probably just have different tastes. Fortunately, there is plenty of diversity of YouTube, so you're not stuck with what's popular.
Which raises a question about this article: What exactly is the author criticizing? Surely it's not the lack of good content, because there is more of that than ever. It seems to be the mere popularity of bad content. But if bad content is popular, what of it? I don't mind. If it is truly bothersome, one can always take comfort in snobbery, which can be a lot of fun.
If Google were somehow distorting the market by deliberately promoting low-quality stuff, I'd blame the system. But based on the facts as stated by the author, I don't see any reason to believe that.
> The same can pretty much be said about the rest of YouTube’s top “talent.” From Shane Dawson to Smosh, it’s almost universally bad content, bad jokes, bad premises, bad production value.
TV wasn't that bad 10-15 years ago. Formulaic as they were, 90s sitcoms used to always entertain, even if they didn't have much new to bring to the table.
Now, of course, we have mindless nonsense on TV, but I'm afraid YouTube is even worse. I have no subscribers on YouTube, and I never watch any of the producers listed in the article.
I generally use it for music (I listen to a lot of jazz, and Spotify has very little jazz music), and watching arbitrary YouTube videos that end up in links from Hacker News.
And the occasional technology video.
EDIT:
What's interesting about the article is the trail of comments left by top YouTubers, such as Ryan Higa, Tay Zonday, and Lamarr Wilson. Really entertaining to read their responses.
In addition to the author's points about how the videos are constructed (thumbnail tricks, headline bait) to gain views, you also have to consider the basic mechanism involved in getting views: accessibility to a large population of people. If your videos are created at such a high level that only people with an IQ>130 can understand, you won't get that many views, and even fewer subscribers. If you target the crowd with average to below average intelligence then you have a much larger market. What do people with average/below average intelligence care about? They want to see people doing stupid stuff. They don't care about production value that much. They want to see someone looking like an idiot because it makes them feel better about themselves. This is the singular reason for low quality crap on YouTube and TV. The audience that can truly appreciate high quality shows is very small and can't sustain that much programming.
I'd also like to point out that not all YouTube channels suck. There is a solid community of educational YouTubers which make good stuff [1]. Also, SourceFed is where I go to get caught up on news that other people want to talk about and I only have 5 minutes to spare. Phil DeFranco's empire is an example of a business built on YouTube.
[1]Maybe that should be "who make good stuff" or "whom make good stuff." Maybe I should watch more YouTube videos on grammar and less about NASA.
"If your videos are created at such a high level that only people with an IQ>130 can understand, you won't get that many views"
That's a terrible specific example because you only need 0.25% of the American population to watch to get a gold plaque, but by the old standard of 95% of the population scores within 2 SD of the mean aka 70-130 IQ, that means your videos would appeal to about 2.5% of the population, or ten times as many people as you'd need to achieve the coveted youtube gold plaque.
I get what you're trying to say even if the example was not so good. The problem is no one watches youtube, so the small fraction of popular videos is pretty small if you compare it to the fraction of the population who are smart.
"They don't care about production value that much."
Production quality is a DSW for professional producers and no one else cares.
Attractive young woman I saw in the lunchroom today got plenty of attention from the guys despite not having rehearsed her lines and screwing up the joke punchline. And lighting and costumes weren't any good and none of us had much of a decent camera angle. Nothing in life that's memorable ever seems to be hollywood perfect, and no one minds but the professional production crews.
This article completely misses the point. It is not glossy fine hd quality that attracts, it is the soul and heart that youtubers put into videos. Be it Jenna Marbles showing an example of a strong woman, Shane Dawson who gives hope and inspiration to bullied kids across the country - you can't do the same if you will be just pouring dollars.
And no, they have someone to be 'good' for - Jenna has 8,785,657 highly engaged subscribers on youtube only, who value her sincerity above video quality.
I watch only a couple YouTube channels actively and there's a common thread in almost all of them: the 'host' has an interesting personality. Sometimes that personality is completely fabricated and sometimes it's real - it doesn't really matter since viewers don't care. It's a lot like how the Stephen Colbert on 'The Colbert Report' isn't really the real-life Stephen Colbert. The videos also are typically more throwaway than TV - and that's why production is so low and the comparisons don't hold up.
It's the allure of a la carte TV, where if you want some girl talk, gun videos, a let's play, or funny cat compilation video, it's all there and easily digestible at any point in the day.
One thing we saw from that $100 million was that higher production values don't translate into more views. But really, why should they? What matters is content; I'm very happy for people to continue producing videos in their living room on their laptop, if the content is good.
I suspect that this article makes more sense if you've read his book, which hits on the same themes with a lot more context, and a lot more history.
Youtube optimizes for grabbing attention in well-defined bite sized chunks that people think they can spare. A little dopamine hit, followed by another, followed by another, followed by..why didn't I get anything done today? The interaction isn't meaningful. It isn't rich. It doesn't improve our lives. But it is addictive.
Throughout modern history (certainly long before the internet) creative works that become the most popular are not necessarily that of the best quality. They're usually those that cater to the interests of the most people.
It happens to be that most people wish for regularly-updated pieces of entertainment that give them a particular emotional stimulus, regardless of their "quality". Aspects of human nature like these affect markets involving a macrocosm like the community of those that watch YouTube. Changing the pay model won't fix that. In the end, the number of people who want to view one's creative work determines how much the creator earns.
So really, rather than being a complaint about YouTube, this article is a general complaint about how things of "bad quality" are more popular than things of "good quality", which is a half-handed complaint about an aspect of human nature in the public macrocosm. This can't really be fixed unless one limits the audience in some way, and often it's a much more logical decision not to do that.
What is being run, unintentionally by YouTube and its army of content generators, is a massively parallel search algorithm that evolves and optimizes itself to find every facet of human weakness. Networks effects on the internet allow it to run at an unprecedented speed and scale.
There is a certain ironic beauty to how destructive the system as a whole becomes. Everyone gains. The content producer, YouTube and the advertisers are locked in an addictive feedback loop. Even the users gain through the quantity and diversity of content.
Exactly like the housing bubble, everyone including the rating agencies did well right up till the end.
Unlike the housing bubble no one loses in the end. Sure, the Youtube revenue stream will dry up but that's the nature of the business. Either the content providers will move on to The Next Big Thing(TM) or will just be replaced by someone else. I don't think any of them believe that they can continue doing this for 30 years.
Comparing the quality of TV to YouTube is like comparing the design of a website vs the design of a newsletter. The expectations are much higher with TV shows and websites. With email and YouTube, as long as it's readable/watchable and the content is good, people will come back.
I couldn't help but agree with a lot in this article. Youtube's video page tends to be too busy and distracting. It's more of an entertainment/pop culture platform, if anything. It's really hard for tutorial/educational content to rise, and since they don't reach that many page views many channels don't collect much revenue from youtube.
which is why, recently I launched a site called Starseed - it's a youtube-like platform just for tutorial/educational videos. Starseed.io was created so that tutorial authors can upload tutorials on any topic they care about – no matter how advanced – for free and start collecting donations on their video’s page from day one. It's sort of like each channel on starseed is like the PBS network - getting funded by its viewers.
I watched Idiocracy [1] last night for the first time. The story is very clever in parts. Certainly the description of a film that was considered the best because it was just a picture of someone farting. Is taking the style of Youtube to the extreme.
The original article is pointing to that future, where Generation C's attention is on the low brow entertainment and traditional production cannot sustain itself.
Like journalism today is fighting for survival (who's going to pay for a full time reporter when you can get information off twitter?), television production will also be fighting in 10-15 years time as the next generation of adult switch off the satellite/cable TV in favour of Youtube style content.
There's a few well known youtubers in the comments to that article ... kind of interesting to see their responses :) But yeah, I kind of agree. Youtube is a new thing, it doesn't have to adhere to conventional notions of "quality".
This is oddly inverted, but I remember a few years ago I was working at EA Tiburon when EA did the whole exclusive NFL deal. There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth over that, and people complaining about year after year releases of Madden, with few improvements ... but you know what? consumers buy it, and so the party continues. Same goes with youtube ... the content obviously provides value or entertainment for a large number of people. Don't fight it, just accept that it is what it is.
It works for some. Actually it works for a lot, and that doesn't mean it's a bad thing. Most people go through the day without the intuitive eye for wit, great taste, and appreciation for production value that a media manipulator and PR strategist would have, but I wouldn't say that makes the world a worse place. What's good and what's effective can be 2 separate things entirely.
Its really arrogant to think you know what "good" is, universally. No matter how much you argue for why something (media, art, music-ish stuff) is bad or good, it really doesn't change people's minds- when was the last time you were personally convinced that you didn't like something after enjoying it?
I wonder how much revenue these channels would produce if comments were universally disabled.
Nearly every popular YouTube video is its own discussion board. There are people discussing the video, other comments, and completely unrelated topics. You see comments like "Hey, I'm back. How are you guys doing?" -- which implies this is a person who treats the video as its own self-contained forum.
Then of course there's the trolls who perpetuate conversation by inciting others. It's ironic to think trolls earn video channels ad revenue.
Yeah, most of the internet hasn't heard of a hosts file or AdBlock. It's a good thing though, because if there wasn't money in the advertising we would have to pay for access to YouTube.
All I get from that is that betabeat is pissed that the audience doesn't understand that they must care about production value and how much money is being spent to make those videos.
Don't get me wrong I find the Young Turks to be so badly produced that I can't stand to watch them -- but that doesn't mean that I get to tell others what they should value.
Much of the blame for vapid content propogation on YouTube must also be assigned to YouTube's own content recommendations engine. This:
Won't accept no for an answer. You can't select and item and say "never, ever, under any circumstances, show this to me again." You can't even delete it from the recommendations list.
Once you fall down a YouTube rathole, you stay there. YouTube never forgets (or requires a severe amount of ass-kicking and browser/history deletion to be told to forget). Random crap content I've viewed long ago seems (and of course, I can't know for sure) to result in promoting the same sort of crap content. You've all ended up in that corner of YouTube, and there's no way out.
YouTube promotes its own recommendations over what you've searched for. When I look for content, rather than have the search results represented in the recommendations list, it's YouTube's own selections. Which are often ... not what I want. But don't be tempted to click (see "rathole" above).
Mass markets favor common denominators. There's amazingly good stuff on YouTube, for whatever your definition of amazing is. But often, that's going to be ver specific to who you are and what your interests are. The only thing I can guarantee is that the intersection of your interests with the rest of the world is likely to be at a pretty base level.
Eyeball economies favor vapidity. We're seeing this in many areas (news, Web content, videos). Until user-selection tools become better at countering this, we'll continue to see the problem.
There is really good content with relatively poor production values. Having an interest in fitness, Boris "johnny mnemonic" Bachmann's "Squat Rx" video series is _great_. It's a one-man production filmed at low (320p) resolution with spotty audio levels. But the depth of knowledge is excellent. Thankfully, it's filmed with a tripod and well edited. http://www.youtube.com/user/johnnymnemonic2
Production quality doesn't translate to high-value content. "Vsauce" is a highly-produced video series. The information content is virtually nil (and the energy level is beyond annoying). The "origional series" "Blue" is ... beyond stupid.
Production quality CAN further boost high-value content. The TED Talk video series, and RSA Animate videos are excellent. If viewed from a production perspective, there's a lot of work that goes into them, and poor imitations are poor, though some other parties have used similar techniques well, see the Post Carbon Institute: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJ-J91SwP8w
YouTube handles spam / MVP poorly. A popular video will be grabbed and repurposed by spammers and mindless video propogators / mindless viral propogators endlessly. It results in a huge duplication of content (often at increasing levels of video/audio quality degredation). See especially "fail" video compilations. No, it's a trap! (See: "rathole", above).
Chalk it up to my own boring interests, but finding micro-channel content relevant to specific areas is one of the huge wins of YouTube. Interviews, seminars, conference sessions recorded, and other informational content. Along with a bit of entertainment. The problem of course is that such content has very little visibility at scale -- it's part of the "long tail". And despite what some Cluetrainists would want you to believe, the real money is still at the head.
I mean, I think "Transformers 3: Pixels Making Grinding Noises" has insanely great production value, and made a bajillion dollars, but honestly I'd rather watch two hours of Jenna Marbles videos, and I don't even like Jenna Marbles all that much.