A question that has been running over in my head is whether YouTube can be (or should be) the center of the creator economy, especially after their steps toward better Shorts monetization and Twitch’s pay cuts.

YouTube: Then vs Now

When YouTube started, it was a platform that did pretty much nothing but act as a sort of cloud storage for videos. Monetization didn’t exist, and neither did ads.

In contrast, today’s YouTube looks very different. YouTube is now (arguably) just an ad company and tons of businesses are built on top of the framework provided by YouTube.

Online Video

In the world of online video, there are mainly 3 spheres that exist: long-form video, short-form video, and livestreams.

Long-form videos are YouTube’s wheelhouse: it is their bread-and-butter, and that’s what people go to YouTube for. YouTube’s prowess in long-form video is what has made it (somewhat ironically) the second largest search engine in the world (after parent Google).

The other two spheres (I’d argue) have taken off only after the pandemic.

Livestreaming existed, of course: gaming content lends itself extremely well to the livestream format (and a bulk of livestreamed content is still gaming content), but with the pandemic and (possibly) Ludwig Ahgren’s subathon, viewership for variety streaming content took off. Twitch was (and still is) top dog in the livestream world, with challengers coming and going one after the other (case in point: Mixer).

I don’t know when exactly short-form content took off like it did, but I do know that it took off with TikTok. TikTok did something no one else could: beat YouTube in terms of number of views. TikTok’s meteoric rise is arguably what sparked other companies (ahem Instagram, YouTube) to copy its format.

What happened?

Even though companies have tried to get a piece of YouTube’s pie (long-form video), they have utterly failed. Nobody goes to Vimeo or Facebook to find a tutorial for something; people go to YouTube. The greatest sign of their success is the fact that YouTube is used as a search engine.

YouTube, though, wants more. I think they want to be the center of the creator economy revolution. Their eyes are set, first and foremost, on cornering the web video market.

After Hank Green’s video about TikTok’s monetization program, sentiment against TikTok began to rise and creators began to post their videos on platforms like Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts a lot more. The issue was, this content was usually just direct reuploads of their TikTok content. YouTube, though, seems to have jumped on this opportunity. They recently announced their plan for Shorts monetization (moving from a static fund to a percentage split, which means when YouTube grows, so do their creators), and revealed their plan for licensing copyrighted music (something TikTok needs to deal with: TikToks tend to have copyrighted music in the background).

Twitch, too, is falling: massive creators like Fuslie, Valkyrae, Sykkuno, and Ludwig are now signed to YouTube; and YouTube is developing features (albeit slowly) to bring it to parity with Twitch. Twitch’s decision to remove the 70/30 subscription split, moderation issues (sponsored gambling streams are extremely common on twitch), and exponential increase in copyright-related issues (due to the complete lack of copyright protection) has just made this worse.

It seems to me that YouTube wants to create a workflow that accommodates all 3 of the web video formats, and creators will ideally create all 3 of them too. This explains their decision to create 3 separate tabs for videos, livestream VODs, and Shorts. In my experience, this has also incentivized creators to create all 3 types of content (check out Ali Abdaal’s channel, before and after the change: he started to livestream, and he vastly increased his shorts output).

Will YouTube Win?

YouTube still doesn’t have a complete stronghold over the web video world just yet, though.

Let’s talk about short-form content. The issue is, TikTok is a phenomenon now (just like Vine was, all those years ago), and to break that sense of community is almost impossible. The audience of TikTok is huge, and the discoverability they offer is just incredible. YouTube is just too big for that. This is evident as many YouTube Shorts are just TikTok reuploads (but this could change, after Shorts monetization comes into effect). A big question-mark, though, is TikTok’s Pulse program. Basically, it is TikTok’s version of the “percent-split” revenue model. I have a couple of questions, though: how easy it is to get into the Pulse program? How many advertisers will actually go to TikTok, given their issues with moderation? Will TikTok face an “adpocalypse” given the high amount of copyrighted content?

Livestreams too, are a little bit confusing. Twitch’s dominance over livestreaming is still expected to remain due to the culture that they have (again, YouTube is too big for that). But, if they continue to make policy blunders that push creators away from the platform, and if YouTube catches up, feature-wise, fast enough, I don’t think Twitch will remain top dog. They’re stuck between the devil and the deep sea: they’re bleeding Amazon’s money, they’re facing creator pressure (in terms of the pay split), they’re facing advertiser pressure, they’re facing pressure from the music industry (given the high amount of copyrighted content played on Twitch), and they’re being hunted down by YouTube.

YouTube’s Advantages

In my mind, YouTube has 4 MASSIVE advantages (from least to most important):

1. Workflow: The fact that YouTube does it all allows creators to centralize their businesses and allows the audience to go to one site for a multitude of different functions.
2. Reach: YouTube is the 2nd biggest search engine in the world, and therefore reaches an audience that no other platform can reach.
3. Copyright: As much as people love to hate it, YouTube’s Content ID system is incredibly smart and solves the issue about copyrighted content TikTok and Twitch are facing. Their plan to increase their music library only serves to increase this difference.
4. Monetization: YouTube’s biggest strength is monetization. No one has been able to monetize videos as effectively as YouTube can, and Shorts monetization seems to make this even more appealing to creators. For Livestreamers, Memberships also offer a 70/30 split of the revenue, with 70% going to the creator.

What will happen?

Honestly, I don’t know.

But in my mind, it seems highly likely that YouTube will at least cause some change in these other organizations, for the better.

Updates

Vacation

I took a break from making content mainly because I had a couple of weeks off from school, and I wanted to rest myself before coming back to normal life.

I should start making more stuff soon! Maybe more long-form content?

Livestreams

I streamed a bit of my production session a few weeks back, and that was a huge learning experience.

Make sure to join the streams when I (hopefully) stream more!

YYGS

I applied to Yale’s pre-college program, called YYGS!

The experience was honestly kind of painful. It took so much work; I really didn’t realize applying to college would be so lengthy.

Photo Diary

Thanks for reading!