In a previous blog post I wrote about a youtuber who used to be quite big. About 6 years ago he made several videos that got over 2 million views, multiple others with over 1 million views, and even the average view count on his other videos during that era was in the 200-300 thousand views per video.
Then somewhere around 3 or 4 years ago he experienced a sharp decline, until it was about 20-30 thousand views per video on average, with only a few rare videos breaking the 100k mark. (Trump becoming the President of the United States at that time is not a coincidence.)
Out of curiosity I checked his channel now, almost a year later, and it appears that he seems to have trouble even breaking the 10k views mark, only very occasionally achieving that many. The average seems to be in the ballpark of about 8 thousand views.
One particular phenomenon that I notice in his latest videos is the sheer amount of 2-hour long podcasts. During a particular recent period of about 5 months he has uploaded 55 videos. Out of them, a whopping 47 are 2-hour long podcasts. In other words, during that period he has made and uploaded only 8 shorter videos with actual content, out of 55 total.
This is, by far, not a unique phenomenon. I have seen the same thing happening many times: Youtubers who were once enormously big and popular, who are still active but have had their viewership counts drop like a lead balloon from their heyday, start making copious amounts of hours-long podcasts instead of actual content. Usually the view counts in these podcasts are some of the lowest in their entire channel (and, I'm guessing, mostly caused by a fraction of their subscribers checking the first few minutes of the video before leaving, which nevertheless probably still counts as a view).
I consider copious amounts of podcasts to be a sign of laziness, especially when it comes to YouTube channels that in the past had high-quality popular content. The thing about podcasts is that they are extremely easy to make: It's just the person, or a few people, talking and nothing else. No scriptwriting required, no editing required. In the vast majority of cases these podcasts are completely unedited and uncut (which is why they are typically several hours long). It's essentially just the youtuber dumping raw lazily done footage as-is onto their channel, of them talking and nothing else.
This is so lazy that I would even consider it an insult to that youtuber's viewers.
If they want to make podcasts, at the very least create a separate channel for them. Putting them in the main channel is quite often a sure sign that the viewerships are dropping and the youtuber has fallen, or is quickly falling from grace.
Then somewhere around 3 or 4 years ago he experienced a sharp decline, until it was about 20-30 thousand views per video on average, with only a few rare videos breaking the 100k mark. (Trump becoming the President of the United States at that time is not a coincidence.)
Out of curiosity I checked his channel now, almost a year later, and it appears that he seems to have trouble even breaking the 10k views mark, only very occasionally achieving that many. The average seems to be in the ballpark of about 8 thousand views.
One particular phenomenon that I notice in his latest videos is the sheer amount of 2-hour long podcasts. During a particular recent period of about 5 months he has uploaded 55 videos. Out of them, a whopping 47 are 2-hour long podcasts. In other words, during that period he has made and uploaded only 8 shorter videos with actual content, out of 55 total.
This is, by far, not a unique phenomenon. I have seen the same thing happening many times: Youtubers who were once enormously big and popular, who are still active but have had their viewership counts drop like a lead balloon from their heyday, start making copious amounts of hours-long podcasts instead of actual content. Usually the view counts in these podcasts are some of the lowest in their entire channel (and, I'm guessing, mostly caused by a fraction of their subscribers checking the first few minutes of the video before leaving, which nevertheless probably still counts as a view).
I consider copious amounts of podcasts to be a sign of laziness, especially when it comes to YouTube channels that in the past had high-quality popular content. The thing about podcasts is that they are extremely easy to make: It's just the person, or a few people, talking and nothing else. No scriptwriting required, no editing required. In the vast majority of cases these podcasts are completely unedited and uncut (which is why they are typically several hours long). It's essentially just the youtuber dumping raw lazily done footage as-is onto their channel, of them talking and nothing else.
This is so lazy that I would even consider it an insult to that youtuber's viewers.
If they want to make podcasts, at the very least create a separate channel for them. Putting them in the main channel is quite often a sure sign that the viewerships are dropping and the youtuber has fallen, or is quickly falling from grace.
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