A few years ago I wrote a blog post about the youtuber who goes by the nickname TL;DR (which officially expands to "Teal Deer") who many years ago was one of the biggest anti-leftist youtubers, with almost 200 thousand subscribers, and an average view count per video of about 100 thousand views.
At some point, maybe about five-or-so years ago, he just decided that YouTube is a "censorious platform" (his own words) that deranks and delists anti-leftist videos, and as some sort of (quite empty) protest and knee-jerk reaction decided to private all of his YouTube videos and move to alternative (and much smaller) video sharing platforms.
The huge irony is that, while he got about 100 thousand views per video on average on YouTube, in those alternative platforms he got an average of about 2 thousand views per video.
In other words, he cut his own viewership by two orders of magnitude. For all intents and purposes he censored himself, and did it much more effectively than YouTube ever did (allegedly).
There was indeed a kind of rumor going on over five years ago, particularly among the anti-leftist youtubers, that YouTube is indeed "censoring" anti-leftist videos, delisting them, not promoting them, obviously demonetizing them, and so on. I myself never saw any actual evidence of this. It was a claim that was really prevalent among anti-leftists back then, but I never saw much of evidence of this.
Given that, for example, TL;DR kept getting about 100k view per video on average, and this hadn't been noticeably diminishing over time, the claim didn't seem very true to me.
Anyway, TL;DR stubbornly refused to return to YouTube for something like five years. He stubbornly just kept uploading videos at semi-regular intervals to those other video sharing webistes, and refused to do anything on YouTube.
The thing is, not only had he cut his viewership by two orders of magnitude, but his view counts per video were actually steadily declining over the years. It started with perhaps 2k views per video on average, but over the span of the five-or-so years that he spent there, it clearly started to decline to maybe 1k views per video. Many of his videos started getting less than a thousand views.
So here's the update: Finally, after all those years, apparently he relented and returned to YouTube. I'm guessing he just got tired of not gaining any new viewers in those other platforms and, on the contrary, only losing them. His videos were becoming less and less viewed and thus popular there.
So he returned to YouTube and made all of his old videos public again (which once again showed that he was indeed getting about 100k views per video on average, give or take, before he left.)
Problem is, the damage has quite clearly already been done: He is not getting even nearly as many views per video as he used to. He is now getting maybe 10-20 thousand views per video. Ten times more than in those other video sharing websites, but only a tenth of what he used to before he left.
And, it seems to me that he has lost motivation to keep making and uploading videos. I would guess that seeing his videos only getting a tenth of the views that they used to, has demoralized him and made him lose motivation.
So, quite clearly, he just permanently damaged his YouTube channel by leaving, delisting all of his videos, and stubbornly trying to make futile attempt at those other sites for so many years.
It's very probable that if he had made such a hiatus for just six months or a year, and then returned, he would have likely recovered all of his viewers. But 5+ years was too long. Nobody remembers him anymore. And now he just effectively just stopped uploading videos. (The last video he has uploaded as of writing this blog post was 3 months ago, and prior to that it was 4 months and 7 months ago. The upload pace has gone down significantly. And the view counts have gone down drastically, with just 5-10k views per video.)
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