I’ve been harboring this post for quite some time, and now, with the demise of Gawker fresh in mind, I can’t wait any longer. YouTube is not your friend.

This past summer, I went to the VidCon conference for the first time since the very first one in 2010. VidCon is the unofficial official conference for YouTubers, those people who have throngs of fans on YouTube and, in a sort of sense, try to make money off of it.

Back in 2010, YouTube had just decided to share its revenue with its creators for the first time [EDITORS NOTE HERE. YouTube did have prior rev shares that arguably date back to 2007, but were by invitation only. in 2010 they began opening up the ‘partners program’ to a significantly larger group of people prompting VidCon], enabling a new era of online content creation with some of the brightest expectations for humanity since the dawn of MTV.

At the time, I wrote this piece for the Huffington Post entitled: Proof of Intelligent Life on YouTube:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dan-beckmann/proof-of-intelligent-life_b_826336.html

It was a time of incredible optimism, insatiable ‘yes YOU can make millions out of thin air based on your face’ ambition, and greedy opportunism that is the essence of what uniquely seems to keep people coming to California and keeps the United States going.

In 2016, I have a much darker version of what became of this world — one in which ambition is smashed, creativity is quickly and severely punished, and Goliath beats David in the middle of the night while he sleeps. This is a long read, especially for the YouTube crowd, so stick with me (it’s divided into roughly 4 sections, so why not take breaks?).

YouTube is not your friend (and probably never was, btw)

YouTube is not a friendly fun tech company that’s your friend. YouTube is a content plantation that exploits what’s most sincere about a young person’s creativity and aspiration, sucks them in with lies and deceit about being rich and famous someday, and leaves them sitting out at the suburban curb for the trash man, all before they turn 24. Don’t let your kid become a YouTuber. You might as well let them play football.

YouTube — the once heralded democratization of our video media — does not govern what’s popular by a mass vote. Instead labyrinthian and opaque business interests govern what you get to see under the falsehood that the best stuff rises to the top.

Its management smells less like an innovative tech company and more like Sears Roebuck & Co of the ‘60s with brighter colors, fake smiles, and foosball tables no one uses. (ref innovators dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma). Very few of the technocrats in power there have any creative experience making anything of their own. They are running a dominant business that attracts obviously credentialed business talent — but is a fundamentally bad enterprise that has Walmart-ized a huge section of our media and almost all of our video. Yes, like Sears, they may still be spitting out YouTubers and spontaneously cutting them off from their subscribers in 2050, even as their only value may be a Real Estate Investment Trust — but everyone will wonder why they didn’t see everything else coming.

For instance, it would have seemed like YouTube had a advance on doing live video — now they are stumbling to play catch up to Periscope, YouNow and the master thief Facebook (and apparently talking trash about all of them as they actually try new things first… Early YouTube never said bad things about other places — they were leading). They could have had THE dominant video social network — but the truth is, they have not really had a single mind blowing innovation since Google bought them — it’s all been about Sears Roebucking the creators out, with Wharton, Stanford GSB, and HBS geniuses who have never made a single video themselves. Larry and Sergey may indeed have started Google in Susan Wojcicki’s (now YouTube CEO) garage, but I doubt any of them have ever made a compelling video on their own in their entire lives, despite sucking up the funding for those of us who do. If they ever have, it’s the biggest secret in the world.

And now an example of their ‘innovation’… all of a sudden, YouTube is not just for video anymore! Notice this FAST COMPANY article written by the YouTube PR department in which they basically attempt to steal what’s AMAZING about Snapchat, several years too late, at the apparent behest of their finest YouTuber talent — GIFs and Emoticons, ‘the future from two years ago’ is considered a gift to all us plebes dear sire! : https://www.fastcompany.com/3063623/most-innovative-companies/youtube-is-building-community-and-its-not-just-about-video

The problem this time is, YouTube is not Sears. They aren’t selling washing machines, they are a huge part of what fills our minds. It’s the largest online video platform, and its morbid treatment of its creators, and its animatronic creative decisions affect the structure of our world in a way that’s more fundamental to what it means to be a human living in an information based, free and open society. Their business and the way they run it not only affects the next generation of those who wish to create, but it also impacts every other media business that takes actual creative risks while supporting real professionals who have the space to take these chances, without their parents paying for them (hey YouTube HBS MBAs: at some point the parents supporting your content makers will run out of money. Have you figured out what will happen then?). YouTube takes absolutely no creative risks, and just like Uber, all the risk is on the poorest, weakest part of the chain.

While YouTube claims they will help you become famous — in their presentations they brag about how YouTubers ultimately can get jobs on television — television is a medium and business model they continue to rob, beat, destroy, and leave for dead through their monetization practices. They must have gotten it from Google, which along with Facebook, has taken a blunt object to funding for original reporting, with their Walmart-ization of ad buying. On YouTube, every view is worth the same price whether a video is straight copied, someone gets shot at to make it, or more often than not these days, someone steals someone else’s video who got shot at to make it. All are worth the same amount on YouTube, so the incentive is to spend the least money and provide the lowest value possible or just sell in-video product endorsements (one day it’s Bonkers, the next day it’s a vacuum cleaner) or have your parents pay for it.

The creative class that got coaxed into their plantation is scared, damaged, and afraid to come forward about the way they’ve been treated over the last 6 years. Most people I’ve spoken to about this story agree that YouTube is a bad actor but they are afraid to do anything about it. They have reason to be afraid — just like in totalitarian places like North Korea, if you get in trouble with YouTube, there’s absolutely no recourse if they randomly cut you off from your audience (which to some is their family), take away your monetization, or just shut down your channel without any explanation or justification.

Here’s an example. Recently they shut down William Shatner’s YouTube channel with absolutely no warning. If it was your livelihood, they didn’t care. If you didn’t do anything wrong, they didn’t care. In North Korea, at least they may have fake trials; at YouTube, they have nothing — an appeal down a dark hole. Fortunately for Captain Kirk, he was famous enough to get his access restored — but we should all also be thankful that he was able to tweet about it (Twitter isn’t owned by Google, yet) so a larger group knew. If you aren’t an historic household name, and you just work for YouTube as a creator, you fade away.

This doesn’t sound like democratization to me. Whilst the old days of NBC, ABC, CBS, and broadcast television severely limited access to distribution, you knew exactly who was making those decisions and in some way, since they were using the public airwaves, you could hold them accountable — or at least they were accountable to the public at large in some way. YouTube is not benevolent — it’s also not accountable to anyone right now. If they would just stop at being a bad phone company connecting us to a warehouse of music videos and how to videos, that would be fine, but unfortunately, their business model preys on our youngest generation’s greatest ambitions and destroys them.

Youtube CEO Susan Wjcicki Keynote @ VIDCON 2016 #terriblyawkward

I’ve made a lot of claims here, so for the remainder of this epic, I have pulled from YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki’s keynote VidCon speech [https://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=5UVOK4SdVno.], which is probably one of the most awkward, disingenuous things I’ve ever witnessed (and I’ve been to 3 major party conventions in person). I will use their 3 C’s of YouTube, which they used to try to explain and organize what it is they are trying to be about — Community, Creation, and Creative Ambition — to prove my points.

The 3 C’s of Youtube @ VIDCON 2016 Keynote

The 3 C’s of YouTube

Community

Let’s stay for a moment on this most horrible and awkward keynote of all time and CEO Susan Wojcicki. Let me preface this with the notion that in order to maintain, let alone support their community, the way they see the world is all wrong. The creative people that make up their community are the ones making the things YouTube sells, and in almost all cases, are the ones taking all the risks. So when Susan talks about “improvements to their comment section” and it falls flat — the reason is, these are “improvements” that actually help YouTube a lot more than it helps their creative community. These changes are incredibly small, impersonal, basic items that don’t address major issues that humans have in order to do creative work professionally.

I’ll give you the best worst example. After Susan offered these flat IMPROVEMENTS, they carted out Sebastien Missoffe, their Global Head of Operations, to unveil pitifully late and painfully inadequate basic product feature enhancements (they used marketing music from 2011; ironically the same year YouTube went to the digital upfronts and proclaimed themselves BRANDtube).

Some guy YouTube carted out they will forget about in a few months

Missoffe begins by trumpeting the experience of one guy that someone at YouTube took a liking to. One day the creator visited a pop up YouTube space and then VOILA YouTube helped him to get to 10k subscribers and now he’s amazing! “We want this to be the experience of every single creator!” Missoffe said.

How are they going to bring this magic to the millions of YouTube creators?

Get this, I’m not shitting you and Sebastian announced this with baited breath — “are you ready for this?” — from now on, when you write YouTube as a creator who is essentially giving your work to YouTube for (in most cases)free, if you have a problem you will now get a written response within one business day!

Will it be a form letter? Probably. Do you get to call anyone? No. How about chat? Nah, not necessary. Will the person writing you be empowered to do anything? If history proves correct, they will absolutely not. But you get some response in one business day as your YouTube-based business may be collapsing all around you. The sad part is the way it used to be, they never responded at all.

The other MAJOR GIFT to the creative community is that instead of having 7 websites that didn’t work to answer your questions, the design geniuses that you think have something to do with the MEGLOcompany GOOGLE, will now streamline this labyrinth into ONE SINGLE PAGE of self serve FAQs!

You’re supposed to APPLAUD!

Do we even hear the sound of one hand clapping?

You know what this tells the COMMUNITY? It basically says, people are going to be coming to us and giving us stuff for free by the tens of thousands. You’re not special. You’re easily replaceable. If we cared about you as a human, we would give you humans to work with to make sure you succeed. We don’t. So applaud our pittance we give you or don’t — we don’t care — we have an LGBT video we’re going to tack on to the end of this show to act like we care about something — we just don’t really care about you. So you don’t even have to applaud really — what are you going to do about it? VIDCON 2016!!

Creation

Jesse Williams said it best about YouTube at the BET awards https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8IUTwaIWPBc] — they don’t hire creative people. I like to say it more harshly: I have never met a person at YouTube who is curious about the world — the type of person who’s the 9% who wanders off the path at a National Park which in turn makes for an interesting video — (plenty of bucket listers @youtube who stay on the trail and climb Kilimanjaro though).

Here’s how YouTube thinks creative work is nurtured.

At VidCon, I went to a packed, fire-marshall controlled presentation by a group called Frederator [http://frederator.com/] in which they explained how they reverse engineered YouTube’s algorithm. To put it simply, YouTube wants their creators on a treadmill, producing at least 3 solid minutes of video a week with absolutely no variation in what they do.

BEHOLD! How Youtube might decide what’s good COURTESY Frederator @ VIDCON

The Treadmill -

In order to merely stay alive on YouTube, you need to post regularly, often, and up to 3 minutes of videos that people watch all the way through to the end per week or you lose your status and your hard earned subscribers may stop seeing your videos. This means big media companies and gaming companies with long video game recaps are the only ones with enough scale to DUMPOLA all that time online with ease. The big media companies LOSE MONEY on this effort, video game shows are overly incentivized on Youtube, and the smaller creatives with all their diversity and experimentation that were the heart of YouTube and its future are TORTURED, DAMAGED, and ABUSED. (YouTube will get back to you now though, in one business day with a form letter.).

If you talk to veteran YouTubers, they will all refer to “the day the algorithm changed” like those who witnessed the bombing of Pearl Harbor. YouTuber country was never the same again.

Essentially YouTube used to incentivize number of views and an amount of interactivity in videos. When they changed the rules (without notifying anyone) to the amount of time watched, it sent certain YouTubers from getting 1M views per video to 50k overnight. Psychologically most YouTubers are more stimulated by views than money, especially those who joined YouTube before they were paid, so to have this happen overnight was so crushing mentally, many have what looks like Post Traumatic Stress from the event — this is not a funny joke. Then it kept getting worse because when you’re down that low, you fall faster and your own fanbase that took you years to build don’t even get to see your videos in their feeds anymore. At VidCon 2016, I witnessed veteran YouTubers with declined view counts getting mobbed by fans who wondered what had happened to them, while they were still posting regularly.

What could possibly be the motivation for this seemingly arbitrary 3 minute time goal? The reason is that YouTube still has the most minutes of video when compared to any other ad-based video service on the internet. So when going out to advertisers (yo — antitrust people: if you are alive at all in this country and not mixing it up in Washington; Google is a top ten lobbyist now up with Big Oil — https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/dec/18/google-political-donations-congress ; you may want to WAKE UP and PAY ATTENTION!), YouTube can uniquely claim ‘NO it’s not about number of views anymore, the most important metric is all about minutes watched’. (Based on what science?)

No one can even come close, bar the other ‘definitely not your friend’ platform Facebook, to the number of minutes watched that YouTube has. Think of all the videos per day on the New York Times website or even an entire broadcast network. Even if people were to watch ALL of those videos in one day, they don’t have the volume of content that YouTube does, yet traditional players need to pay to make almost all of those pieces up front and take a risk that an audience will even want to watch it. Traditional media companies often are able to sell these audiences at a higher rate, but that’s only if they can compete on an apples to apple metric. They will NEVER be able to compete on the basis of number of minutes watched — and therein lies why “the day the algorithm changed” shall live in infamy, not just for the YouTubers, but for all media companies and everyone in the entire video consuming world.

They punish you for experimentation

This type of thing flies in the face of what the legends of Silly-con Valley are supposed to be made of. If you risk, you get rewarded. Especially with consideration to online videos- Why not? Can’t we play a little? Try some new things. ABSOLUTELY NOT says YouTube.

It’s hard enough making a video people want to watch, none of these metrics help Ideation COURTESY Frederator @ VIDCON

If you try something new, either because you’re bored with your format, you’re trying to develop the next concept that got you to the top, even if YOUR AUDIENCE ASKS YOU FOR IT or because it’s the AMERICAN WAY — if you don’t keep doing the same thing that performs IMMEDIATELY, sometimes even on one or two videos, YouTube won’t show your new videos to your subscribers. This means that YouTubers are DEATHLY afraid of trying anything new, but also, they can’t get off the treadmill to their own peril.

Why would YouTube DO this? Well advertisers have complained that they don’t really know where their ads are playing on YouTube and whether or not the content is agreeable to their message. This has hurt YouTube’s ad rates for some time. In an attempt to make their offerings more consistent, without explaining this to anyone making the videos, they are punishing people who do not provide a consistent effort by making them fall to the bottom and disappear. They will also say that this is what the audience is demanding — and that could be true if they let subscribers see a few new concept videos over time before slamming their creators down. This gives people a little time to adjust so they can make a decision about the new concept. It’s also respectful of the creative process, and humane.

Creative Ambition

So after 6 years, why are all the fans at VidCon still the same age — generally teenagers? You would have thought that the teeny boppers I met in 2010 would have aged up with their favorite YouTube creators. That’s not so — as mentioned above, the older YouTubers are pushed out and not permitted to evolve based on the way YouTube’s algorithm works. So while the tweenie bopper fans get to leave their angsty years and go on to college, their YouTube creators are simply left with angst.

Despite many attempts to try to make YouTube a place where creative people can actually have a career , just like the homeless people that LA hospitals used to dump on skid row instead of treating them, YouTube dumps its best and brightest on the doorstep of the traditional media companies they intend to destroy.

Let’s dump them at Television’s Door.. — Wojcicki, Youtube CEO @ VIDCON

During Susan Wojcicki’s terrible keynote, she bragged about how some YouTubers ended up as guest stars on HBO or the CW — and there was a lot of attention paid to YouTube Red. YouTube Red is their attempt to try to create a subscription service based on a handful of shows they actually put money into creating. There are many problems with YouTube Red. Mostly, it does not recognize the medium that is YouTube as a thing in and of itself. It steals a Hulu/Netflix model and at best, takes its short form YouTube-native talent and tries to force them into making episodic shows these people have no experience making.

What happens with YouTube’s “check a box and we’re covered” approach to the creative process is lackluster shows that fail to take in the ambitions of the thousands of YouTube creators who are left without a future from the business they are well known for. By not caring for their creative talent and nurturing YouTube’s unique format as an actual final destination for professional creative people, they will continue to underline the point that they run a content plantation of unsustainable, parents paid for, glut of videos that leads pretty much everyone involved nowhere.

What to do about this?

Overall, we need to stop thinking of the internet as a permanent Burning Man. A place in which we are lucky to have the space to create, show off in front of a bunch of people at our own cost, while the organizers make all the money. That’s not only unsustainable for a world of people who need to be able to afford to eat, sleep, and go to the bathroom, it’s short sighted and discourages a generation of personal growth.

These platforms are not doing us a favor — without us they would be empty strip malls. We all, whether we are watching videos or making them, posting comments or reading them, are providing them with the reason that people use their platforms. We need to adjust what the definition of labor means to include all postings and work so that the best ideas we pour into these platforms have value.

We also need to humanize the way we monetize these platforms so that the value of a view is worth more when more work is put into a video, if it’s from an original source, or if there is intrinsic public value or interest in a work (aka objective journalism), than for a machine that copies someone else’s work or a video of someone farting. We should do away with arbitrary time metrics.

Everything we do online has a value. If we expand the definition of labor to include all the work that we do online, not only is it a humane approach to technology and building our future economy, it will also build, strengthen and grow the platform businesses. What are they so afraid of?

Yes, YouTube did decide to share the wealth with the poor plebes that were creating videos for them. But they’ve done it wrong. They have no loyalty towards these people and share none of the risks that these creatives take on in order to do this work. I’m not asking for every single YouTuber to be given money for their work, but those who have proven themselves to be talented deserve MUCH better treatment than they have been receiving or they won’t survive.

Anyone who’s ever worked in the creative industries understands that talent is not an infinite resource. To treat in an arbitrary fashion those who have honestly created signal amongst the online noise, despite the algorithms, is not only going to damage an entire generation’s most creative talents, it’s also terrible business practice.

There’s been talk of an internet creators guild, brought on by one of the founders of VidCon, Hank Green:

http://www.vlognation.com/internet-creators-guild/

I think this is a good first step — but it’s not enough. This is a moment to make a point that the work that people do for these platforms on the internet has value. This is a moment for people from organized labor to stop thinking of YouTubers as juvenile or a joke and begin to understand that these are future workers who do not own their means of distribution. Beyond organizing, we all have to work together to understand that without our talents, these places are empty and they need us more than we need them.

I welcome the discussion on how we can take back more than just our monetization that they arbitrarily take away — but also our dignity as the first generation of digital creatives.