How To Turn Your Audience Against You - The Woes of Watcher | TRO

How To Turn Your Audience Against You - The Woes of Watcher | TRO

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Introduction - 0:00
The Dynamic Duo - 8:12
Leaving Buzzfeed - 13:11
Create Stuff - 18:37
Watcher World - 24:35
2024 - 30:24
Why Not? - 35:43
Everyone Disliked That - 43:53
The Backtrack - 50:12
Business Strategy - 57:17
The Third Man - 1:03:33
Inspiration - 1:10:16
Just Business - 1:16:28
Unsolved - 1:23:28

Success on YouTube, it’s never meant to last forever.

YouTube is an inherently unpredictable platform, whose model makes it very hard for creators to necessarily predict their success. With the rise of “YouTuber” as a cultural phenomenon, there are more and more people who say they know how it all works from the inside, and that if you just listen to them you’ll have a million swooning subscribers in no time at all. This then beckons the question: if the formula to success is so identifiable, why do so many channels that seemed designed to exploit those formulae eventually fail?

For every TikTok from a virality coach revealing the secrets to blowing up on social media, very few will tell you what happens after: whether it takes minutes, or decades even, people lose interest. We are always evolving, or devolving as humans, and the content that you or I watched five years ago will often hardly resemble the content that is watched today. Although possible, a very miniscule amount of channels can consistently reap the benefits of an evolving landscape. When you establish an audience with a certain brand of content, the algorithm is always going to be associating you with that, and deviation from that route can often backfire.

To YouTube it just seems simpler to promote channels that are creating new content that might reach a new audience. It doesn’t matter who did it first, it’s about who can create the most views for YouTube right now. There are exceptions in genres where loyalty is more rewarding to the human brain, however, many genres do not even have the benefit of that, they are always needing to find new ways to keep an audience entertained, and in a world where media is becoming increasingly frantic yet disposable to many audiences this quandary only becomes more and more pertinent to those trying to maintain internet relevance, especially when the content they’re creating is already at the point of market saturation.

The “mystery” genre on YouTube is probably one of the most relevant examples of this… people have always been interested in strange occurrences and seemingly supernatural events that simply can’t be explained away by the lay person, with many TV shows and even channels being set up around this premise, but its inroads to YouTube were a bit more gradual than other genres, I think at least partly because it required an atmosphere that felt too high production for much of the early era of YouTube which instead mostly veered towards crude alternatives like creepypastas. However, in the last decade, as YouTube has embraced its role as the alternative to television, many creators have filled that gap, with one network in particular seeming to make the most of the pivot towards higher budget higher production content.

Sometimes I feel that Buzzfeed receives more mentions than it should on this channel, but make no mistake, their impact on YouTube as a whole should not be understated. In the early 2010s, while YouTube was making that transition to supporting more professional content, Buzzfeed effectively backed and oversaw multiple successful series which struck the balance between glossy well-produced content, and a compelling personality-driven approach to said content that simultaneously set it apart from many TV shows, and YouTube channels alike. At the heart of this campaign was one of their most successful projects: a mystery channel by the name of Buzzfeed Unsolved.