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The Dark side of #YouTube A Thread:
I love you all and love the community we have built but I've fallen into the trap lately I think a lot of YouTube creators fall into but don't talk about...basing your self-worth and happiness on the success or failure of each video.
I love you all and love the community we have built but I've fallen into the trap lately I think a lot of YouTube creators fall into but don't talk about...basing your self-worth and happiness on the success or failure of each video.
It's so easy to let the analytics get in your head. The way YouTube analytics work it almost punishes you for a video not doing as well as the last one. It does this with red numbers, percentages, ranking your video against the last ten, and so forth.
Even if you don't mean to it's very easy to get sucked into the numbers and doing everything you can to get your latest video up to #1. God forbid a video drops down into the 7, 8, or 9 out of the last 10 or the worst...10 out of the last 10.
It becomes a struggle to make sure the video you are working on beats and does better than the last one and when it doesn't you feel like you failed. You start rethinking everything. Do I need to change my thumbnails? Maybe my titles suck. What am I doing wrong? Maybe it's me?
You add that in with a handful of toxic people in the comments or on other platforms like Reddit telling you "so and so is better your videos suck" and "I'm unsubscribing your channel sucks" and you can really feel like a failure.
You start to get desperate and start looking everywhere for ways to just do better. Tutorials on thumbnails, courses on increasing your reach, and understanding the analytics. You start questioning everything again and at that point, even a good video doesn't seem enough.
It never ends. Nothing ever feels like enough because you can randomly get a really good video and you get on this high feeling like "yes I did it! I cracked it!" Just to have your next video tank or not do as well. I've been struggling a lot with this lately.
It's made doing the whole YouTube thing not as fun as it should be. You cannot base happiness on something so trivial and unpredictable. I didn't set out to be that way but you really just get sucked in without realizing it.
It becomes a problem when you are checking your view count on the latest video like an addict. Multiple times an hour, not just a day. refreshing to see just how good or bad the video is doing. Watching the sub count minute by minute. It's dangerous, unhealthy, and sad.
It steals your time, your happiness, removes you from enjoying life for what you have already not what you don't have, takes away time from family, and just all around sucks. I say all of this to say thank you to everyone. I love you all, I love VR, and I love creating content.
I want to move forward doing what I've always done but focusing more on the community, the real people not the analytics, and enjoying VR. Much love everyone and thank you all for the awesome support. I know a lot of people must struggle with this and you are not the only one.
