Reasons YouTubers keep imploding, from a YouTuber

'outrage crowd'. Huh. right now, the big blowup is over some guy ('jontron') spouting racist BS. This is bad enough in front of an adult audience, but in fact he is performing this for children. Shouldn't we be mad? For PewDiePie recently, the same story: He is an adult (who should know better) performing antisemitic jokes for children, who might not follow the joke were it funny. When they don't follow it, when it's not funny -- it wasn't -- it boils down to a respected figure repeating anti-semitic talking points to an adoring audience of 14 year olds. Did he mean poorly? Maybe, maybe not. If he didn't mean poorly and it was all environmental factors, "He's just trying to make a living and YouTube culture doesn't give him time to test jokes", are we supposed to apologize for him and move on? I say he took on a responsibility and failed it, so we should be angry.

If he wants to perform for children he needs to respect the fact that his words have exaggerated consequences because he's dumping them into impressionable, insecure minds. Don't reduce me to some 'outrage crowd' and write me off when I'm concerned that a children's performer is feeding them rape & jew 'jokes'.

You were not alone in this. I read about him some weeks or months ago because of some newspaper that features a 'scandal' about him. IIRC something about Disney dropping him from their network (did not know they had a youtube network, and I'm not entirely sure if I remember that correctly).

One factor that is rarely mentioned in this conversation is that Drama helps Youtubers - a lot. Videos about 'Youtube in crisis' gets a whole lot of views, much more than the usual standard-fare videos. This doesn't only apply to the YouTuber being targeted.

For example, assume there is some controversy over some gamer on YouTube. YouTube Channels dedicated to talking about Internet culture, like h3h3productions or PhillipDeFranco, take the opportunity to make a video titled "YouTube is Dying" with a lot of question marks in the thumbnail. They do this because videos about meta-controversies get more views than specific things. So the video gets more views, and other YouTube channels talk about the 'controversy' in order to get views themselves. Then the gamer may make a video titled "Response to YouTube controversy" which gets way more views than his average video, because it's a meta topic that everyone's talking about. And the cycle continues.

TL;DR: Controversies help content creators get more views.

I imagine this mostly relates to the super mainstream channels that pump out content of the same quality as the random TV shows of years past. If you follow the niche channels (that are IMO more fulfilling) like mikeselectricstuff or flightchops or whoever, they operate under different rules. Their audience will seek their postings because they want the specific content.

I've been watching Youtube vids for a long time (well relatively, like 10+ years) and it's one of my primary forms of entertainment.

It has been very interesting to see youtubers come and go, a lot of them seem to burn out on the schedule of trying to produce content regularly, which I can understand, anyone who's edited videos would realise the time it can take to produce something of good quality.

Pewdiepie is an interesting case as he's far and away the biggest "real" channel on youtube (i.e. not VEVO or one of the generic youtube channels).

https://vidstatsx.com/PewDiePie/youtube-channel gives you an idea of the size, he regularly gets 5-10 million views a day!

The controversy seems very click-baity to me, I read the articles and watched his response videos. It seemed to me that he made some pretty bad taste comments (if you've seen much of his content that shouldn't be a surprise) and the WSJ deliberately sliced it up to take it out of context and produce the most sensationalised headline possible.

All reminded me of the quote generally attribued to cardinal Richelieu.

"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him."