31–40 of 187 posts
I would say youtube peaked around 2012. Been downhill of a cliff ever since.
2012 is around when they rolled out personalization of your feed, which drastically increased hours spent on YouTube. So the data shows it was on an upward trajectory since then.
There is still some quality content on youtube, but the ads I get are awful and repetitive... It's probably my own fault though as I turn personalisation off (so likely no frequency capping) And there's something tragic about people making content in their homes and reading out a marketing script about some crap for a minute.
why are you not using ublock & sponsorblock? Ads are a choice you know?
Just a few years ago, you could search for anything, even current-political, and find a bunch of videos from a bunch of people, from "best trump insults" to "why xyz is bad?" .... but now, all the top search results about anything remotely current (be it politics, covid, russia/ukraine, crime, heatwaves,...), all you get is mainstream media (cnn, msnbc,....). If I wanted to watch CNN, I'd watch CNN, not youtube.
Add to this all the blatant demonetization of anything remotely non-politically-correct, discussing anything current, or even using a bad word.
For me, youtube has become in 90% just one more "cable tv" channel... mainstream media, and a few large media houses pushing their shitty videos. There are only a few channels left that I actually enjoy, and even those are producing less and less content every year.
Add in the algorithm preferring new content and channels that publish new videos frequently (weekly or more), making it essentially a full time job staying relevant.
Youtube money is not enough to pay for living in high cost of living countries any more. Almost every popular channel I follow is mostly funded by Patreon etc these days.
The people who made a living on YouTube started in the early 2010s or so. And I have understood that most of them aren't primarily funded by tube moneys any more.
There is some interesting stuff coming from low cost of living countries like India, Bangladesh and in particular Vietnam. Not enough to offset the loss of creators from western countries.
I have not seen a new and interesting channel by anyone living in America or Europe in many years.
When I was 17 I started learning for about 8 months but then stopped due to various reasons. I'm 35 now and picking it back up again and the most mind blowing aspect of it is how much content there is on YouTube to help learner drivers, compared to back then!
There are loads of creators (usually driving instructors) creating really good instructional videos with helpful visuals for everything you could think of for driving in the UK and how to pass the high bar of the UK practical test.
It's been an invaluable resource and new content seems to come out everyday exploring different topics. Yes some of the channels are sponsored, usually by car insurance companies, but it's not intrusive
Yes it has. It seems like the downturn was a few years ago when they made their monetization system pay less to the content creators and introduced a high barrier to entry for monetization (1k subscribers). Add in the algorithm preferring new content and channels that publish new videos frequently (weekly or more), making it essentially a full time job staying relevant. Youtube money is not enough to pay for living i…
I wouldn't use the word "peaked". It may be hard to discover useful content; but if you know the channels that you are interested in, then youtube is fantastic compared to the alternatives (vimeo, odysee, rumble, peertube).
> I searched for a software tutorial on Youtube and 90% of results are talking heads. What else did you want on a video site? You just think they should not include their faces in the videos?
Yes? Heads add no value to a technical video, they function as a distraction at best.
Body language. Expression.