Feed the Beast

YouTube Studio has a personality. (That’s the behind-the-scenes side of a YouTube channel.) It talks to you. Seriously. Oh, it's always friendly enough. Sometimes there’s a little animation of fireworks or confetti when you’re getting a lot of views! But when you’re not doing so well, it will let you know. 

It will make suggestions; maybe your thumbnail isn’t good? Maybe the topic isn’t interesting? Nothing too aggressive, just casually letting you know that your meagre 200,000 views is a failure compared to last month or the month before. 

On your dashboard, there's this big box which tells you how well your video is doing compared to your nine most recent videos. Oh you got 135,000 views in four days? That’s great! Except… not as good as your older videos. It’s a real shame that your work sucks so much. Consider doing something completely different as soon as possible to become less rubbish!

So while we don’t really have a boss, there is this constant reminder that we’re not doing very well and we need to hurry up with the next video! Get that content out fast to keep the graph line going up!

When I first started making “video essays” (if you could call them that) they were all about ten minutes long and thrown together in a week. I felt terrible guilt whenever I spent more than that on a video. But it became clear the quality was better when I took more time.

But the longer space between videos meant view counts had longer to go down and YouTube Studio would make a passive aggressive complaint.

And then Ada had the idea for the “The Gay Button” video. Could we do it in two weeks? Sure we could! No problem! Except of course, we couldn’t. Ada was getting deeper and deeper into academic theory about video games while I started developing screen sickness playing games 24/7. We were recording all the gameplay and there was so much editing to do… So we pushed it to three weeks. And maybe one more week…?

All the while the graph was reminding us that the channel was suffering from negligence.

When I was a teenager I worked as a cashier in a grocery store in America. Our manager was always ordering us to check out those groceries faster! The cash register would calculate how quickly each cashier checked out groceries and tell us our average down to the second. We were competing with ourselves and with each other, and no numbers were ever really good enough for the bosses. 

The transaction only officially ended when you gave the receipt to the customer. So even while the customer was paying, there was pressure to speed up the process. So naturally, the faster I got, the worse my customer service became. Customers started complaining to management that I was trying to get rid of them. So the bosses scolded me for it. They were scolding me for being too fast and also not fast enough.

That’s kinda how YouTube feels. We have to put out the next video quickly, but the quality needs to be better and better each time, because we are competing with our every success. The shadowy void of the internet needs feeding, it's hungry for content, always something new, faster and faster. YouTube Shorts? That’s the future. Sixty second video essays, that’s what the beast wants! 

I think YouTube Studio trained us for the grind. Regardless of the quality of the videos or their general success, there’s always the shadow of our tireless, passive aggressive manager YouTube Studio standing over our shoulder demanding we churn out the next video. To be fair, we couldn’t have become the video essayists we are today without the encouragement of these automated messages, guiding and advising us, or the analytics showing us what works for our audiences and what doesn’t. 

But someone once asked us in a Patreon livestream how we know when to slow down to avoid burnout and I said, “I don’t know.” And I think about that all the time. I genuinely don’t know. For all our years of experience, “self care” is not in YouTube Studio’s vocabulary, so it hasn’t really been in ours. 

All this to say, the new video is taking longer than usual, and I feel compelled to apologise for that. But the truth is, I think this video is going to be a banger! And the more time we spend on it, the better it will be, and the more we look after ourselves, the better job we can do. Truly, we’re so excited about it!

And maybe there will be longer stretches between videos in future, and that graph line will go down, down, down in the meantime. But if you stick around, I promise you it will be worthwhile. Thank you all so much for your support and your trust. We are so lucky to have this job and such wonderful supporters!

Okay, back to work!