9 votes

I feel like one of the biggest digital losses of the last five years was the rise and fall of independent news networks

There was a brief (an oh-so-brief) period in youtube history where all types of non-corporate content thrived. I'm referring, if memory serves, to the timespan from around 2011 - late 2014.

This was after youtube initially got big, but before Google decided that it wanted to step in and maintain the cultural status quo rather than redefine it. Ad revenue paid creators fairly-ish in most cases, and the talk of the town was machinima assfucking it's segment of poor souls that signed into it, rather than youtube pulling the same moves universally as it did a few years later.

(Suffice to say I have no love for the platform).

It's important to note that at this time, Youtube was a bit like a small-scale television enterprise, before it dreamed of deliberately becoming one. Youtube had everything from animations to product reviews, news to reality programming to VFX extravaganzas.

One of the most incredibly important innovations of the time, and one that's been all-but-lost, was the birth (and subsequent heat-death) of youtube news channels.

These channels mirrored cable news, but without the influence of corporate sponsors getting in the way, and without the ravenous need to appease political parties and harebrained cable tv viewers. They were biased - good god were some of them biased - and they weren't perfect, but they were set up in such a way that, had youtube not fucked it up (sigh...) they might've someday dethroned CNN, MSNBC and Fox.

With the next election coming up and shaping up to be a small-scale repeat of 2018s (you're kidding yourself if we're every going to go any other direction than further down at this point - after all, it works!) it's important to remember that there was, for a beautiful gleaming moment, a chance for not a corporation, but a community, to rise up and redefine the way people received news in a way that hadn't been seen since the conception of the newspaper.

Instead, youtube squandered it. Real events and engaging content don't generate views. People can't sit and watch hours of current events like they do for whatever-the-hell youtube trends nowadays (list videos and toy openings, I guess?), and why would they? If you get on youtube to watch today's news, you're not going to stick around for yesterday's. So youtube's 'algorythm', a word I've come to absolutely detest, doesn't favor them just like it doesn't favor basically anything else that once made youtube great.

The icing on the cake: rather than embrace even a tertiary aspect of the community, they went for the safe option and the ad revenue. No Phillip Defranco for you, we'll show you Jimmy Kimmel. No TYT, we'll fill trending with clips of CNN, MSNBC and Fox News. The only real survivor of the era was infowars.

Here's to you, youtube news. Dead and gone, but not forgotten.

2 comments

  1. nacho
    Link
    There was a "video-bubble" in a lot of areas during this time. News, sports, gaming, all sorts of hobbies, commentary/"thinking", books, guides, reviews, ,all sorts of things. A lot of companies...

    There was a "video-bubble" in a lot of areas during this time. News, sports, gaming, all sorts of hobbies, commentary/"thinking", books, guides, reviews, ,all sorts of things. A lot of companies took a shot at producing videos, then financing them through adviews.

    The money just wasn't there. Producing good videos with talent people actually care to watch is too expensive. The online video-advertisement industry has matured a lot since, so there might be new potential, but of course investors are weary because the last crash-and-burn series of investing in the area was so recently.

    The decline hasn't only been on youtube. It's been everywhere. Irrespective of some of the large tech platform's revenue-sharing plans, the disappearance has been everywhere. On self-run networks, on every platform you can imagine.


    The reason is that these shows had too high production value for the number of eyeballs they could get. That's why there's a second round of longform news broadcasting going on.

    I'm talking about podcasts.

    So far the sponsors and the ad buyers don't seem to be quite there yet, but the production costs are much more in line with future sustainability.

    8 votes
  2. cfabbro
    (edited )
    Link
    TBH, I think you're letting your "no love for the platform" taint your views quite a bit. Philly D still gets on average well over a million views per video and is regularly featured on trending....

    TBH, I think you're letting your "no love for the platform" taint your views quite a bit. Philly D still gets on average well over a million views per video and is regularly featured on trending. His latest video is sitting at #26 right at this very moment.

    Yes, the YouTube recommendation algorithm is hot garbage right now (and maybe always will be). But that's where social media, link aggregators (like Reddit/HN/Tildes, etc) and word of mouth comes in. I have been introduced to dozens of remarkably high quality and/or new-ish discussion/current event/news channels via Tildes, e.g. Paget Kagy's Not Your Asian Sidekick discussion series. Philosophy Tube. ContraPoints. The list goes on. Just because you have given up on the platform and aren't actively looking for new, exciting and/or groundbreaking channels in that sphere doesn't mean they don't exist anymore, aren't being created anymore or aren't getting pretty good views/money either. They still are, and the high quality ones are in-fact generally reaching far more people than they ever would have in the past. It's only in comparison to the mainstream mega-hits that currently reach tens-hundred of millions of views that they look small or "squandered" by comparison. But to expect those niche channels to get the same amount of views and so top the trending page is unreasonable IMO.

    And to be totally honest, I don't really miss the "old days" of YouTube as much as you seem to. There was a tremendous amount of pure bunk, hate speech and undeniably dangerous/detrimental material/trends being spread through it, so IMO having some standards and access to more "mainstream" media as a counterpoint isn't a bad thing at all.

    I don't necessarily agree with some of the current standards YouTube has adopted, e.g. demonetizing gun-related content (making it harder for channels like ForgottenWeapons/InRangeTV/Demolition Ranch/etc to survive) or any "gore" (so even surgery videos from excellent channels like Vet Ranch have taken a hit and were forced to change the content they produced). But at the same time, if that's what advertisers want to avoid associating their brands with, and the platform and creators rely entirely on advertising revenue to survive, what can YouTube really do about it? They can't force advertisers to advertise on channels they don't want to or on videos with content they do not want to be associated with. But thankfully while YouTube may not be able to do much except cave to advertiser demands, at least we as the consumers can do something thanks to sites like Patreon, so the channels who may not get the most views or cover topics that are generally considered not "advertiser friendly" can still produce content for the platform and make a living doing it.

    Now, with all that said, I definitely do think we as consumers and the content creators need alternatives to YouTube. However that is no easy task. The technical and monetary barrier to entry is absolutely astronomical and if that new platform relies on ads too, it will inevitably be forced to institute the exact same policies and demonetization processes as YouTube anyways... to maximize views and minimize controversy, etc. But even there, thankfully there are some major efforts being made towards achieving that though. IMO the more promising, non-mainstream ones are:

    https://joinpeertube.org/en/ (Federated, P2P, opensource, recently reached 1.0 stable release)
    https://www.bitchute.com/ (Centralized, P2P, proprietary)
    https://www.full30.com/ (Centralized, proprietary, ad-supported, but only for firearms related content)
    https://www.floatplane.com (Centralized, proprietary, Ad-free, Patreon/Video host combo currently in Open Alpha)

    2 votes