{"id":40542,"date":"2024-07-07T11:47:44","date_gmt":"2024-07-07T16:47:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/?p=40542"},"modified":"2024-07-07T11:47:44","modified_gmt":"2024-07-07T16:47:44","slug":"eating-your-production-team-with-bad-olive-oil","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/2024\/07\/07\/eating-your-production-team-with-bad-olive-oil\/","title":{"rendered":"Eating Your Production Team With Bad Olive Oil"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Glen of Glen and Friends Cooking<\/strong><\/em> claims he’s been running his channel on YouTube<\/strong><\/em> for 17 years, which I suppose makes him an institutional memory. Recently, content creators[1]<\/a><\/sup> on YouTube<\/em><\/strong> have been required, or at least strongly encouraged, to produce “shorts,” which should be self-explanatory.<\/p>\n

As you’ll see below, this is unprofitable for Glen, which he protests, and while he’s not dropping out, it’s interesting that he’s seen this sort of thing before. For me, it speaks to the diverging aims of the publisher, YouTube<\/strong><\/em>, and the content creators of the publisher. YouTube<\/strong><\/em> is doubtless driven by investor demands and the like, while the creators are driven by their own financial needs. Don’t gloss it over; the presence of financial terminology in both is at odds, rather than dovetailing, since the pie, while not a zero-sum pie, doesn’t expand easily. I might suppose the cost of making a video is proportional to the ln(video length), which would make short videos potentially unprofitable.<\/p>\n

And so I wonder if YouTube<\/strong><\/em> is eating its own geese for breakfast. True, geese grow old and unproductive of eggs, but this isn’t a biological situation in which such a process is automatic and self-evident; such creators as Glen may have years of attracting and keeping audiences for YouTube<\/strong><\/em> to harvest still in them. Trying to squeeze yet more immediate profit by forcing, more or less, a format unsatisfying for both creators and their audience<\/strong> may result in a future failure, or at least downturn.<\/p>\n

As Glen says he’s seen this sort of thing before, I wonder if YouTube<\/strong><\/em> has a new VP of content creation or somesuch, tasked with increasing revenues.<\/p>\n

Here’s Glen:<\/p>\n