The skewed perception of YouTube

During my ongoing literature review I often discover interesting facts about things I’ve never thought about. Sometimes I can connect these facts with my own observations: The result is mostly a completely new idea why things are as they are. Maybe these ideas are new to you, too. Therefore I’ll share my new science based knowledge with you!

This week: This time, I think about the issues that are created by the assumption that the YouTube subscriber count is a measurement for quality.

Amongst other things, YouTube is famous for the huge variety of different content creators who publish videos related to computer games. The majority of those YouTubers create so-called Let’s Play videos that feature their gameplay which is enhanced with their commentary.

One of the most common ways to measure the impact factor of the content creators is to take a look at their subscriber count. Large YouTubers have more than 1 million, medium sized YouTube channels more than 100.000 and small content creators less than 100.000 subscribers. Although those large YouTubers reach a high amount of viewers with their videos, they are just a small amount of the total content creators on YouTube. The bulk of the videos that are created and uploaded to YouTube comes from the smaller channels.

Unfortunately, this method of categorizing YouTube channels led to the conclusion that the subscriber count is a measurement for quality and that only large and medium YouTube channels feature entertaining and good content. This, however, neglects three main factors that played a crucial role in reaching those high numbers. Most of those bigger YouTubers have started during the early days of Let’s Plays. At this point, the market was not saturated and it was much easier to gain the attention of viewers who subsequently formed the initial basis for a medium or large YouTube channel. Today, the market is saturated as many other content creators have begun to release their own videos and thus it is really hard to gain the attention of new viewers.

In addition, YouTube’s search function increases this effect as it ranks the search results by the amount of views and likes. In other words, YouTubers who already had a good initial basis of frequent viewers had a huge advantage over YouTubers who started during the last years as their videos are always shown on top of the search results.

The third factor is based on the skewed perception that only those larger YouTubers create good content and, as a result of this, game developers and other relevant players started decorate themselves with the content of large YouTubers. For instance, it is much more likely that a medium sized YouTuber gets a retweet on Twitter than a small content creator with only a few subscribers. This behavior creates an additional brickwall for smaller channels as getting announced by other relevant players is currently one of the best ways to gain new viewers.

This behavior can be even seen as a huge marketing mistake as smaller content creators can create content that is superior to the content of larger YouTube channels. In the end, game developers miss an ideal opportunity to advertize their products as they do not recognize the value of smaller channels. Furthermore, announcing the content of smaller channels would also help those smaller channels to grow and subsequently to reach even more users. This, in return, would help the game developers as more people would then be aware of their products.

In general, just taking a look at the subscriber count is a huge mistake these days as the whole YouTube market has changed within the last few years and huge subscriber counts are no longer (and never were) a measurement for quality. In addition, larger channels only remain large as the majority of the viewers does not recognize that there are more interesting alternatives available due to the flawed system. YouTube, game developers and other relevant players need to become aware of the opportunity that leveraging smaller channels can result in a higher return of investment than continuing with the current system of favoring larger channels only.