Slave to the ‘rithm: HOw algorithmic curation drives youtubers to extremes
Written by Jess Sweetman
When Youtube announced its partner programme for creators in 2007, the company was seeking a way to both monetise itself and differentiate itself from competitors by offering viewers home-grown, high-quality original content. In doing so, the company recognised the creators who had taken a video hosting site and made it, through experimentation, creativity, skill, and luck, into a viable alternative to broadcast TV. Thus the professional Youtuber was born, and today content creators from 137 countries who have the requisite followers and views can earn 55% of the ad revenue from their videos, as well as being open to in-person events, training, and merchandise sales opportunities from their channels.
18 years later, while a handful of unlikely stars have become multi-millionaires, mostly Youtube has created a workforce of self-employed creatives hedging a bet on a living. The first generation of Youtubers has grown up before our eyes, and while some have left Youtube in a hail of tough love criticisms, some have grown into fully fledged production empires, and others have collapsed into obscurity - one issue remains constant - it’s really really REALLY hard to keep creating content in order to please an algorithm.
Youtube is no stranger to criticism - the curation algorithm has been shown to encourage extremist beliefs via its suggestion feed, as well as a spate of showing terrifying content to children. Not to mention being criticised for demonetising LGBTQIA+ content, or allowing certain creators to get away with being horrible human beings online while sidelining smaller creators.
Bearing in mind that the headlines about Youtube that make it outside the platform skews critical, there are positives galore that emerge from Youtube: It has promoted learning, given artists, creators, and obsessives a voice free from the critical eye of society's gatekeepers, brought new stars into the world, and granted voices to the previously voiceless. But, as Youtube turns 20, it’s becoming increasingly clear that algorithmic curation and monetisation means that creators on the platform are being pushed to greater and greater extremes in pursuit of the almighty click and the associated paycheque.
The creepy world of family vloggers…
Just as Mommy bloggers rebuilt the internet, family vlogs were a staple of many people’s lives in the 2010s. Kids grew famous (and sometimes rich) while unboxing toys, or playing games in front of their parents’ eager video cameras - and then the world.
But as a generation of child vloggers age out, stories are emerging of kids facing horrific overwork, manipulation, and abuse in the name of Youtube fame. The recent documentary BAD INFLUENCE: THE DARK SIDE OF KIDFLUENCERS, explores child influencer Piper Rockell and her “squad”, all tweens, allegedly forced to work frequently all day until two or three o’clock in the morning, seven days a week, while being subjected to sexually inappropriate words and action Rockell’s Momager. The documentary makes it clear that the ad revenue and brand deals emerging from The Squad led to Rockell’s family pushing children to work around the clock to keep making videos - and therefore money.
See also the documentary “AN UPDATE ON OUR FAMILY”, which explores the scandal of the Stauffer family who adopted a son from China, only to be forced to admit later on that the adoption had been dissolved. The family’s matriarch, Myka Stauffer had been blogging about parenthood since before she met and married her husband and was very popular, but videos about the upcoming adoption caught the algorithmic eye and became huge. After attempting to phase their adopted son Huxley out of their videos without mentioning what had happened, eventually the Stouffers had to address the issue with their fans - the little boy had greater needs than they could provide for and he had been moved to another family. It didn’t go very well. The story hit the worldwide news, prompting questions about how far family bloggers would be willing to push their kids in order to maintain their audiences, promotional opportunities and ad revenue. Meanwhile the Stouffers deleted their account and protested that they hadn’t adopted a child as a stunt. Whether or not they had meant harm in this case, the harm had been done to a traumatised child with complex needs.
Stories like these are always going to garner attention, and I’m sure that there are kids making Youtube videos who are cared for and loved. They do, however, illustrate the blurry moral boundaries around putting your children online, made worse when earning money enters the picture, and how the most vulnerable in our society can be abused in the name of wealth.
Smashing up your friends for online engagement is a thing
Collab-houses have been a thing for as long as Youtube has existed: a mansion full of young influencers where they create content around the clock. One of the most famous examples of this was the Vlog Squad house, led by Vine-star turned Youtuber David Dobrik.
Dobrik emerged from the prank and stunt-driven side of Vine and later Youtube and was among the first to join the Partner Programme due to his immense popularity on the site.
But in 2021 a member of the Vlog Squad was accused of sexual assault, while Dobrik was also accused of instigating “cult-like” dynamics in the house, pushing members to do more and more intense “pranks” for video views.
Eventually - during a prank involving an excavator that Dobrik was driving with squad member Jeff Wittek attached to the arm, Wittek was slammed into the vehicle and fractured his skull in 9 places, nearly losing an eye. Four years later, Wittek released a documentary series on his channel exploring how the accident had left him struggling through multiple surgeries to save his eye, as well as the mental scars he was dealing with. It seemed clear that the relentless search for extreme stunts had led to danger.
Dobrik disappeared from Youtube for a while, but recently returned with the announcement of his having become body-builder buff while giving away Teslas. So I guess the Youtuber to alt-right pipeline is still working a treat.
A rather snarky cottage industry
Tea accounts are all over Youtube, there’s a cottage industry of Youtubers talking about Youtubers, dishing the latest feuds and gossip. And no one seems to be spared. In researching this piece I looked up Ryan’s World, the 6-year-old toy influencer who had become the most watched channel in 2016, with the empire of brand deals and money that came alongside this. While searching Google’s AI, I was informed that the FBI had opened a case file on the family in 2019 for mistreating their children and withholding money - none of this is true, this came from a Youtube Tea account.
Apparently Youtube doesn’t mind an industry spreading salacious gossip about its creators, or “the Tea-Industrial complex” as tech journalist Taylor Lorenz calls it. Once a Youtuber reaches celebrity status, it seems inevitable that the gossip mill will piggyback from that. Top Youtubers deliberately create beef with other top Youtubers in the name of the mighty click, and it has been shown to contribute to people quitting the site and walking away, and sounds like the opposite of a healthy work environment.
And then there’s the burnout situation
Ash Blodgett is a filmmaker who has built two very different successful Youtube channels in her time. One creating original comedy skits, and the other producing how-to videos for filmmakers. She speaks candidly about the pressures of the algorithm:
“If you’re not constantly posting content on the same day at the same time every week, you basically don’t have much of a chance of getting picked up by (the algorithm). Thus, you feel the need to churn out videos weekly that might not always be your best work or might not be something you’re passionate about.”
Somewhere around 2019, Youtuber burnout started to hit the national news. Popular creators, often those who had survived the transition from unpaid to paid videos, seemed to be walking away in droves from the platform that had made them.
Just a few weeks ago, creator of “The Outdoor Boys” Lyke Nichols quit his 14.9m subscribed Youtube channel, citing that success and fame had become overwhelming, not to mention a slew of privacy issues that had arisen for his family as a result of his channel’s success.
Watching those final videos, the format is recognisable as to have become cliche: a beloved figure earnestly, exasperatedly explaining that the thing they once did for fun became a full time job and then some, dragging their time away from family and hobbies, kicking their mental health to the ground, and jumping up and down on it until it was well and truly dead. In response to Youtuber burnout, Youtube issued guidelines about taking downtime with links to mental health support. Critics argue that it’s not enough and that the creators who made the channel what it is deserve more support.
The blah culinary universe
So far we’ve looked at how a quest for views has led to extreme behaviour within videos, creator burnout in making videos, and fuelling a cottage industry of hate aimed at those who are successful at the game. But what of the quality of actual content making it to Youtube. How does chasing the mighty algorithm lead creators to adapt their work itself.
Cory Doctorow’s theory of “Enshittification” looks at how internet companies take a nosedive in their offerings once they have secured money and locked in users. This theory can definitely be applied to Youtube’s relationship with its creators. Now they are locked in to producing regular-as-clockwork videos to make a living, the company owes them nothing, and can adjust their algorithm to follow overall trends in the industry, destroying livelihoods (and original work) in its wake.
The most recent one is the swathe of social media companies switching from users seeing content from their friends and the other accounts that they have chosen to follow, in favour of a “for you” curated page, based off interest. The CEO of Patreon, Jack Conte, has been calling out social media platforms for this behaviour. In Conte’s view - this is taking away one of the greatest assets that content creators can have. With no loyal audience, they have fewer ways of monetising their work through brand deals, merchandise revenue, or subscriber services. What’s more - with the lure of clicks from an audience who aren’t loyal to a particular creator, each creator is pushed to, potentially, move away from the reason they may have started their channel in the first place, in order to follow the latest trend in content.
One somewhat benign example comes from cooking videos, and complaints from viewers about “The Babish Effect”, named after “The Babish Culinary Universe” (10.5m subscribers), which brought a clean visual style and detached, dryly humorous narration to cooking videos, that seemed to be enjoyed by the algorithm. The popularity of the style was then seen to push out any other styles of output. Thus content became samey and uninteresting to its viewers.
Similarly, complaints abound about the “Mr Beast effect” seemingly pushing content creators to directly follow the algorithm-whispering video style of Youtube’s most popular creator. Channels that were once focussed on tech, food, or comedy are churning out taste tests for candy bars, seemingly dancing for those clicks.
Or as Ash puts it: “The system is set up for quick garbage content, not content that was heavily produced and polished.” She continues: “When I started making YouTube videos, web series were all the rage. You could find good narrative scripted content and channels like Rocket Jump and Geek & Sundry were making a killing making them. But the algorithm shifted, and then vlogs became king. YouTube is now not a place for that and I think that’s really sad because besides Vimeo, there’s not really a good place for storytelling on the internet anymore.”
So is there hope?
While Blodgett hasn’t been making Youtube videos lately, she admits that it doesn’t mean she might not come back. The filmmaker has, instead, however, been focussing on the short film world. When I ask her how she would change Youtube for the better she says:
“I think I would do away with the algorithm or just find a way to make organic content that a viewer actually might like more accessible. For example, on Netflix you can search by categories such as comedy, movie, tv show, drama, and true crime. Why not make that an option on YouTube? …Just because I clicked on one cat video doesn’t mean I want to only watch cat videos from now on.”
And while it’s fun to speculate on new platforms being built by independent companies which can circumvent the algorithm - such as those created by Youtube superstars The Try Guys, while tech monopolies exist, competition will be bought or forced out of the market.
Cory Doctorow reminds us not to give up, consumers still have some power against the “enshittifiers” and provides some bigger picture answers, including fighting to restore antitrust legislation, and overturning laws preventing reverse-engineering copyrighted apps, so that users might be able to use other tech that can help them circumvent elements of apps that they don’t agree with.
And of course, there’s always unionisation. Youtubers banding together could give more options to bargain for their rights against the company whose algorithmic system is pushing them to greater and greater extremes. These options are all large and slow, but that’s where we are in the tech world right now. But slow change would be better than nothing, and perhaps then we can reach a place where creators can make and share their work for a living online without having to resort to extremes.
