JUST SAY IT: The Real Reason People Are Abandoning YouTube 

You can really unpack this whole conversation into a college course on what it's like running a business and RU-vid channel. So there are a ton of other reasons too that factor into this. Things like having money saved up, or having a hard time managing the stress if you are purely a personal brand, which leads into the topic of making things harder to delegate. However, I do think this is a primary factor, especially for channels that have so much going on. If you dig deep into it, you can probably find some areas people need to delegate. Anyways, have a good weekend guys!

This could totally be a college course! Great job, Siddy! ❤

You are such a good communicator, you got your self a new forever fan!❤️

7:03 On the concept of figuring out some sort of way to figure out the content/business workflow, I think probably the best example reference would be similar to how a studio production company would run. You have lists of different departments & delegations on both the set & the office side of the projects, but in RU-vid's case, the team might be smaller & posting videos is the distribution equivalent. Content creators staying on the platform seem to be comparable to some producer-actors who bring on a production team to include directors & other producers in order to stay in the spotlight

I actually don't think this is it. I think the true underlying reason big channels are quitting is because they are experiencing diminishing returns for their effort because of the saturation due to the rise and popularity of RU-vid creator economy. I mean it's one thing to experience this personally and then brush yourself off and get back up again (if you're a one man band) but it's another thing when you have a team (more mouths to feed) and everyone on your team gets paid except yourself during slow months. In one sense you're right about the CEO part but the only person that has been honest in alluding to this is Caleb Pike on his reasoning for changing direction. The only creative control that gets surrendered is perhaps to Sponsored videos but in an industry of strong personality types the CEO calls the shots. Just my two cents FWIW; likely not much 😉

Love this breakdown!!

This was an incredibly good insight. Most creative people want to create, because it's fun. The reality is more successful you become, the more time you spend on business stuff, the less on the fun creative stuff. This is rarely considered though. I speak from experience, having built a 30-person creative studio from scratch. I much prefer working solo, or with one or two people when larger projects come my way. Photographers and filmmakers need to know WHY they have a RU-vid channel. For fun, or to build a business? Do you want to create because you love creating, or you want to earn lots of money? Pursuing a creative path for money is a huge mistake, but that's an entirely different conversation...

I didn't sign up to be a CEO, I signed up to be a creator. However, once you reach a certain point on RU-vid, you need help. I wish that RU-vid provided a video introduction outlining what to expect and providing guidelines once you sign up to be a content creator.

I thought MKB was, as always, lucid and articulate about his own take on the not-so-quiet-quitting of so many big youtubers. Of course, I think he's being politically 'savvy' in not rocking his own boat by criticising platforms like RU-vid for neglecting their creators' mental health. It has to be said, that there is much more RU-vid could do if they chose to. And that extends to creator education and support on things like business development, mentoring, networking with similar sized creators, etc... the creator is left on their own to figure it all out, and it needn't be this way. But of course, it is what it is... even if it could, and IMHO it should, be different. I'd just like to offer an add to your take on creators being business owners first. The predominant mindset and mental models, if you think about it, frame the idea of "a business" as a traditional hierarchical pyramid structure, with the owner at the top. This is one model, but not the only one. There are partnership models where all employees own a share of the business. There are social enterprises that are not run purely for profit, but for societal good for the communities a business is a part of. In the tech world, you have open source software development that is unlike any traditional business structure. And you have concepts like "agile" development, that have created so-called 'flat' organisational structures... These flat structures offer a different model that I suspect creators could adopt, and which is different from old traditional ways of doing things. In agile environments, emphasis is put on speed and fluidity. Leadership could come from anyone in a project team, not just the leader. Often leaders of such teams are introverts, because they're better listeners and more open-minded than traditional (ie CEO-type) leaders that have to call all the shots and know "the right thing to do" - instead, they work in collaborative ways and value progress in the project rather than compliance with orders. You see where I'm going with this... It seems to me that letting go of some control is exactly what some creators might WANT TO DO... collaboration entails a sharing of the creative work and even leadership. So your "control" framing of the problem is not the only way to see it. But it would require trust, and choosing carefully the people who you want to co-create with. And probably it would mean sharing more of the rewards: a CEO-type model means the boss takes the lion's share of the reward, and everyone else is 'working' for the boss. This is a valid model, and well tried and tested. But there are other models and ways of doing business. I'd suggest to anyone interested, Bo Burlingham's book called "Small Giants" is a great source of inspiration, and a bit of Googling on things like "agile development principles" and "Adam Grant on introvert leaders" for example...

Amazing video. Subbed!

hi

Ayyyyy! I'm from Muskegon! Awesome to see some so close doing great work! 🎉