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The oldest video of Matt Kovalakides' channel appeared on YouTube 12 years ago, while he was a more traditional filmmaker in Hollywood, dipping his feet in the platform. He loved freedom and direct access to his audience. His friends thought he was crazy.
Like his other shorts, this video – a vignette of the quality of a potato about a man working in a laundry – the eve of September 11 – sparked favorable views and comments, but the work that was He uploaded to YouTube never gave it a resounding success. Kovalakides, better known by a more sympathetic researcher, Matt Koval, took a break from his channel. Upon his return, he understood that he should try to stand in front of the camera. He hated this idea. He did it anyway.
YouTube was not yet known to be a place to make money, but his sketches made it popular enough to attract branded deals. Yet the money was incompatible. YouTube was an eccentric way to make a name for yourself. He was already older than most creators of the platform. His creative work did not offer the kind of financial stability he could rely on. Once his wife became pregnant, it was time for him to look for what he considered "a big job with social benefits".
It turned out that the answer was still YouTube. He played a role as a content strategist. But Kovalakides is not the first YouTuber to become a business. Many employees manage their own channels. "We realized that creators did not want to learn about YouTube employees most of the time," says Kovalakides. "They do not want to learn from their parents or their high school teachers. They want to learn from other creators who participate. "
YouTubers are today a cornerstone of pop culture. They are better paid and more visible than ever. Some bridge the gap between Hollywood and online fame, while others build empires under their own name. As the culture of creators becomes a more viable path, burnout issues give way to the issue of overall sustainability. Is it a full-time career or a stepping stone to something else? "I want designers and young people to understand what they are doing and whether it will last a career or a job for five years," says Kovalakides.
YouTubers collectively downloads over 450 hours of content per minute. Audiences have an ocean of seemingly endless content to choose from, and their permanent audience will falter. "People grow up and their tastes change," Kovalakides says, likening them to groups you might have liked in adolescence. "It's a challenge that I want the creators to understand and know realistically, that the tastes of their audiences will change and theirs too."
To survive as a creator in 2019, you must be fast. Top creators such as Lilly Singh have mentioned the growing disconnect of the YouTube culture as one of the reasons for their departure. Others, like Shane Dawson, quickly swung to go up and even set the trends. In 2018, Dawson used its platform to reach new heights through a series of documentary videos about creators such as Tana Mongeau, Jeffree Star and Jake Paul. He is currently working on another series with Star, with whom he recently launched a makeup palette. "It's amazing how he reinvents himself," says Kovalakides. The two men started on the platform at about the same time, but their paths branched out. Kovalakides returns to the music as a metaphor once more. "The best professional musicians really find a way to reinvent themselves and stay relevant. Shane did that.
Kovalakides' transition to the YouTube business world has allowed him to better understand the challenges that creators face. The turnover is a constantly changing target, unlike the reliable salary of a YouTube employee. Going online every day online can be an exhausting emotional journey. "I'm trying to convey the experience of this to YouTube, to the company, as much as I can," he says. The company can play a contradictory role to its creators, who feel more than anyone the impact of platform changes. "I'm trying to make people understand that [changes to YouTube] This could have an impact on people's careers, lives and jobs, because these businesses are at the heart of what we do at YouTube. If we make any change, they will feel it under their feet. "
Part of YouTube's strategy is to put your own employees in front of the camera. According to Kovalakides, there has always been a bit of paranoia about what YouTube employees can say to creators. Channels like Creator Insider are working to strengthen this relationship. It started about two years ago with an internal conversation about employees knowing their own platform. If YouTube employees want to understand what it means to be a creator, they have to use their own product.
Unlike Kovalakides, Sarah Healy and Tom Leung turned to their own channels after starting work at YouTube. Healy works specifically in the play area and keeps her own channel where she is broadcast daily. Leung is both product management director for YouTube's creative tools and Creator Insider's engine. What did they learn? Being creative is more difficult than it seems.
"There are more steps to [creating YouTube videos] it may seem to a stranger, "says Leung. "Secondly, there was this hope that" Oh, we'll download our first video, and then we'll be huge. "You know, the reality is that it's a great platform where viewers have a lot of choices, and it's not because you're editing a video that you'll be on the homepage the next day. It applied to us as well.
The video game industry may have been one of the first to fully embrace creators alongside the press. Recent reports have gone as far as calling influencers into officially dead gambling spaces. Perhaps more succinctly, as the Gamasutra The influential role of YouTuber is guaranteed. The game, says Healy, faces a unique challenge: "They usually produce more content, by downloading a lot more, and I think it makes them hypersensitive to any question or concern they might have. Because they really live in this kind of scale, everyday, where they do not have a week to produce content. "
Mr. Leung and his team also felt the burden of downloading content, although it is much easier for them. In addition to Leung and his core team, a handful of volunteers lead the channel. They have the support of a full-time job with benefits and internal support, and no one does it alone in pursuit of it. Instead, they all contribute in different ways, whether it's hosting, thumbnails, coordination, or scripting.
Leung attributes the development process of this channel as a formative experience to his understanding of the creative community. "We especially learned that it was important to find your voice," says Leung. "What is a process of trial and error, it does not happen right away, to find your niche, and then also, like, consistency and just kind of a grain." This is a slow badysis of the first hundred submarines to a larger number. Intellectually, he says, the team knew it. "But when it comes to your own channel and you check your badyzes or look at this undercoverage, you know, maybe it does not increase as fast as you thought, it gives you a very different lesson. "
Since then, Creator Insider has reached its pace and delivers content to more than 170,000 subscribers. The channel allows YouTube to communicate directly with creators on a variety of topics, from platform experiences to ad revenue, advice, unpacking and Q & A, in a more personal way than through a single channel. blog. "The ecosystem of creators is extremely diverse, but I also think they have a lot in common … they have a story to tell and they want their stories to be heard by as broad and relevant a public as possible," says Mr. Leung. Creators are constantly looking for new ways to develop and sustain their channels, while understanding how the platform works.
For Healy, juggling both his work on YouTube and his channel gave the impression of reconciling two jobs. His channel may have been smaller than more established creators, but this has allowed him to better understand how growing chains think. "What I learned as an employee who was then creative, was just that idea of how your channel encompbades everything for you," she said. "I do not think I understood how much my daily life and my constant concerns would occupy:" Do I not only maintain my content, but my community as well? "I do not think I understood the point. extent of the power of this feeling. "
This experience is an important reminder for small creators, who can often be forgotten for big names. "The reason there is such a gap at the present time is that we can have these one-to-one conversations with people, and that's not always the case with our little ones creators, "she says. "We can not sit down and talk to each one of them, one by one."
For both YouTube and its creators, there is still a gap to be filled in terms of understanding and culture. According to Healy, YouTube continues to work internally on finding a balance between the well-being of creators and the stressful nature of their online work – not just for the big names, but for all those who devote their time to career. "I think we will also make the mistake of looking at our best creators and talking to them about burnout. But we are forgetting a group of people who use both YouTube channels and other jobs they support, "said Healy. "This is a very difficult problem to solve, and I do not think there is a single solution for all the problems."
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