As we can expect with anything in the world, because God has cursed the world to get worse as time comes to an end, everything that is good decays and gets crappier by default. The Internet itself, though a fraction of humanity’s history, has demonstrated this perfectly in its brief lifespan of 30 something years — going from MySpace profiles and AOL direct messaging to the age of social media and, now, what many are calling the “Dead Internet Theory”; which is the idea that now (and going forward), the majority of content on the Internet is actually robotic, algorithmic, stale and, well, dead.
There is truth to this, and a driving reason for it is sheer human greed. Take Google as a perfect example. They spend the better part of two decades building a name people could trust for a basic yet priceless tool: search. You could search for anything in the world, and if it existed online, Google could probably find it.
But that amazing democratization of knowledge lasted about as quick as a Trump admin MOU. Google quickly started adding adds to the top spots, and then more sponsored links, and as of recently AI summaries on top of the sponsored links themselves before you get to the real search results. Suffice it to say that having a website and relying on organic reach and search traffic is all but obsolete, and while there are certainly still many strategies to be successful online — the days of throwing up a simple website and key content pieces are over. Today’s strategies are multi-polar and it is an insane grind to build an audience and stay relevant.
Some of this is to be expected in any area where something new and good gets profited by many. A “gold rush” doesn’t stay a gold rush for long. Ten or more years ago if you put any content on YouTube, you’d probably be famous today just for the fact that you would have been early. Today it’s still an opportunity, but one that is not as clearly incentivizing.
And with that we turn to the point: YouTube is getting worse and worse, and it is unclear how all of it will pan out. In the fall of 2025 they made a drastic change to prioritize shorts over longform, giving way more slots to shorts in people’s home view, and as a result nuking longform views (and earnings) significantly. I personally saw something like a 30-40% decrease in revenue and even more in views because of this change, yet my content output (quantity and quality) has been consistent throughout time. Several other big channels saw significant drawdowns, and overall this was a really crappy decision on YouTube’s part.
Another thread is the lawsuit currently being filed against them for their deceptive advertising of their premium service as ad free, and yet creators are still showing ads on live streams and also doing paid sponsorships, which are still ads. Sometimes if you hit 2x speed, a button pops up to skip passed the promo, but this is a real issue and there is no clear way around it, at least with sponsorships. Personally I have never done any sponsorships nor do I intend to, but many creators get more revenue from them than regular YouTube ads. If YouTube loses the lawsuit, that will impact many creators’ businesses and desire to continue making videos. If they win, premium will continue to not be that premium. And if you got their Temu-tier premium (“YouTube Lite”) for less money, you’re paying for a “semi-advertising” experience, which is bogus.
Then you have the recent changes. Monetization requirements have doubled, and that means any new channels after the time these changes take into effect (in several months) will have an incredibly harder time getting to the point where they can make some income from their work. This will encourage more AI slop channels, not less, because people will be incentivized to game the system since it is becoming a slog rather than an adventure.
And to make all of this even more horrible, just a few days ago on the 24th, YouTube implemented their new views metric change — a change that is bound to make this platform even worse by a long shot. Basically, views now are counted from the first frame of you landing on a video. So even if you land on accident, it counts as a view. Imagine now that views will mean practically nothing, and all of the problems just discussed will be glossed over with a whitewashed facade to make you feel better about it. It’s literally the equivalent of quantitative easing (money printing), and the people who suffer are the longform creators like myself who work tirelessly to create meaningful and high-value content.
I believe YouTube pulled this latest shenanigan to hide the absolutely ridiculous impact of their original decision to prioritize shorts, so that all of us getting screwed can look at our stats and say “Wow cool! I got 1,000,000,000,000 views!” But views don’t actually mean engagement or income, they mean nothing now. There are still engagement metrics, but those take sitting down and analyzing, so it will be interesting to compare the two over time.
Either way, combine this with YouTube actively suppressing likes when my videos come out, unsubscribing people randomly or not notifying them of a new release, the growing bot and AI slop content problem (and now watch it explode with this recent views change) — YouTube at this rate is becoming a dumpster fire.
So, this is why I tell you to subscribe to my website. It costs you nothing. Content is always ad free and free for all when it is initially released, and yes — you may have to deal with Substack (because they sneak their platform into every link now), but you can still navigate everything in your browser without any of that. Regardless, it is the best way to stay in touch.
I will be on YouTube until it either goes bankrupt or I get kicked off. But YouTube has only gotten worse. I know it’s convenient, but sometimes convenience has a price. It’s always good to have a backup, so stay connected and you won’t have to deal with these shenanigans.
