YouTube Created a Generation of Young Stars. Now They Are Getting Burned Out.
Grayson Dolan, in ripped black jeans, and Ethan Dolan. The twins, who have more than 10 million subscribers on their YouTube channel, will stop posting every week to preserve their mental health. PHOTO: RICH FURY/GETTY IMAGES FOR H&M
Dolan twins among the big names taking a break from the video site, citing the demand of having to keep creating fresh content
The latest trend among YouTube’s hottest stars: feeling burned-out by the whole experience.
Having achieved success, some top influencers are deciding to disconnect from the video-sharing platform, worn down by what some say are the demands of YouTube’s algorithm for fresh content to promote.
Last week, controversial YouTube superstar PewDiePie, who was the first individual creator to hit 100 million subscribers, said in a video that he was taking a break—“I’m feeling very tired”—as did the comedy duo Ethan and Grayson Dolan in October. In their video, posted on YouTube, the Dolan twins said that after five years of posting to the platform every Tuesday, they needed to stop posting every week to preserve their mental health.
“We have a job where you can’t just take off because there’s the fear of becoming irrelevant,” Grayson Dolan said. “I can’t even go home to see my mom.”
The New Jersey natives started posting to YouTube when they were 14 as a passion project, and then moved to Los Angeles when it took off. Now 20 years old, they have accumulated more than 10 million subscribers.
A unit of Alphabet Inc. ’s Google, YouTube responded to their decision on Twitter : “We’re proud of the Dolan twins. And all creators putting their well-being first.”
Still, the exodus of top influencers is a potential issue for YouTube, which has flourished in part by cultivating an ecosystem of creators who produce endless hours of original content. Some influencers on other social networks, such as Facebook Inc. ’s Instagram, experience burnout too, but YouTube as a video platform is unique because of the amount of time creators spend crafting their content. Alphabet doesn’t report YouTube’s financial results, but analysts estimate YouTube brought in as much as $15 billion in revenue last year.
Susan Wojcicki, chief executive of YouTube, addressed the topic of burnout in a letter to creators in late November. “We want to encourage you to take care of yourself and invest in recovery,” she said.
YouTube also has posted a series of videos aimed at influencers to offer tips on how to balance all the work that goes into being an influencer. In one, licensed therapist and YouTube creator Kati Morton encourages YouTubers to find ways to take time off, even in the form of internet-free days.
A spokeswoman for YouTube said the company encourages its creators to make their videos in a healthy, sustainable way, and to know “if they need a break that their audience will be on YouTube when they return.”
Yet YouTubers say they are afraid to take time off, out of fear it will hurt how their videos are highlighted on the site, which uses an algorithm to determine which ones to recommend. While the algorithm is a mystery, many influencers say it rewards accounts that post frequently with more page views.
More views mean more money. YouTube places ads at the beginning and midway through videos, and pays the creators depending on how many times the ads are viewed. YouTube doesn’t release how much money it pays, though creators say it varies, from a couple dollars to hundreds of dollars for every thousand views. For a celebrity YouTuber who receives half a million views a month, that can work out to millions of dollars a year.
As a result, YouTubers are creating more original content than ever, and young people around the world aspire to be famous on the platform. Influencer-marketing platform Captiv8 estimates there are now more than 1.7 million YouTubers with more than 5,000 subscribers who have received sponsorships from brands.
The YouTube spokeswoman said the company processes more than 80 billion signals every day, such as dislikes, surveys and time well spent, that go into how it chooses which videos to recommend to users. YouTube doesn’t take upload frequency or past video performance into account, although it does consider upload recency, she said.
YouTubers say they can tell what the algorithm prioritizes based on which videos do well and which tank.
For Casey Neistat, a 38-year-old filmmaker and YouTube star in Los Angeles, that meant realizing that uploading videos every day was the way to grow his subscribers. His first five years posting videos to YouTube, he posted sporadically. Some of his videos did well, but his subscriber growth was “anemic” until he started uploading daily, he said in a video in 2016.
Creators say YouTube’s algorithm appears to push traffic to the most recent videos. Then when someone watches a video, the algorithm suggests other recent content from the same creator. This setup pushes YouTubers to post more videos to get traffic both to their new content and to keep their older posts in the mix.
“The longer you don’t post, the lower your numbers dip. There is a direct correlation,” said Lizzy Capri, who used to work for LinkedIn and now posts funny videos to YouTube such as the time she turned her yard into a petting zoo.
A spokeswoman for YouTube said the company’s product team analyzed data that showed channels on YouTube have more views after their creators return from time off than right before they left.
YouTubers face growing pressure in an increasingly crowded field where there is now more competition than ever for eyeballs. With the explosion of creators, there has been an accompanying feeling that if you don’t work all the time, someone else will, said Mikey Murphy, who posted sketch comedy videos and video logs once a week for five years, starting in New Jersey when he was 14. “It wasn’t like this when we started,” Mr. Murphy said.
Online, Mr. Murphy typically appeared bubbly and upbeat. But right before his 20th birthday last year, he realized he had hit a breaking point. “Setting the camera on a tripod and being the most happy, hyper, awesome version of myself for an hour straight started to feel very unnatural,” Mr. Murphy said.
“I started to dread everything that was YouTube-related. It was a sinking feeling in my stomach,” Mr. Murphy said. Now in Los Angeles, he is focusing more on writing and directing films, some for YouTube, and he is set to premiere a show on Snapchat Originals. He still posts to his YouTube channel but not as frequently, prioritizing videos that push his creativity.
YouTube is considering ways to tweak its product to alleviate creator burnout. Earlier this year, the company started rounding the subscriber counts that it displays to creators, to dissuade them from obsessing about the daily fluctuations in their numbers.
But despite YouTube’s changes, Ms. Capri said it’s still very apparent in her traffic reports that if she doesn’t post frequently, her videos won’t do as well. “If I took a month off, I’d see a huge drop,” she said.
