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'''DarkViper:''' To help facilitate this, YouTube has an algorithm that presents thumbnails of videos, also called impressions, with the goal of matching a person with something they actually want to watch. These are different from views, which come when a person actually clicks the impressions. YouTube’s problem is that the more time people spend searching for content, the less time they can spend actually watching the content which earns YouTube revenue. Worse, the longer it takes someone to find something to watch, the more likely they are to leave the website altogether. YouTube can only present a finite amount of impressions each day, therefore each impression is seen as a valuable resource that they don’t want to waste. Before showing each impression, the algorithm must carefully assess both the likelihood that it WILL be clicked, as well as how much TIME will likely be spent on the platform if it IS clicked. |
The algorithm has to judge ''not just'' how much time will be spent watching the video, but also how likely more videos are to be watched after the first video. YouTube’s accuracy with impressions is usually between 2-10% depending on the type of content. This is known as the click-through-rate; the % of clicks an impression gets versus how many times it is shown. The higher the average time spent on the platform from an impression click the more likely YouTube is to risk one of its valuable impressions on that content. Bottom line, YouTube doesn’t care what content you are watching as long as it is keeping you here.'''DarkViper:''' We content creators on YouTube are different. We want you on this platform, yes, but we do care what you watch. Each content creator is attempting to influence as many people as possible to watch their content instead of anyone else’s. We are effectively running a store in a market and attempting to get you to spend your limited time on us. We want you to click on our videos, ignoring everyone else’s that are presented to you. Whenever someone on this platform gains some of your finite time, that gain is a loss for whatever you would have spent your time on had they not succeeded in taking you from that course. You also lose in a sense because doing one thing prevents you from doing something else, this is the implied opportunity cost in every decision you make. Given that you are already on YouTube, the most likely other path would have been looking for and then watching a different video. If the video you clicked didn’t exist, you might have clicked the video that the algorithm would have served instead, or another video on the same page, or you may have failed to find anything for 5 minutes and decided to leave to instead watch Tiktok videos, giving the benefit of your time to their creators. These days users get the vast majority of their content from recommendations, or end up viewing other content after getting a recommendation. For example, going to a channel page to watch more, finding a playlist of the content just recommended to you, or subscribing because of a recommendation. If you aren’t in people’s recommendations, it doesn’t matter if they know your name, they are not watching your content. |
'''DarkViper:''' People rarely go to YouTube to find specific videos and then leave once they see them. In most instances, people go to YouTube to search for content to fill the spare time they have to spend. For us creators, the more of your time we get, the faster we grow, and the more money we are given. If we don’t get enough of your time, we die, figuratively speaking, and as at the bare minimum we can no longer do this as a career. There are 30 to 50 million creators on YouTube depending on how wide your criteria, and over 2 billion people access YouTube at least once a month. <span style="background-color:#ffffff;color:#3c4043;">If these people only watched one creator each, creators would get about 40 to 67 views per video, which is far from what is necessary for a career. <span style="background-color:#ffffff;color:#3c4043;">From a business perspective, we upload videos to take a greater portion of the market for ourselves away from others, and to capture a greater portion of the limited time each of you spends on YouTube every day. There is obviously not enough for everyone.'''''Why do many of the large creators do reaction content?''DarkViper: '''Being a YouTuber means you largely get out what you put in, you can always work more to get more. Anything you do that isn’t working is therefore a loss of both revenue and exposure, as you could otherwise have created content that would have generated both. So when you start as a YouTuber and attempt to make it your job, you try and put in as much time as you are mentally and physically able. If you achieve some success, this brings money which you can then use to effectively give yourself more free time to potentially spend on YouTube. You get better hardware to make editing faster and easier, you buy better software, better stock footage, you pay someone to mow your lawn, wash your clothes, whatever the inconvenience can reduce it. You essentially increase your potential efficiency by removing unnecessary burdens on your time. This creates a feedback loop, the more efficient you are, the more money you get, which enables you to become more efficient, which gets you more money and so on. But eventually you hit a wall, you are only one person with a finite amount that you can physically or mentally deal with in your job. So you either stop here, and just rely on expanding and refining your own skill set to increase your efficiency and growth, or you give up some degree of creative control and find someone to help you. Thinking up ideas, researching, writing scripts, set design, set building, filming, editing, rendering, creating thumbnails, drawing, whatever it is; your goal is to find a person whose time you can buy with your money. The more people who help you, the more efficient you can become, meaning you make more money, which means you can get more people, which makes you more efficient and so on. Obviously in the real world it isn’t that simple especially with creative endeavors like YouTube. While your channel becomes more efficient in terms of its output, you will become less personally involved the more you delegate to others. |
More of your time will be spent managing and finding others to perform tasks, which can impact the quality of the product you once produced alone. Most YouTubers stop at getting one or two people to help them to do things that are particularly time intensive or things that they simply wouldn’t do if they didn’t have help.But others do go to the extreme, becoming an entire enterprise with dozens of people working for them. |
'''LinusTechTips:''' Alright, so we are hiring a full-time writer, a full-time social media coordinator, full-time executive assistant, full-time tool designer, manufacturing engineer, full-time csr, we just… We just got a LOT of stuff to do, you know? |
'''DarkViper: '''An entire video could be written, shot, edited and released without the channel owners input at all. It is important to note here that for the people you hire, your success is effectively their success. In that they benefit from everything going well, as you are not competing with those who work for you. The more successful you become, the more secure they can be and the more you can give them, but ultimately that depends on the channel owner. Basically, your success does not harm those who work for you.Reactors are a little bit different in that they have allowed themselves a pathway that is inaccessible to the more, lets say, moral participants in our industry. This pathway gives them another avenue for problem solving than the ones we have discussed so far. Let’s use some examples: |
Do you need to think up ideas:You can do it yourself.Pay someone to do it for you.Or you can steal a YouTube video.Do you need to do some research?You can do it yourself.Pay someone to do it for you.Or you can steal a YouTube video.Do you need to write a script?You can do it yourself.Pay someone to do it for you.Or you can steal a YouTube video.Do you need some background images for your voice over?You can do it yourself.Pay someone to do it for you.Or you can steal a YouTube video. |
'''DarkViper:''' I could go on but you probably get the picture. Effectively while some YouTubers will work hard or pay money and spend the time hiring others to increase their output, reactors will simply use the videos produced by their competitors in the market to skip over that process. They avoid the time spent working and managing, as well as the financial expense, but end up with the same end product. They effectively outsource the time, cost and effort to their competitors on the market, while spending no time, cost and effort themselves. It also avoids much of the stress and potential for burn out that is associated with this industry, as you are not doing the work normally associated with it. Additionally with reacting you can have high quality content of a great variety, becoming a mecca for the best content, and it doesn’t matter if the videos do well, because your expenses and time investment are effectively zero. For actual creators, every video created is a gamble; because if it doesn’t pay off you lose all the time and money invested, which you need to survive. Unlike in a normal business where the success of the enterprise doesn’t explicitly harm the workers, reactors are attempting to take a greater portion of the market for themselves away from other creators which obviously will impact everyone else’s ability to survive in the market but we will talk about that later. Instead, let us look at just how effective this reupload strategy is using Asmongold as an example. He has been reuploading other people’s videos for his entire career and it has been fundamental to his growth and success. For simplicity's sake, we will just look at his current YouTube channel and its react content even though he has obviously reacted to astronomically more videos on his Twitch stream, and those litter YouTube on other channels as well. Also, for fairness, I have removed the videos where he reacts to his reddit, twitter, or formal announcements, instead just leaving in his largely unedited reuploads of other people’s YouTube videos.'''''Wait, Reactors get HOW MUCH for watching YouTube videos? (Data)''DarkViper:''' Asmongold has reacted to around 450 videos on his main channel for a total of 188 million views. Traditionally with YouTube videos made by actual content creators, it is hard to know how much time and effort went into producing the end result. |
'''Kaze Emanuar:''' I’ve read, optimised, and bug-fixed the entire Mario 64 source code. This took weeks to finish, and a few hundred hours of concentrated work went into this. |
'''DarkViper:''' Days, weeks, months, we can only guess. But as Asmongold is a reactor, we know the duration of the video is roughly the amount of time he put into it. We can therefore say that Asmongold spent roughly 205 hours “working” on these videos. As western channels get on average between 3 and 5 USD per thousand views, I will use my two year average of $3.43 to say Asmongold made approximately $644000 or $3100 an hour for just watching these YouTube videos. He has also received approximately 5 billion impressions of exposure assuming the 4% average clickthrough rate which would be fairly standard for videos of this length. |
'''DarkViper:''' I am of course underselling how much Asmongold makes from these reuploads of other people’s videos, as obviously those who watch these videos would then be given impressions for his other videos by the algorithm, which would lead to more views and revenue for his other content that he wouldn’t otherwise get. Additionally I am excluding the ad revenue, bits, donations, subs, and growth that he gets on his livestreams where he first reuploads this content. This system of exploitation is fundamental for Asmongold to be able to make the roughly 1.5 million dollars he makes on Twitch each year, as any other method to create this content would have resulted in less growth and less streaming for him on that platform. |
'''DarkViper: '''So that may already seem like a lot but it is more than you likely realize. I have learned that many viewers have no idea how long YouTube videos tend to take to be made, so to give you some context, I have had singular videos that have taken me longer than 205 hours of work to make. It is also important to point out, my work is far from the most complex on this platform. Perhaps you know of the channel “Kurzgesagt - In a nutshell” which has 43 employees. |
'''Kurzgesagt:''' For years, people have asked how we make our videos. So, let's finally talk about it. How to make a Kurzgesagt video, in 1200 hours, or more. |
Each of their videos takes over 1200 hours to make, sometimes taking as long as a whole year to finalize. '''DarkViper:''' It should be obvious to everyone that you can’t actually make over 400+ videos in 200 hours through normal means, especially not with high quality animations, research, complex editing and so on. You couldn’t make a YouTube video in 20 minutes, let alone transform one. Tens of thousands of hours of labour went into this content from hundreds of people that Asmongold did not pay a dime. You can see quickly why reactors have an advantage. A YouTuber can make one high quality video to generate exposure for themselves in the same time a reactor can steal 400 and the reactor's product will be of a much higher quality on average when comparing effort invested, due to containing a staggering amount of unpaid labour. Actual content creators can’t compete. |
'''Hassan:''' Make 10 hours of high quality original content a day? Hahahaha…. |
'''DarkViper:''' I hope by the end of this video you will understand why this exposure and money would either entirely, or almost entirely, have gone to other content creators if not for Asmongold’s interference. Not just the people who Asmongold directly steals labour from, but from everyone in the wider market.'''DarkViper: '''Similar to how many larger YouTube enterprises have dozens of people working for them, Asmongold has hundreds of people working for him enabling the output that he has. The difference is that Asmongold doesn’t pay his workers any money, having a relationship similar to an unpaid internship where Asmon makes vague promises of non-monetary benefits in exchange for the fruits of tens of thousands of hours of labour that he would otherwise have to do himself or pay for. Successful reactors abuse parasocial relationships, people’s ignorance of the platform, dubious promises of future success, and/or the implicit threat of backlash if anyone complains, to secure this labour and they obviously reap a huge reward for doing so. |
'''DarkViper: '''They know that many creators won’t find out about their reuploads and, even if they did, the worst case scenario is they take down the video after they have already gotten the lion’s share of the exposure, views, and revenue that the video will generate. It is theft without any possibility for downside. Basically, the videos Asmongold has been stealing for years are the backbone of his career. Absent them, he would be out far more than a million dollars, far more than these billions of impressions, and he would be a tiny fraction of what he is today. |
Now you might fire back, sure for each of these videos over 99% of the effort that went into creating them was done by someone else. But that other tiny fraction of effort that comes from Asmongold is really something special, he pauses the video and speaks and speaks for a long time! Mathematically this is not true (he only speaks on average the same length as the original video) but more importantly that is not how effort works. '''DarkViper: '''Perhaps you have heard of the quote ‘If I Had More Time, I Would Have Written a Shorter Letter’. It takes effort and time to be precise, to prepare your words to communicate exactly what you want to in the best way possible. Asmongold speaks for a long time because he is not prepared and is just rambling, often about things that are about to be addressed in the video that he is simply unaware of because he hasn’t seen it beforehand. Rambling off the top of your head is the least effortful form of content you can make. His verbosity is evidence of his lack of effort and work ethic. Bottom line, a react video has the same value proposition as going to the movie with a friend. Seeing and discussing a movie with a friend can be more enjoyable than seeing it alone but you would never say that the friend you took to the movie should get a cut of the movie proceeds for sitting in the chair and giving you his opinion on it.Reactors are a net loss of exposure for everyone on the platform, because their existence means they can gain a heap of exposure from the finite pool for themselves with no effort. It is why reactors are at the top of the content creation game, shortly followed by their friends who leech from them. Stealing is the most energy efficient way to gain access to high quality content. |
'''''But what's the harm? ''DarkViper: '''Obviously this enterprise of unpaid labour resulting in massive profits exclusively for an unskilled lazy person doing none of the work is one of the grossest conceivable things in this industry, but how does this impact other YouTubers?The obvious first point is that reaction content enables any reactor to far out produce everyone else on the platform. |
'''DarkViper: '''Here we have one YouTuber who labours for a week to make one video. Here is asmongold who steals a YouTube video as a part of his livestream and he makes it into a video for his channel, ending up with 1 video that normally takes a week to make, but instead it took him 30 minutes. He also has the added benefit of a livestream and the other videos made of his livestream content. What takes a YouTuber a week, Asmon can do in 30 minutes. But it gets worse, as Asmon isn’t limited to only reacting to one video, he can react to several. He can also do this, every single day. Now who is more likely to bring themselves a greater amount of exposure, views and revenue? Each of the individual youtubers with 1 weeks worth of labour and 1 video, or asmon with 7 livestreams and over 40 potential videos collectively housing a years worth of labour with a content variety and quality that cant be matched by anything but an army of creators? I hope the answer goes without saying, but it gets worse. Each of these YouTubers and Asmongold are attempting to attract to themselves viewers from the same general finite market. Who is more likely to end up with the most at the end of the week? Do you think individual YouTubers would benefit more or less if Asmongold wasn’t a reactor? Not just the people he steals videos from, but everyone else in the market, as his goal is not just to steal viewers away from those he reacts to, but everyone in general, as he can just as easily steal someone away from any of us as he is the people he reacts to. |
If it takes the average creator 7 days to make one difficult video, Asmongold in that time can steal 7 difficult videos, and spend the time streaming instead, producing an additional 14 low quality videos. |
So while the average creator has one high quality video for their labour, Asmongold has had 7 high quality videos made by his unpaid labour force freeing him to produce his other 14. Who is more likely going to grab a greater portion of the finite online market that exists each day? Especially when the algorithm is weighted slightly towards newer video releases over older? It’s obviously the reactor. Who is more likely going to grow faster? It’s obviously the reactor, not because of hard work, but specifically because of a lack of it. |
'''DarkViper: '''Who is more likely to grab a greater portion of the finite online market that exists each day, especially when the algorithm is slightly weighted towards newer releases than older? It's obviously the reactor. Who is more likely to grow faster? It's obviously the reactor. The reactor not because of hard work, but specifically because of the lack of it. |
'''DarkViper: '''When a creator supports a reactor, they are implicitly allowing all reactors to out-supply them on the market, making it easier for their direct competitors to capture the same general market that the creator is also trying to capture. This is what is known as “shooting yourself in the foot”. Even if you believe falsely that reactions to your videos offer you something of value (which we will look at later), what you do not see is every time any reaction video appears where your video would have otherwise appeared. Any time where one of your videos would have got an impression except it then went to a reaction video. You also do not see every time a reaction video is chosen by a viewer instead of one of your videos. You are supporting increasing the competition your videos experience in the marketplace astronomically, spurring on the growth of your competitors, and rewarding them for not working hard or paying for labour, by giving them your work for free. As a business decision, like in any other market, it is quite silly. As a moral decision, this is obscene. You are intentionally choosing to support the existence of competitors who can on a whim steal the talent from thousands of people in order to capture the market you are also trying to capture. A true underdog story. The harder you work, the more they can steal, and so you will always be behind. It is a form of accumulative advantage. Asmongold being in a position of advantage has an easier time gaining more advantage, to your detriment. |
'''DarkViper: '''Asmongold is not trying to get into your viewer’s recommended feeds to help you, he is trying to supplant you in them, or have your viewers pick his content over yours. Asmongold isn’t magnanimous, he isn’t altruistic, he is just trying to use your content to infiltrate your audience to take it from you. No person has unlimited time to watch videos everyday, so for Asmongold to find space, he necessarily has to take those viewers away from something else and that something else has a greater chance to be you than anything else chosen at random. Asmongold’s goal is, like actual content creators, to take a person from the path that they would have tread absent their content being released. The only difference is that Asmon is doing this not with hard work, but with stolen content. |
'''DarkViper: '''But remember I am not just speaking about the impact on the person being reacted to, also known as the reactee, that will come later. I am speaking about everyone in the market that Asmongold is using this content to try and steal from. To believe that Asmongold’s react enterprise has a net positive effect on other creators,you’d have to believe that others benefit from Asmongold being able to skip over all the normal difficulties involved with content creation. Others will benefit if he can produce more higher quality content on his channel. That others will benefit if he has more uploads on his channel. That others benefit if he can give his viewers more content to watch and less reason to seek out or watch other creators. '''DarkViper: '''This obviously makes no sense. What is more likely to lead to other creators getting noticed? Larger content creators having the easiest time to create infinite content with no effort, or larger content creators struggling to make content leaving their audience to need to look elsewhere for more? Do you sincerely think that if the rich just get richer everyone benefits in the long term? In a world where Asmongold didn’t use this system of exploitation to increase his supply, then those who watched him would have instead engaged with the recommendation algorithms as normal and ended up in other places watching other content creators. Reactors are not giving exposure to anyone, they are just taking it. They are effectively acting as the middle men for the algorithm, and obviously a multi-billion dollar algorithm using the analytics of a website with billions of users is going to have an easier time putting new creators in front of people who will actually watch them compared to a reactor who is just stealing videos and showing them to his audience. Other creators would clearly see more exposure to new viewers if reactors would just get out of the way. Without reactors there is no reason to believe the online creator market as a whole would shrink. Partly because the amount of people who interface with it exclusively to watch other people watch videos is quite small, but also because the overwhelming vast majority of impressions given to react content are never clicked; and for those that are, there is little reason to believe the algorithms effective “equal or second choice” that would replace them would be significantly less effective at keeping people on the platform. Arguably, as original content would just get more exposure making it more profitable to make, this would inspire people to make more original content. The online content market should therefore be more captivating to viewers, not less.[Charlie react content unlikely to help video clip] |
'''''But can’t everyone just do react content!?''DarkViper: '''Obviously not, someone at the end of the day has to do the unpaid labour for reactors to steal and this degree of reaping benefits away from others that you clearly don’t deserve requires a lack of conscience that few possess. This system of reacting splits everyone into two groups; First, the reactor who takes the work, and second, the underclass that performs the work for them to steal. More importantly, react content is most successful when you already have an audience that you are trying to keep with you. People have a greater reason to click unfamiliar creators when they run out of content from those they are familiar with or when they get tired of that type of content. Reactions enable you to have a huge variety of high quality content very quickly, helping you maintain your audience. Ultimately, if we all did react content, those who are already the most successful would just maintain their higher status and we’d eventually run out of content to react to. |
'''''Is the reactee at least better off? (Data)''DarkViper: '''So reactees are creating a situation where a subsect of the market can outproduce them at a higher quality, and for far less effort, to capture the same market they themselves are trying to capture. But maybe the reactees can still get a tiny win in this game even if everyone else in the market loses except the reactor? What if the crumbs that fall from a reactor to the reactee are bigger than any potential loss the reactee will experience from all reaction videos on the market? This can’t be determined definitively of course, no one has a time machine. Although conceptually it seems unlikely that you could get more exposure and views from a single reaction than what the millions of reaction videos would hypothetically take from you in the algorithm terms of impressions and views in the long term. Even speaking of just one reactor, while you could have a net gain in viewers from the one time Asmongold reacted to you, the other reactions he releases would have just as much chance to take impressions and views away from you as they would anyone else. Actually it would be more likely than most creators because the demographics you both target are likely similar but nevertheless I think it is important to look at the crumbs that can fall from a reactor's mouth to the reactee to see if these are truly significant. I am therefore going to present the analytics of Josh Strife Hays. He makes great content surrounding MMOs, has a great voice and is a humble dude. After binge watching his content I heard him remark that he believes Asmongold made him in some respects, that he owes his success to Asmongold. Knowing something about how react content works, I knew this had to be untrue, so he was kind enough to let me see his analytics to see if I could find a correlation and therefore potential causal relationship between his growth and Asmongold’s react videos.'''DarkViper: '''Looking in a general way, Josh took off in December 2020 but Asmongold’s first reaction to Josh was not until March, which funnily enough preceded a dip. But these general stats from socialblade are insufficient for our uses so we will look at YouTube analytics for the period where Asmongold’s reactions took place. At the very least, we know for certain that Asmongold’s reactions were not responsible for Joshua’s channel taking off, as the channel took off before that point. We’ll be looking at these 16 reactions, which have netted Asmongold 180 million impressions, 7 millions views, and roughly $25.000 for doing nothing.[Slide 1] '''DarkViper:''' Looking at his channel views between March and August, unsurprisingly there is little correlation between overall health of the channel and reactions. Understand some of these views have to come from asmongold, but there is just no correlation with reactions and an overall change in the success of the channel. Reactions can’t make your content appealing or algorithmically viable, and that is all that matters for channel success. [Slide 2] The first 4 reactions seem to have done nothing at all, often preceding drips in viewership. [Slide 3] In fact, the period where Josh’s channel saw the greatest growth compared to the prior month was in May and it had no reactions until the end, [Slide 4] with the reactions actually occurring prior to a downturn in the channel and and these in the middle doing nothing to change its course. |