Quote:Three weeks ago, Bobby Burns, a YouTuber with just under one million subscribers, sat down on a rock in Central Park to talk about a recent mental health episode. One week ago, Elle Mills, a creator with more than 1.2 million subscribers, uploaded a video that included vulnerable footage during a breakdown. Six days ago, Rubén “El Rubius” Gundersen, the third most popular YouTuber in the world with just under 30 million subscribers, turned on his camera to talk to his viewers about the fear of an impending breakdown and his decision to take a break from YouTube.

Burns, Mills and Gundersen aren’t alone. Erik “M3RKMUS1C” Phillips (four million subscribers), Benjamin “Crainer” Vestergaard (2.7 million subscribers) and other top YouTubers have either announced brief hiatuses from the platform, or discussed their own struggles with burnout, in the past month. Everyone from PewDiePie (62 million subscribers) to Jake Paul (15.2 million subscribers) have dealt with burnout. Lately, however, it seems like more of YouTube’s top creators are coming forward with their mental health problems.

Constant changes to the platform’s algorithm, unhealthy obsessions with remaining relevant in a rapidly growing field and social media pressures are making it almost impossible for top creators to continue creating at the pace both the platform and audience want — and that can have a detrimental effect on the very ecosystem they belong to.

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youtube doesnt care. they want to become the evolution of TV.
They could care less what happens to the people that made them what they are. The big studios and news companies will make them more money,

Shane Dawson one of Youtube's big stars wound up doing movies and all that which some of it is on Red which is making them money.

A lot of the newer Key of Awesome videos are being put on the Red as well.

I have a buddy with a pretty decent Youtube, Twitch and Insta following. He'll make $4,000 over a weekend on Twitch. He told me that you shouldn't get into it if you don't expect to work for real and that people shouldn't view it as an escape from a 40+ hour workweek. The pro is that you can make as much money as you can hustle with no boss. The cons are everything that goes along with being an independent contractor.

You have to film, edit, post, and advertise pretty much daily. In his case he's also live most nights. You need to attend events and conferences.

Youtube also took a lot of the value away from just getting a lot of views. It's why a lot are moving to Patreon where they can guarantee that they'll get $5 a month from a few hundred people.

Youtube is going downhill fast. The independent creator (which put the You in Youtube) is what built it up to begin with, and now Google has turned their back on them, and is pushing corporate content that no one (except maybe the alt-left) wants. Just go to the trending tab. It's chalk full of jimmy kimmel, vox, buzzfeed crap that isn't actually, organically trending (look at the like/dislike ratio), it's just there because it's what Youtube wants to popular. There are talks that they may even take away your subscriptions, and instead just put what *they think* you want to see. Insanity. Google seems to be prepared to make Youtube a loss leader in order to push the politics of their leadership.

Pewdiepie level creators should just retire, they've made fortunes. KSI and the Pauls seem to be transitioning away in favor of live appearances (soccer games, boxing matches, etc).

The 100k-1m subscriber level creator is who really got screwed. They invested all that time and money into building a fan base, and went from making decent money to 90+% less overnight. Patreon (crowd funding) is one solution, but even they are monitoring everything you do, and will ban you from their platform if they see something you said on twitter that they didn't like. They banned Lauren Southern for her activism in Europe. No laws nor the TOS were broken, they just didn't like it.

Seems like time for someone to create a competitor.