TheGridMonster: “VLOGMAS 2014 IS HERE!!!” December 1, 2014. 16:28.
It’s Ingrid Nilsen, Missglamorazzi, on her second channel, where she posts vlogs and personal miscellany. Her intro jingle plays on-screen: “I’ll vlog every day ’til Christmas for you.” Ingrid is without makeup, so her “skin can breathe,” wearing, she tells us, a cozy Brandy Melville turtleneck and Target slippers, padding around her home. She must grocery shop. She places her phone behind the steering wheel, camera rolling, en route to Whole Foods. “All you have to do is sit back and enjoy the ride.” Back home she unpacks her haul. We cook together. We see glimpses of her BF Chris, but he’s not a YouTuber, though he’s into Snapchat. As usual Ingrid has gifts to give, body lotion: we need to visit her Instagram to win them. She signs off, “I will see you guys tomorrow!”
Ingrid Nilsen had created Vlogmas, a holiday vlogging challenge, in 2011. She was good at it. She loved it, at first. Each year more vloggers joined in, testing their endurance during Vlogust, Vlogtober, Vlogmas in July, VEDA (vlog every day in April). As Nilsen aged and her real-life holiday responsibilities grew, Vlogmas became less fun. Producing regular, compelling clips started to feel like a monotonous job.
Nearing twenty-six, Nilsen was now a YouTube elder, part of a second generation of broadcasters who saw the platform less as a stepping-stone than as a full-time career. Earlier that year Nilsen had signed an endorsement deal as the first YouTuber CoverGirl “Glambassador,” which required shooting videos for the drugstore brand. Beauty magazines that once dismissed her act now called nonstop. People devised a new name for creators like Nilsen: influencer.
Starting in 2014, Wojcicki launched an advertising campaign to promote such influencers to mainstream audiences. Variety published a survey that summer that showed American teens were more familiar with YouTubers like Smosh and PewDiePie than A-listers like Jennifer Lawrence and Johnny Depp. The survey whizzed around YouTube’s office, confirming its new belief that its old strategy of courting celebrities was obsolete. YouTube had its own celebs. Wojcicki’s ad campaign, dubbed Spotlight, plastered their faces on billboards, subway trains, and TV ads, starting with a trio of female “Lifestyle” YouTubers—one known for makeup, one for “haul” videos, one for cooking. The company had a new term for stars with commercial appeal: “endemic creators,” a native species.
All this new promotion invited even more YouTubers to chase fame and fortune and made some of the site’s veterans feel an immense, exhausting pressure to keep up.
Olga Kay had made her splash on YouTube before most “Lifestyle” stars, and she was famous in YouTubeland for hustling harder than everyone else. Kay first uploaded YouTube footage of juggling routines—she had joined a circus troop in Russia, her native country, at age fourteen—but soon gravitated to the thrilling intimacy of vlogging. She posted a medley of confessional diaries, antic skits, whatever stuck. Petite, with a heart-shaped face and boundless energy, Olga Kay became a staple of YouTube’s first motley crew. She appeared in Maker Studios clips with LisaNova and juggled swords onstage at VidCon. No other YouTuber arrived at VidCon’s hotel with a bulky iMac in tow; she had taught herself to edit footage and had to keep doing so during the conference, obviously.
To make money back then, YouTubers needed serious subscribers, and Kay noticed she could attract more with personal touches. Each time someone subscribed, she went to that person’s YouTube page and left a comment: “Thank you for subscribing, from Russia with love.” Others might see that and come to her page. Rinse, repeat. She posted while watching movies at home and during her day job in TV production. Hundreds an hour sometimes.
“Thank you for subscribing, FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE:)”
Slowly, some success came. She received her first check from YouTube: fifty-four cents. This is good, she told herself. That’s going to be $5 tomorrow. Some days she put in twelve hours of work making YouTube videos. By 2014 her YouTube earnings topped $100,000 for the third year in a row. It was good money, but that was before taxes, before investments in merchandise (she sold her own), before hiring an editor. And it required that she produce twenty videos a week across her channels, a new kind of juggling.
And then YouTube’s second generation and all the demanding social apps arrived. Kay adapted to YouTube’s watch-time change, uploading gaming and makeup videos. At YouTube events she learned that her fans were mostly teenage girls. Kay, then in her early thirties, made videos to show that femininity could be unconventional, oddball, blemished. She posted once a week until she discovered that no longer worked. To stay relevant, she needed to post daily.
Olga Kay: “I AM NOT READY!!!” January 21, 2015. 4:29.
She holds her iPhone at arm’s length and films herself lying on the couch, in selfie pose. “Why am I making this video? Because I have lots of pimples and I just want to show you what it looks like on my face. There’s so many of them.” She points to one on the left ridge above her lip. “I am just like everybody else.” Another reason for posting, she continues, is that she has shot two really awesome videos but they are not yet ready. “Well, I want to post something for you guys to let you know that I’m still here.”
In April of 2015 YouTube invited more than a hundred of its stars to a studio space in Manhattan’s fashion district for the inaugural YouTube Creator Summit, its very own video conference. There was fancy catering and a David Blaine magic performance, but no mobs of teenage fans. Still, creators felt a need to be on. One vlogger filmed the lunch, turning a camera on Ingrid Nilsen, who sat casually eating a salad in a gray hoodie. She performed on cue, lighting up with a smile and banter.
But Nilsen left the summit feeling inspired. YouTube offered production tips and truly celebrated its dedicated video weirdos, finally treating them like A-listers. YouTube, too, deemed the gathering a triumph. Inside the company, staff often discussed the two paths to creator success: the SNL model, where performers used YouTube as a springboard into movies and TV, and the Oprah model, where creators built an empire of loyal audiences right on YouTube. The summit was full of mini-Oprahs.
The summit also reminded YouTube of the growing competition in its rearview mirror. Nearly every YouTuber there pulled out their phones at some point to snap a selfie for Instagram. This was the hot moment for social apps: Instagram, Snapchat, and Vine, a service for six-second video loops. People only needed their phones to post on those apps, not the cameras and editing software YouTube demanded. Ambitious creators felt compelled to be on all the apps, all the time. Those apps didn’t pay creators yet, minimizing YouTube’s fears, but Vessel, a new video service from Hulu’s founder, did and it had signed up marquee YouTubers like Nilsen to produce exclusive material. YouTube business staff weren’t too worried about Vessel until they heard that Larry Page was, prompting a furious scramble for a strategy to snuff the rival out. (That strategy, called Platinum internally, involved giving select stars big advances on ad revenue to keep them loyal to YouTube.)
But no rival worried YouTube quite like Facebook.
In 2012 Facebook had paid $1 billion for Instagram, which now looked like a steal; the photo app captured the youth zeitgeist like nothing since YouTube. For a while Facebook was a useful adversary: YouTube clips shared on the social network often went gangbusters, like they did on MySpace back in YouTube’s early days. Around 2014, YouTube managers noticed video traffic from Facebook start to sputter. Then tank. The social network had its own video player and it seemed to be favoring posts in its feed that used that over outside services like YouTube. Facebook planned to add a livestreaming feature and video functions to Instagram. Google Plus had, by then, withered to zilch. “Google had kicked its own ass in social,” said one YouTube manager. “And now Facebook is coming after video.”
Facebook’s big assault came when it teamed with Nielsen, TV’s standard bearer, for a system that let marketers run commercials on TV and Facebook using the same audience ratings system. Essentially, it was a screw-you to YouTube. This world—the wonky operations of digital advertising—was where Wojcicki had spent most of her career. She immediately put more systems in place to bundle YouTube channels like TV. She seized control of ad operations from the multichannel networks, which YouTube had let sell ads willy-nilly. No more. The MCNs, already rattled from YouTube’s earlier changes, took a further bruising during its new fight with Facebook over measuring commercial messages online. The urgency was apparent. Google, recalled Maker Studios’ David Sievers, was the “massive, eight-hundred-pound gorilla. They can’t lose that war.”
Yet in this war YouTube felt like an underdog. YouTube had claimed more of people’s time: it went from racking up five minutes of average daily viewing sessions in 2011 to forty minutes a day in 2015 on phones alone. But Facebook earned far more in ad sales, a discrepancy that partially inspired one of Wojcicki’s first big hairy goals as CEO: the 2020-20 plan, set in 2015, to cross $20 billion in revenue within five years.
Competition from social apps, little dopamine machines, might also have explained Wojcicki’s other major order as YouTube chief. Early in her tenure she looked at the data and concluded that the site was very good at getting existing viewers to watch more, a nice steady ramp to its billion-hour goal. But it was less good at growing the overall number of daily viewers. Larry Page had a favorite Larry-ism about this: “the toothbrush test”; Google’s products were only worthy of existence if people used them as often as they brushed their teeth. So Wojcicki tasked her engineering team with adjusting the recommendations algorithm to favor videos that brought in daily viewers, again and again.
All this explained the lavish treatment of the mini-Oprahs. YouTube hoped to equip its star creators to be their own media showrunners who could match TV’s daily output and ad rates. To do that, YouTube wanted a tighter bond with its stars, though it had to overcome a sizable cultural gap. Ariel Bardin, a Googler Wojcicki had recruited as a YouTube executive, went on a tour to meet YouTubers early in his tenure. In Los Angeles he visited Matthew Patrick, a former musical actor whose well-known channel, the Game Theorists, mixed theatrical bombast with a scholastic knowledge of gaming lore, science, and YouTube. Patrick started with an icebreaker, “What YouTube channels do you watch?”
“Vice,” Bardin replied.
Patrick flinched. The trendy Brooklyn media operation had raised more outside funding after receiving a YouTube grant. To most YouTubers, Vice typified the corporate-backed poseur stuff taking over their site, the kind of channel people with no real attachment to YouTube culture watched. “Okay, who else?” Patrick asked. The executive didn’t have an answer.
At the first Creator Summit, Patrick sat near the front row as a DJ spun tracks ahead of the main act. Every creator there knew Patrick by his YouTube nom de guerre, MatPat. YouTube, the company, didn’t. As the official presentation began, the company posted images of its creators on the gigantic video screens. Smosh! iJustine! MatPat! A photo was displayed of a different dude, not Patrick. Ouch.
Kyncl took the stage. “There are so many wonderful faces here that I love,” he began in his deep baritone. “Creators such as—” Pregnant pause.
Uh, Patrick wondered, could he not think of anyone’s name? Finally, Kyncl named Hannah Hart, a YouTuber whose face shone on the billboards YouTube plastered around the city.
Felix Kjellberg was dressed as a doll, getting whipped by a dominatrix and obeying orders from his own voice piped from a loudspeaker. It was all very surreal.
Inside YouTube, while Wojcicki worried about Facebook, Robert Kyncl had a different concern: his old company, Netflix. In 2013, the streaming service premiered House of Cards, an original series that became a megahit. Amazon had started producing streaming shows too, diving gracefully into the golden age of TV and prestige. Why couldn’t YouTube? After failing to generate hits with A-listers, Kyncl pivoted to a new strategy. YouTube would finance its own shows, called Originals, available only to its paid subscribers and starring creators its audience loved. Netflix and Amazon had followed traditional media’s model, letting showrunners and producers pick the story lines and stars. Sumner Redstone, Viacom’s mogul, had a famous credo to defend the financial value of this model: “Content is king.” At YouTube, they devised their own credo for their approach to the House of Cards era: the audience is king.
So that’s why YouTube’s audience got to watch Kjellberg get whipped in episode 9 of his YouTube series Scare PewDiePie, which debuted in early 2016.
Maker Studios produced the show, which placed Kjellberg in real-world simulations of horror games from his videos. Scare PewDiePie leaned heavily on reality-TV tropes; later in episode 9, Kjellberg fished through raw meat and roaches to solve puzzles à la Fear Factor. Kjellberg gamely went along, but his series received lackluster reviews and interest. Perhaps it was because Kjellberg played himself—a reserved, slightly awkward YouTuber—not PewDiePie, the cartoonish maniac he performed on-screen. Despite good production the series felt like stale TV. Those around Kjellberg noticed that filming it drained his energy.
As YouTube premiered more than a dozen of these Originals shows, many YouTubers noticed a central paradox. On the one hand, YouTube wanted gloss, pizzazz, expense; in Los Angeles, the company converted a 40,000-square-foot airplane hangar into a state-of-the-art production studio for select creators called YouTube Space. But YouTube’s algorithm still wanted the opposite. It desired watch time and daily views; videos that delivered that were usually made cheap. But they rose to the top. One YouTube executive later lamented that its creator team had gone from nurturing talent and creativity to “searching for people that fit the metrics.”
For many YouTubers, the site’s foundational culture of independence and accessibility started to feel a bit antithetical to a mass-media advertising business. “To be both authentic and relatable becomes very hard when you’re doing this professionally,” Hank Green, the VidCon founder, lamented in a video called “Honest YouTube Talk Time.” Olga Kay felt this tension all the time. She didn’t have quite enough subscribers to get invited to star summits, though she did entertain offers from movie studios and networks. They looked for Hollywood-style production, but Kay knew YouTube’s fans and machines didn’t want that; they preferred her talking at home to her camera. They demanded frequency. Kay continued posting about twenty videos a week. Friends would invite her out. “If I can’t film there,” she replied, “then I have to stay home and make content.”
She occasionally made content at YouTube’s Los Angeles studio but mostly went there for ad hoc consulting. An MCN wanted to sign her gaming network. She once brought the network’s paperwork to Andy Stack, the YouTube manager.
Stack eyed her figures. “You’re going to lose so much money,” he said, advising her to turn down the offer. Like others at Google, Stack had concluded that MCNs, with their iffy contracts and mafioso tactics, were no bueno; another YouTube staffer called the networks “parasites.”
Still, YouTube’s shortcomings as a place for managing talent was becoming clearer. Stack oversaw the system that doled out payments to millions of creators in its Long Tail. Its daunting size struck him when Google lawyers called to alert him to new compliance measures required because these payments were becoming material to Google’s daily revenue. All these YouTubers needed systems to track money flow and the site’s frequent updates. Other companies might set up a call center or hire teams devoted to managing broadcasters. Not Google. “The Google way of solving problems is to throw machines at them, not people,” said Stack. A team of engineers created a computer system to address needs without having to involve a phone call or a human. But machines could leave creators in a lurch. Under Wojcicki, YouTube’s systems had become more aggressive at identifying videos that might offend advertisers (too much cursing or innuendo) and stripping them of ads. Yet after the system pulled a creator’s income, it didn’t clearly notify them or offer an explanation. In a meeting Stack pleaded with colleagues for better resources. “You know, if you get arrested, at least you get a phone call,” he said.
Sometimes, the machines screwed up. On one occasion YouTube updated its skin-detection algorithm, which automatically flagged porn or sexual exploitation for removal. Someone turned a dial too far. The update was introduced (with no public announcement), and suddenly scores of bodybuilders on YouTube, a popular niche, saw their videos disappear, victims of a system that couldn’t differentiate porn from Speedos. Kathleen Grace, a YouTube employee, watched this all unfold. Oh, she realized about the algorithms, they can’t know everything.
Grace ran YouTube’s Los Angeles studio, where creators came through not only to shoot but to unload. One female YouTuber, distraught over her falling viewership numbers, told Grace about her plans to rebound: she would spend six weeks filming more than three hundred videos, post one daily, and meanwhile create a whole separate YouTube show. The YouTuber had gone 10x. Grace, who had produced and directed web video since YouTube’s inception, stared at the creator’s plans. This is insane, she thought. Another YouTuber broke down in tears, exhausted from posting regular videos that lasted more than ten minutes, long enough for an algorithmic boost. “It’s just a treadmill of pain,” Grace said. “It’s not a way to be creative.” Bing Chen, another YouTube employee who worked with creators, tried running his own channel with frequent postings as an experiment. Despite leading man looks, Chen resigned quickly. “It’s a hundred-hour job,” he told colleagues. “It’s just so much work.”
As a side project Stack had converted his home in the Hollywood Hills into the Alchemy House, an artists’ space he imagined as a haven for creativity. He invited musicians and YouTubers. Olga Kay first arrived stunned to see Stack, who dressed conservatively at work, in shorts and blue nail polish; Stack, like many Googlers, was a Burning Man regular. In 2013, Stack reconverted his Alchemy House into a “decompression space.” After each VidCon, he invited YouTubers to come enjoy drinks and panoramic views, free from crowds, cameras, and the pressing need to upload.
Perhaps Kay could have kept going on this treadmill if it were only twenty YouTube videos a week. But all the social apps, eager for slices of YouTube’s business, began calling. Kay lost it with one call about Snapchat. The messaging app had invented a format, Stories, that let people share fleeting photos or videos. A brand representative asked Kay if she could shoot five of them for a sponsored deal, ten seconds each. They would pay $7,000.
A pretty good offer, and yet her hands shook as she considered it. She felt angry and ill at the prospect of filming even fifty seconds more. She simply couldn’t. Wow, she thought. I am done. This is not good. Is this what she wanted to do in her forties? Her sixties? Constantly live on camera, reinventing herself to grab people’s attention? Nope. “I just want to have a normal life,” she decided.
The company knew something was askew with its creator economy. But it had another corporate hubbub to deal with.
That August in 2015, Larry Page had shocked the world (and most Googlers) by announcing the creation of Alphabet, a new holding company that would split his empire into several stand-alone businesses: one for Google, one for self-driving cars, one for smart thermostats, and so on. YouTube seemed like a natural splinter; it already operated with a different name and office. Leaders there considered plans to become a separate Alphabet unit, detached from Google. Wojcicki wanted to keep reporting to Page, who had appointed himself Alphabet CEO, rather than his successor at Google, Sundar Pichai. But ultimately it was decided YouTube was too intertwined with Google’s business and machinery to leave. So it stayed at Google.
That year Wojcicki had also brought on two new executives to shape YouTube’s future. Neither had a background in media production, but they were both Google veterans. Neal Mohan had cut YouTube’s first big ad deal, in its office above the pizza shop, as a director at DoubleClick, and he had stayed with Google’s ad division after the DoubleClick acquisition. He had two Stanford degrees, an NBA obsession, and the careful elocution of an accountant. Within Google he was known as a political master, someone who could “manage up.” One YouTube director recalled having a tense standoff with Wojcicki during a Tuesday meeting. By Thursday, Wojcicki had changed her mind. Mohan “had done some Jedi mind trick behind the scenes,” the director recalled. This paid off. A publication reported in 2011 that Google had given Mohan a $100 million bonus to counter an offer from Twitter. Some Google colleagues then ribbed Mohan as the “hundred-million-dollar man,” much to his chagrin.
Wojcicki put Mohan in charge of YouTube’s product, and he quickly became her top deputy. As his deputy, Mohan recruited Ariel Bardin, the executive fond of Vice—a fast-talking, blunt Israeli who had been at Google since 2004, most recently running its payments service. When he and Mohan arrived, they looked at figures in the creator economy and saw serious inequities. Most ad money flowed to the top one hundred creators. What if a few of them went elsewhere or quit producing? Was the compensation system really a level playing field? The new executives developed a plan to redraw YouTube’s entire payment system based on mathematical measures of success. They called this Project Beane after Billy Beane, the unorthodox baseball general manager featured in Moneyball.
They had another nickname for the project: “boil the ocean,” a nod to the Herculean engineering task required. YouTube had used this phrase before to describe big, successful efforts to remake its service for apps and TVs. So as 2016 began, the company prepared to solve the financial problems of its creator class with engineering, like usual. It didn’t seem like there were other major problems on the horizon.