Roger’s $0.02 - Feeding the Beast (Patreon)

image by lukasbieri 

Linus Tech Tips is the poster child for the power of the YouTube platform. Founder, Linus Sebastian, has grown a small niche YouTube channel focused on PC hardware into a multi-million dollar media enterprise with branches in merchandising, online video streaming, and an annual convention. Now the company faces strong headwinds as allegations of incomplete product reviews, questionable editorial ethics, and workplace harassment have surfaced online over the past week. 

It would be easy to focus the column on LTT’s woes but I think many of the issues raised by these allegations point to a problem that hasn’t been well addressed with the creator community. Feeding the beast. 

So how does this tie into the creator space? When you build an audience for your content you want to keep the momentum going. And the momentum in the creator space is keeping if not growing your audience. To do that you need to regularly put out content. There’s a reason why so many have flocked to TikTok and Instagram before that. Yet for those who find success with the platform, they’ll also find added pressure to produce and generate content that syncs with the platform’s algorithm. What once was a casual part-time interest has now become an endless treadmill of filling up your channel with new content. You dare not miss feeding the beast, the algorithm that determines your success or failure on the platform. 

This is a place where I think there should be more discussion. The need to constantly feed a content treadmill can lead to burn-out, unethical behavior, or worse. Often the excitement of reaching audience milestones and views achieved can paper over a lot of the problems with the way many creators set up their production pipeline. 

Anyone who’s worked in daily or weekly TV, radio, or streaming programming knows what I’m talking about. The beast is the insatiable appetite for content that shows create when it builds an audience. The process can run any person or group ragged. You constantly need to come up with new ideas, new guests, new discussions, or new angles on the same content over and over again. In my time at TechTV, I worked on live daily shows. Except maybe three weeks out of the year, we needed to come up with new segments to fill out around 250 days of live shows. When I moved to Revision 3, I needed to come up with content to fill 120 days' worth of shows. And that was just one of the three shows I had produced weekly. Constantly needing to come up with new content regularly eventually takes its toll. I’ve easily burned through 50 hours to 60 hours a week to generate content and meet deadlines. I mean we were running out of ideas and time at one point. Late nights shooting video until 1 am, fatigue, and missed meals didn’t help the situation. A few colleagues I’ve worked with have had their Come to Jesus moments where mental and emotional exhaustion caused them to go on hiatus, leave, or quit the business altogether. 

For anyone curious to see how that manifests in content just watch any TV reality show with multiple seasons. Towards the end of some of these shows the on-camera personalities begin to look tired, grouchy, and over it. There’s a reason why shows like Myth Busters added Tory, Kari, and Grant in addition to Adam and Jamie in their mid-seasons. It’s a lot of work to make content. The more that people can help the fewer sleepless nights you have burning the midnight oil trying to meet a deadline. It’s a sign of producer(s) understanding the limits of what people and a show can regularly produce. Keeping everyone and everything in good health ensures production is sustainable. Those who try to burn the candle at both ends often lead to problems with the cast, production crew, and content quality.

With LTT I believe the stress of trying to meet deadlines and maintain its huge audience caused the production machine to cut corners ethically and professionally. When a group is under stress much of the pre-existing issues will boil to the surface. Need to crank out a benchmarked review of a new GPU that needs to go up by the end of the week expect to stay in the office until it's done. Or if you can’t afford the time and money maybe cut a few bits of the review and skip a few benchmarks. A few cuts here and there eventually turn into a torrent of cascading problems. Instead of building slack into the production schedule, staff were expected to adjust to the schedule regardless of the circumstances. This is not to excuse or rationalize the allegations of worker harassment. Those are very serious issues and ultimately everything boils down to management. Management of people’s time, management of people’s behavior, and management of people’s expectations.