Let us talk about pressure. (Patreon)

Hey everybody! I would like to talk to you about pressure today. Kurzgesagt had its best year ever in 2016 (well, ok, there have only been two other years, BUT STILL!). We gained two million subscribers, we made what I think are some of the best videos we ever published. We got an amazing reception and a huge amount of views.

And while this is great, it is also horrifying. As a creator on youtube you are always confronted with the fact that it could end any time. The biggest creators from yesterday suddenly become less visible and then disappear, new ones ready to take their places. Nothing is for certain on Youtube. It does not matter who you are and what you do, if you stop delivering whatever the people are paying you with their very valuable time for, then you will just fade away. This is how the internet works and it would be stupid to lament about that. But it fills you with pressure and anxiety. Every time you up your game you basically have to stay on that level. It is very hard to go back and be playful because this could mean that it might damage what you build.

Also, whoever you are, you are judged on your last few pieces of content. You might have a few „big“ videos from last year, but while that is great and all, the last few things you made count always the most.

If you had a particularly successful and lucky streak like we had this year, it is maddening. After „safe and sorry“ all of our videos went at least semi viral. Every one of them was on the front page of reddit. The least successful video we made this year has 1.6 million views. I mean, seriously, what is happening?

So now the next few videos have to be amazing too, right? If we make a video that reddit does not care about and that *only* gets like 800K views that will be a failure, right? Success like the last few months can drive you into a corner where you feel like you have to deliver greatness always, or all you achieved will go away. The problem is you never know what makes a video great – after all that time I still only predict correctly about 1/3rd of the time how a video will do. Also, there just is no formula. Sometimes you have a good feeling about something but in the end all you can do is work really hard and try your best. But the pressure can get overwhelming and stun you. This is why I haven’t been able to write anything good in the last three weeks and now am writing this text instead of doing something useful. It’s like writers block. All this expectation you feel from the outside and the pressure you put on yourself to prove that you still got it. Whatever „IT“ means, it's probably not even a real thing.

So to conclude this rambling with a solution or something like that: I met a good friend yesterday, also a creator on the internet, and we talked about this – his way of dealing with too much "It has to be awesome" pressure is to deliberately try to break the combo. Trying, on purpose, to make some niche content that is more specific to your subscribers and probably won’t reach too far beyond that. Which releases all the pressure and makes you sane again. This is what needs to happen now. So the next two videos will not have very clickbaity topics but be quite hard science (explaining technology again, wooo!) and something totally different we never tried before. Of course we will give it our best, as always, to make the videos as good as possible – but we have to phase out the reality of youtube for a while. Hope you will stay with us through all of that – but then again, it is our job to make our videos worth your time.

OK! This was kind of a personal post so I hope it was not oversharing. Since we generally prefer not to talk too much about our processes I thought you might find it interesting what weird first world problems come with doing Youtube. –Philipp