Kind of a trend, the amount of youtubers who i had loved but their content became generic after gaining popularity is quite a bit, most drastic one being mrwhosetheboss, his uniqueness went down faster than MH27 MH17
The clickbait is what gets me.
The video is covering the Toughbook CF-19 but it’s not mentioned in the title and the thumbnail looks like generic YouTube trash and makes me not want to watch it out of principle.
Unfortunately, the stupid thumbnail and clickbait title is by design. Linus has spoken about this long before the latest controversy, but unfortunately they do increase views.
I’m fact, they trial different titles and monitor which brings in more views - if you catch a video early enough, you’ll probably notice the title change a few hours later as they trial different ones. So as frustrating as it is, it’s a symptom of the platform and the market at large.
For all of Linus’ flaws and mistakes, he’s generally a good businessman and make no mistake, LMG is a business at the end of the day. Put yourself in his shoes, is he going to do the thing that will get him 1,000 views but put off 1 person, or appeal to that 1 person but lose 1,000 views? It sucks, he been vocal about how much he also hates it, but it is what it is. His goal is to grow his business, at least he’s up front about it.
I’m not completely defending Linus as an individual here, he’s definitely fucked up a lot (especially lately), he still thinks he’s a “little YouTuber” and doesn’t appreciate how much sway he has, how his words can destroy an entire business overnight - the very thing his own company was nearly hit by several times in the past when he was small - but the clickbait and thumbnails aren’t something I think he should be blamed for, he’s just playing the YouTube game and if I was in his position, I’d do the same.
I get it. It’s just not something I appreciate and at times it has gotten so annoyingly cringy I’ve unsubscribed for a bit.
The combination of the Youtuber face thumbnails and the lack of descriptive thumbnails makes me irregularly watch their videos. Probably as irregularly as if I wasn’t subscribed and was finding them through the related video section.
Yup I hear that. I know they use different video titles because they’ve talked about that on the show a few times, but having worked in a very SEO-driven business myself, I would be surprised if they don’t pay attention to all of the metrics - including numbers of unsubscribers (Which you can get a breakdown of per video) and things like that.
In this line of business, there’s always some amount of churn/attrition, you literally cannot please everyone when your audience is tens or even hundreds of millions of people. The best you can do is aim for the net gain/growth and when you don’t hit that, learn from it.
You’re doing the right thing by unsubscribing, if you’re not enjoying the content or engaging with it, that’ll literally tell them as much. The only issue is if that same content is engaging with more other people, there’s a good chance they won’t miss you as a subscriber. Which sucks, but that’s just business. It’s one of the reasons why so many youtube channels have gone downhill, because you end up invariably chasing the numbers and the numbers are decidedly mainstream. LTT is firmly in that camp now.
They increase views at the cost of credibility. Not worth the cost in my opinion.
