Tom Scott Was Right (and YouTube Is Making It Worse)

Transcript

YouTube is currently testing a feature that will merge your hard drives and drive more Creators to burnout. Google has just drawn a clear line of what they consider “real” Creators. And Twitch actually announced some surprisingly good technical updates in Rotterdam. We also need to talk about Tom Scott. Let’s get straight into the Creator News. We already know there are A/B tests for thumbnails and titles. However, multiple sources report that YouTube is now testing entire video files.

The screenshot clearly shows an updated interface where you can compare your titles, thumbnails, and videos. You can actually upload multiple different video files for a single release, and the algorithm will A/B test the content based on watch time. We’ve also seen different interfaces showcasing three various retention graphs to emphasize the importance of your retention to YouTube. While this sounds like a powerful data-driven tool, it’s a logistical nightmare for solo Creators. This feature heavily focuses on corporate channels like Coca-Cola or large Creator collectives like MrBeast or Linus Tech Tips, who have entire media teams to handle three different hooks and render three different files. If YouTube starts favoring channels that can afford A/B testing with entire video files, solo Creators will be left behind. Don’t let these platforms trick you into tripling your editing time for a single upload. Preserve your time, or you’ll surely burn out.

Shifting to the broader Google ecosystem: YouTube just announced Google Search profiles for YouTube Creators, allowing you to organize all your platform links directly on a search card. However, the official requirements show how Google views the ecosystem. It’s currently only available in the US and requires at least 100,000 subscribers on YouTube, Instagram, or X, or 300,000 followers on TikTok to claim your profile. Google is finally treating mid-to large-size Creators like real businesses, similar to Google Business Profiles.

Once you reach this size, you’re a professional entity and need to act accordingly. By the way, if you think Linktree is an alternative, don’t use Linktree to organize your brand. Linktree sent out emails this week confirming they use hosted content on the platform for AI scraping. If you want to protect your data and control your own traffic, build a decent self-hosted website.

Moving on to Twitch. They just wrapped up TwitchCon in Rotterdam, and cutting through the PR jargon, there are actually some solid wins for Creators. Firstly, they’re rolling out 1440p or 2K streaming universally, with an increased bitrate of 9 megabits per second. That’s still far from the 4K at 50 Mbps YouTube offers, but it’s a start in terms of better quality.

How they’ll fund the infrastructure behind this quality push is a mystery since we know their sales team has been internally consolidated with the Prime Video Ads team. As a second piece of news, they’re introducing dual-format streaming. That means you can stream both horizontally and vertically simultaneously if you use client-side encoding.

For those already pushing to TikTok Live or YouTube Shorts Live, this is huge, especially if you use OBS with an Aitum plugin for the vertical canvas and multi-RTMP to blast it everywhere, as long as your bandwidth can handle it. And thirdly, credit where credit’s due: If you’re a streamer in a Eurozone country, Twitch is lifting currency conversion fees of 1 to 2.5% for Crown payouts. More of your money actually hits your account.

By the way, we talked about Creator Burnout earlier in this episode. Tom Scott did a Creator Support episode at Wired this week, and he said exactly what we’ve been preaching for years. When asked about A/B testing titles and thumbnails, he explicitly said, “I hate having to create three titles and three thumbnails. It’s constant work.” He also emphasized that the most important thing to prevent Creator burnout is a content buffer. You can’t survive the algorithm with lifetime uploads. This whole mess is why we’re building the KW Hub.

I’m tired of seeing content creators burn out because they don’t have realistic capacity planning. We’re developing software that focuses on preventing this burnout by accurately reflecting production times and planning ahead. Additionally, we want to offer you a professional network for collaborations. If this sounds good, please consider filling out the survey below, which I’ve pinned in the comments. We need more data so we can develop solutions faster and closer to what creators truly need.

Subscribe for relevant creator news, and I’ll see you next week with more updates.