What writers can learn from the YouTuber who abandoned 600k subscribers

You'll like this if you hate making videos ;-)

In my experience, most writers are never going to use YouTube - typically, you HATE the idea of video content. You don’t want to appear on camera - no, not even in the background - you won’t be caught dead lip-syncing or pointing at words hanging in mid-air (tbf I entirely endorse this decision), and you’d rather delete every raised eyebrow in your first draft than talk to camera.

If you agree short-form video has benefits that make it worth experimenting with, you then have to get to grips with the filming, editing, audio and other features before you have anything useable. To be very clear, with practise, creating short-form video content gets easier, but at first it can be a real - or should that be, Reel (sorry) - ordeal.

At the start of 2023 I did a mini fist pump when Instagram announced it was going to roll at least part of the way back from its over-amplification of short-form video. They admitted they had taken it too far, and committed to adjusting the algorithms to serve users the types of content they most often engaged with.

You’ll have noticed that Reels haven’t disappeared from the Home feed, and they’ve continued to enjoy their own dedicated feed (this extra visibility is why they’re good for ‘discoverability’), BUT if you’re a user who mostly interacts with static posts or carousels, if Instagram has held true to its promise, you should now find these being prioritised in your feed.

This is why I’ve been telling every writer who’ll listen that if you don’t want to create short-form video, you don’t have to! Yes, there are benefits to using it, but it’s not a non-negotiable.

However, after the recent news that sports YouTuber Jake Settleman has abandoned his almost 600k subscribers on the platform, it seems there is another reason to feel vindicated in this rejection of short-form video: it doesn’t always work.

Jake Settleman built his original following on Snapchat, posting short clips featuring amusing antics of team mascots, or NBA highlights. He then ventured into podcasting which he has since developed into a sports media company. When he posted his videos onto YouTube Shorts some of them accumulated nearly 200 million views. But when he tried to monetise these videos…crickets 🦗

Settleman isn’t the first social media superstar to find out numbers don’t equal fans: the internet is littered with stories of musicians who couldn’t sell t-shirts, and influencers who couldn’t sell books, but when this happens, what is going on?

And why is it relevant to writers?

Kevin Kelly’s 1000 True Fans theory states that all an artist needs to make a living is 1000 true fans. These are the people who are going to pay for everything you do, and (importantly) tell everyone who will listen about you. The theory isn’t perfect but it neatly makes the point that to make a living as an artist, you don’t have to have hundreds of thousands of fans on social media or anywhere else.

What is far more important is the strength of the relationships with your 1000 true - or core - fans.

This is the challenge for creators who’ve attracted followings based on short-form video content of the kind popularised by Tiktok that then migrated over to Instagram when they developed (ahem… stole?) Reels.

Short form video creates a dynamic between audience and ‘creator’ that is more akin to the relationship between a TV show and its audience. There is something distinctly passive about how we sit back and consume video content, rarely fully engaging with it.

Motivating users of social media platforms to exit their dopamine-seeking scrolls to actually do something is in fact really hard. If they’ve followed, or subscribed to, your account because they find your videos entertaining, this often isn’t a strong enough driver for them to take any action other than consuming the content, maybe sending it to a friend, then scrolling on.

This passivity contrasts sharply to the dialogue that often emerges on Instagram between the audience and the ‘creator’ of a finely crafted carousel post, or in the comments underneath an interesting image combined with a moving piece of personal story-telling in the caption. What both have in common is a more active form of engagement is required from the start: reading.

Short form video might work if your goal is simply to aggregate people into an audience but if you want them to do anything other than watch more of your short-form videos, you need to do something more.

Personal stories, expertise, and thought-leadership stir reactions and motivate responses from audiences. The subsequent dialogue is where relationships are formed as when a writer brings you their story, we often feel compelled to share our own in return.

Writer,

Katherine May

, put this perfectly in a conversation at Hay Festival this year (you can watch the clip here) when she said, ‘we often forget that story-telling originated as a face-to-face practice, happening on a small scale in families and communities. The idea that stories reside in printed books, which you can read without meeting the author, is historically recent.’

May expands on the challenges this presents if an author’s profile grows significantly - as hers has - as the dialogue between author and audience becomes unbalanced and distorted. In the first instance however, I love the idea that social media offers a partial path to return to a more personal, inter-connected form of story-telling.

Though often, and fairly, criticised, social media still offers a way to exchange experiences and enrich one another’s understanding of ourselves, each other and the world around us. It still offers a route to finding the readers who will care about your work almost as much as you do.

But very few people are able to create the kind of short-form video that facilitates these kinds of relationships.

Relationships between writers and your audiences thrive best when you use social media to communicate thoughts, ideas, passions and interests, through your words.

Something you know a little about ;-)

How do you feel about using short-form video? Do you consume it? Do you create it? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments, Nic x

Photo by GR Stocks on Unsplash