Skip to content

My Thoughts on Why YouTubers Are Quitting

2024-02-23 · Long video (solo, talking head or whiteboard) · Ali · recording, 33:59 · watch on YouTube

Topic: YouTube, writing online and creators (also: Business and entrepreneurship) · mode: Explanation and tutorial · tags: His own products discussed, His own numbers, His medical past, Lesson from a book, Feel-Good Productivity thesis, Sponsor segment present

Ali looks at why so many YouTubers are quitting (a 24/7 job, the content hamster wheel, becoming a manager, boom and bust) and, as notes to himself, uses Stephen Covey's goose and golden eggs to argue for protecting the creator: keep it fun, treat YouTube as an infinite game, act as if you had won the lottery, work in a spirit of service, and set the box of your life before the goal.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — Introduction: a wave of YouTubers quitting, and why it is worth studying

  • ★★ Ali notes a recent wave of YouTubers quitting and finds it worth studying: YouTube looks like a dream job, yet many who have it leave over burnout, tiredness and stress. — 00:00:27 · YouTube, burnout
  • ★★ When people who already have what we aspire to say it is not all it is cracked up to be, Ali says it is worth taking that seriously and asking what to change now. — 00:01:13

00:01:45 — Why YouTubers quit: a 24/7 job and the never-ending content hamster wheel

  • ★★ The first reason Ali sees for YouTuber burnout: you trade a nine-to-five job for a 24/7 one, at a time when running your own business is glorified. — 00:02:05 · burnout, YouTube
  • ★★ Ali says that as a doctor he could switch off after work, but since starting his business at about 19 every waking hour has gone into thinking about it, in the shower, at the gym and with friends. — 00:03:05
  • ★★ The second reason Ali sees for YouTubers quitting is the never-ending content hamster wheel: algorithms and audience tastes keep changing and platforms keep saturating, so creators feel they can never take a break. — 00:03:28
  • ★★ If Ali allowed himself to make only productivity videos, he says he would burn out very quickly, running out of ideas and repeating himself. — 00:04:31
  • ★★ The fear that if they stop working it might all go away keeps many YouTubers up at night, Ali says, himself included. — 00:05:29

00:05:40 — Sponsor read for Epidemic Sound

00:06:55 — From creator to manager, boom and bust, and the 6Med revenue dip of 2016

  • ★★ A third reason Ali sees: once a channel is treated as a business, creators delegate editing, ideas, thumbnails and writing until they have outsourced and optimised the fun out of the job. — 00:06:57
  • ★★ Delegating turns a creator into a manager, and Ali says most creators neither enjoy managing nor are good at it; he says he is not a good manager himself. — 00:07:26
  • ★★ With a team, Ali says, a creator feels even less able to take a break: people's livelihoods and even mortgages depend on the salaries the creator pays. — 00:07:59
  • ★★ A fourth reason Ali sees: long-time YouTubers go through boom and bust, and in the bust YouTube analytics signal that the channel is dying, which is depressing. — 00:08:42 · YouTube
  • ★★ Will Smith (quoted): In his autobiography Will, Will Smith says losing money is bad but losing fame is even worse. — 00:09:07
  • ★★ Ali says the pain of feeling irrelevant cuts at the core of the human psyche, because humans evolved an intrinsic need for social status and the approval of others. — 00:09:07
  • ★★ In 2016, in the fourth year of his first business 6Med, which helped people get into medical school, revenue fell for the first time, from about 150K to 140K. (hedged) — 00:09:56 · 6med
  • ★★ The 6Med revenue dip sent Ali into a spiral of negativity; he read books about it and wrote "Time versus Money", the first blog post he put on his website. — 00:10:25 · aliabdaal.com

00:10:55 — What we can learn: the goose and the golden eggs

  • ★★ Stephen Covey (quoted): In The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey uses the farmer who kills the goose that lays golden eggs to show the difference between production and production capacity. — 00:11:40
  • ★★★ In YouTube or any business, Ali says, the videos are the golden eggs and the creator and the team are the goose, while social platforms push creators to focus on the eggs, not the goose's health. — 00:12:04 · YouTube
  • ★★ Ali says no analytic tracks the overall health of a channel or the mental health and sustainability of the creator and the team behind it. — 00:12:31
  • ★★★ Ali's lesson from YouTuber burnout: do not neglect the goose, meaning his own physical and mental health and enjoyment, and an enjoyable, sustainable, low-stress job for his team. — 00:13:18 · burnout, YouTube

00:13:33 — Keep it fun, play the infinite game, act as if you had won the lottery, connect to the spirit of service

  • ★★★ Taking a video game developer's line that, left unchecked, gamers optimise the fun out of a game, Ali says YouTubers chasing growth, viral videos and clickbait titles do the same. — 00:13:45

    “Left unchecked, gamers will optimize the fun out of the game that they're playing.”

  • ★★★ To keep the goose alive while it lays golden eggs, Ali advises making the process enjoyable and keeping it fun. — 00:14:15

  • ★★ Ali's team always asks how to help Ali have more fun filming; for his YouTube producer Tintin it is front of mind alongside the goal of growing the channel. — 00:14:15 · YouTube
  • ★★ Ali, who says he has read only the first page of Finite and Infinite Games, gives its thesis: life has finite and infinite games, and a finite game is played to win. — 00:14:57
  • ★★★ YouTube is now an infinite game for Ali: it started as a finite one, a channel he meant to run for about two years to see what happened. — 00:15:23 · YouTube
  • ★★ Keeping his dream job for the long term means, for Ali, being okay with under-optimising for growth, such as a long video with an unclickbaity title off the productivity category. — 00:15:50
  • ★★ Ali finds moments of asking why you do something really important, since it is useful to question your motives regularly; he questions why he does YouTube every three months or so. — 00:17:05 · YouTube
  • ★★ Asking himself whether he would still make YouTube videos with 100 million in the bank, Ali answers yes. — 00:17:05 · YouTube
  • ★★ Ali's lottery-winner channel would mean making videos whenever he wants, on topics he feels like, without thinking too hard about titles and thumbnails. — 00:17:33
  • ★★★ Ali asks how to act as if he had already won the lottery: build the channel he would make even unpaid, lean into it as far as a business allows, and keep it as a North Star to aim towards. — 00:18:07
  • ★ Ali has many YouTuber friends who would not do YouTube if they won the lottery: they do it primarily for money. — 00:18:54 · YouTube
  • ★★ It is very hard for something to feel like play or fun, Ali says, if the main reason for doing it is money. — 00:19:21
  • ★★★ Whether creators would make videos anyway or do it mainly for money, Ali says the place to get to is a place of service. — 00:20:03
  • ★★ Ali says we connect to intrinsic motivation, doing something for its own sake, when we feel there is a purpose behind what we are doing. — 00:20:03 · identified motivation
  • ★★ Daniel Pink (quoted): In Drive, a book about intrinsic motivation, Daniel Pink names three drivers from self-determination theory: autonomy, mastery and purpose. — 00:20:30
  • ★★ The point of this video, Ali says, is neither money nor followers but service: helping the person watching. — 00:20:59
  • ★★ The first point of Ali's pre-filming mantra: he does not care about the video's performance; his only goal is to share a message worth sharing for whoever wants to hear it. — 00:21:27
  • ★★ The fourth point of Ali's pre-filming mantra: he will enjoy himself and treat the process with lightness and ease. — 00:21:27
  • ★★ Before filming, Ali reads himself a five-point mantra to connect to the spirit of service behind a video. — 00:22:14
  • ★★ The fifth point of Ali's pre-filming mantra: he speaks to one individual who wants to learn from him and serves that person, not his ego, the retention stats or the algorithm. — 00:22:14
  • ★★★ To connect with service when planning a video, Ali imagines he is a tenured university lecturer giving a weekly lecture series called How to Build a Life You Love. — 00:22:43
  • ★ Ali calls Million Dollar Weekend by his friend Noah Kagan a really good book and recommends reading it. — 00:23:39 · Noah Kagan
  • ★★ Thinking about a video's revenue per mille (RPM) or likely views gives Ali an extrinsically motivated reason for making it. — 00:24:03

00:24:48 — James Clear's box, lifestyle first, a business that works for you and does not rely on views

  • ★★★ Ali advises connecting to the spirit of service in anything you do: it becomes more enjoyable, energising and intrinsically motivating. — 00:24:48 · identified motivation
  • ★★ While Ali was working out the promotion strategy for his book, James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, offered to join him on a Zoom call. — 00:24:48 · James Clear, Atomic Habits, Zoom, Feel-Good Productivity (book)
  • ★★ As Ali observes him, James Clear has not built an Atomic Habits course or a high-ticket offer, has about one team member and gives about two talks a month. (hedged) — 00:25:12 · James Clear, Atomic Habits
  • ★★★ James Clear (quoted): James Clear told Ali that what works for him is to draw a box around what he wants his day and his life to look like. — 00:25:44 · James Clear
  • ★★ James Clear (quoted): Within the box of the life he wants, James Clear has a block for work, and within that block he optimises for money. — 00:26:10 · James Clear
  • ★★ To be a present dad, James Clear works only between about 10am and 3pm; a course would break those constraints, needing a bigger team and making him a manager, so he decided against it. (hedged) — 00:26:10 · James Clear
  • ★★★ Ali advises defining the constraints you want to work under, not just a goal: a goal like two videos a week or a million subscribers without the limits of a box stretches you into burnout. — 00:26:47 · burnout
  • ★★ Ali's example constraints: work only between 10am and 3pm, never to deadlines, time off when ill, a month off every quarter; then find a way to the goal within them, or change the goal. — 00:27:21
  • ★★★ Ali's recipe for a happy, fulfilled, balanced life: start with the life you want, then find the YouTube channel, business or job that facilitates it without taking away from it. — 00:27:42 · YouTube
  • ★★★ The autonomy, freedom and money of entrepreneurship, passive income included, are for Ali a means to an end and not the end in itself. — 00:27:42 · passive income
  • ★★★ In his life update Ali decided to set no deadlines on videos and to film the videos he wants rather than those he thinks the audience wants, constraints that may hinder growth but suit his life. — 00:28:26

  • ★★ Asked at a retreat run by Tiago Forte whether he worked for his business or it for him, Ali felt he worked for it, like an employee; since then he has tried to make his business work for him. — 00:29:27 · Tiago Forte

    “do you work for your business or does your business work for you?”

  • ★★★ Ali advises building a business that does not rely on views: YouTubers who live on AdSense and brand deals are set up for burnout, always chasing views. — 00:29:27

  • ★★ To build a business that does not rely on view counts, Ali's team runs the Part-Time YouTuber Accelerator, a 12-month programme you apply to join, with weekly office hours with his team. — 00:30:09
  • ★★ Ali likes that much of the Part-Time YouTuber Accelerator is decorrelated from him: students take support requests to his team, not to him. — 00:30:49

00:31:41 — Quitting out of desire rather than pain, an impermanent audience, and sign-off

  • ★★ Ali says he may quit YouTube at some point, and that would be okay. (hedged) — 00:31:41 · YouTube
  • ★★★ If Ali quits YouTube, he wants the decision born of a desire for something different, not of pain and tiredness. — 00:32:09 · YouTube
  • ★★ Ali says many YouTubers come to realise the audience is impermanent: those who followed three years ago are probably not the ones watching now, and views falling is okay. — 00:32:35
  • ★★ For Ali the goal of a channel is not to grow the audience but to help people; growth is a welcome side effect that ideally brings leads to a business that does not rely on him. — 00:33:02

In the description and comments

  • ★ Ali Abdaal (channel): Asked how Ali grew his hair back, the channel answers: finasteride. — creator comment
  • ★ Ali Abdaal (channel): Asked whether a business can work for you without you first working for it, the channel agrees that when starting out it is generally an uphill battle. — creator comment

Threads in this video

Mentioned

Central: burnout · infinite game · James Clear · production and production capacity · YouTube

Also: People: Daniel Pink · Noah Kagan · Stephen Covey · Tiago Forte · Tintin · Will Smith

Projects: aliabdaal.com · Part-Time YouTuber Accelerator

Works: Atomic Habits · Drive · Feel-Good Productivity (book) · Finite and Infinite Games · Million Dollar Weekend · The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People · Will (book)

Organizations: 6med

Concepts: autonomy · extrinsic motivation · identified motivation · passive income · RPM · self-determination theory

Products: YouTube AdSense · Zoom

Only in the description or credits: Finasteride

Also centred on infinite game: How I Gained 1 MILLION Subscribers · Everything's Changing - Life Update · I Asked MKBHD and Mrwhosetheboss How to Grow on YouTube · 8 Steps That Got Me Millions of Subscribers on YouTube

Replies to

← Previous: The Protege Effect 🧑‍🏫 · Next → Why negative emotions are so destructive 😨