Reasons for creator downfalls and strategies for preventing them

This tweet will probably only really matter to 1% of creators, but here goes. This is a draft ⚠️so consider this a rough brainstorm, rather than a validated thesis. It comes mainly from a place of thinking about YouTube everyday for years, so would love contributions in terms of other people’s theories too. The topic is: creator downfalls and how to prevent them. ===📝=== We always talk about ways to grow your channel more, but they mask underlying issues that kill channels. Creator downfalls happen in three main ways: 1. Rapid downfalls over weeks 2. Fast downfalls over months 3. Slow downfalls over years So let’s talk about each. 🗒️WEEKS Rapid downfalls are easy to pick. They’re one of two things: - Being cancelled due to waves of negative public sentiment. These are obvious and dramatic. - A creator not capitalising on the momentum of their successes, by having little content overlap between successful videos. 🗒️MONTHS This can be one of two things: - A relatively inexperienced creator who hits with a banger, but is in “unconscious competence”. In other words, they have trouble creating consistent bangers. - A creator that for whatever reason created an idea that can’t exist in a format that is able to satisfy that same psychological appeal as their banger video. - A creator that has unsuccessfully tried to pivot niches, and is just creating something that people don’t want. - A creator that is so successful but with a smaller moat, that copycats saturate the supply aspect of supply-demand asymmetry (a concept I’ve talked about a lot elsewhere). - The creator creates something that garners a lot of immediate attention, but is ultimately kind of unsatisfying so doesn’t really build long term fans 🗒️YEARS This is the one I’m most interested in. The longevity of bigger creators is a really big discussion, and more complex, but also means there’s more solutions and things to try. Supply-demand asymmetry exists but dwindles slowly. Potential reasons: - The creator is not a character that draws a long term fan base - There is no longer term character archetype or style of the creator, and therefore no particular person to be invested in - The creator is not really innovating, thereby saturating their own pocket of supply-demand asymmetry over time - The demand for that topic reduces Potential solutions: - Focus on more exploration rather than exploits - Focus on creating a bigger macro arc for yourself as a YouTuber - Experiment with something absurdly different than what you’re used to - Pick a niche or subniche that creates its own demand pockets (e.g. MKBHD picked the perfect niche because the tech industry does the heavy lifting with regards to constantly generating new things/demands; Fireship does this for programming). — There’s a tonne more to talk about but I’ve only had this spare bit of time to do so. So feel free to let me know what you think, welcoming both examples and counter-examples.