So some of our listeners might know this. But over the last two years, I've been hosting a mini documentary series called Next Jobs, and over the summer I noticed on YouTube that traffic on my show fell off a cliff. We published a piece in June about self driving cars and a piece in July about genetic testing that both turned out to be complete flops on the service, and I had no idea why at the time. I complained endlessly to our very patient video platform manager at Bloomberg
and also to my equally patient wife. And while it's complaining to them other YouTube creators around the world, we're complaining to a guy called Tim Schmoyer. Welcome back to video creators. Is great to have you guys again for another video creators at podcast episode today is a juicy topic. Tim runs an advice channel on YouTube for other YouTube creators. At the time he taped this video, a lot of creators were worried about a change YouTube had just announced.
And I've already heard from some creators saying, like, of my traffic is gone and this video was doing great and now it's completely dead, and it happened overnight and this, and I mean, I understand like creators like, Hey, this is a really emotional thing for us. We put our heart and we put our time, our energy into creating something that we want the world to see. And when we put that out there and we have no control over whether or not people actually see this thing that
we poured ourselves into. Yeah, it gives us. It's offensive, It kind of it kind of hurts. Let's just be honest about it. Tim's right, there's something that feels uniquely awful about being at the mercy of this constantly changing system. And if it's this anxiety inducing to me and my income doesn't depend on YouTube traffic, it's got to feel so much worse for other creators who've made YouTube their
full time job. Today, in the show, reporter Mark Bergen visits YouTube whisper Tim Schmoyer, who's been advising creators on how to adapt to the video services new world order. Over the last three years, YouTube has implemented sweeping changes bound to public outrage over the spread of dangerous and misleading content on the service. But do those changes risk alienating the very people who made YouTube such a valuable service for the rest of us? Imakio, you're listening to decrypted.
Stay with us. Okay, Mark, how's it going. It's going really well. Do you want to introduce yourself? Sure, I'm Mark Bergan, reporter with Bloomberg Technology, and I mostly right about Google and its parent company Alphabet. Today we're talking about YouTube, which a decade ago was this fledgling weird video service and today is worth I think I've seen enough submits of more than a hundred billion dollars, is that right? Yeah? So the company has never shared its financials,
but there are estimates, so that's worth that much. So as YouTube's gotten bigger, it's also had to make quite a few changes. Walk us through the broad contours of that. Yeah, So, I don't think you remember a decade ago one of the most popular YouTube videos was Charlie bit my finger. Oh oh. It was just like low low fi like home videos, hugely viral and at that point, this was like the magic of YouTube was anyone could upload a video,
anyone can start making money off of it. Uh, And it went off in the huge successes before it became just a much bigger platform, before a lot of media companies were on there. Before these big stars and celebrities then turned into this like high production and expensive content UM for a long time, for a nearly decade, YouTube got away with this and Google it was this huge
growth property for them. UH. Starting around twenty seventeen that growth kind of got out of hand and we saw UM there was major advertising boycott after some ads ran on extremists, jihadi videos, UM videos full of hate speech. So, starting in seen, YouTube has made a ton of changes to make it a lot more difficult for hay speech videos for disturbing extremist videos to come up UM. At the same time, for it's made it more difficult for creators to make money. So the most recent changes from
YouTube are happening around kids content. Kids content on YouTube is massive right there. Some nursery rhymes are some of the biggest channels in the world. UM, toy and boxing videos are incredibly popular, and it's also this really popular world of like you call the family vlogging, where families
kind of put our their home videos on YouTube. So in September, the company settled with the Federal Trade Commission for violating children's privacy because the government accused YouTube but basically tracking UM and serving ads to kids in the thirteen, which is not legal on the internet. So starting January one, the company's old creators, okay, you're not allowed to serve any of these targeted ads, which is they're basically more expensive ads, and for a lot of YouTube creators right now,
they're very anxious about these changes. So a lot of changes coming to YouTube that's making creators very anxious. That's where a protagonist. Tim Schmoyer comes in. Yep. So I met him at vid Con, which is this big conference in Anaheim earlier this summer, and then I went out to his house in October. Hey man found the right place. Tim lives just outside of Cincinnati, technically in Kentucky. He and his wife live with I get this, their seven children,
who they all home school. The point thing you know about the Schmier family is they live and breathe YouTube. They watch YouTube together. Tim and his wife have been making YouTube videos for about a decade with their kids. Today's a special family adventure day. We are getting pizza. We're waiting for to cook. Right here, says Mommy's little prince. Are you Mommy's prints? You know what she came out of Mommy Mommy's coming last night. I think she's really cute.
Their kids now run their on YouTube channel UM. I talked to Tim's older daughter over lunch, and she's talked to me about what it's like to watch herself on YouTube videos. When whenever we watch UM, like we if we watch our channel normally, we're like watching our old, old, old old old ones from like Howling and Toby you Meet and Uzek over Babies were like watching build on the video. Us kids did a lot of funny stuff when you're a little, but you don't like watching the
newer ones much. I don't watching them sometimes when's a lot to do, you were in the kids have a channel a lot. It's actually fun for us. So how did Tim and his family get to this point? So we started posting on YouTube in two dozen six is a very different era. That company just started a year before, and he was He told me he was posting videos so his family back home could see images and meet
his new girlfriend a little date night. We haven't done anything for a while, like all these cupons, Like I proposed at Danta today and she said, yes, we were going to do it. So they're posting on YouTube and then they discover that not just their family was watching it, but strangers on the internet watching too, and I got a little confused. I was like, wait, who are these people? How are they finding my video? Why do they keep coming back? Who is catlic or seventy two? And why
do they keep commenting on my videos? You know, there wasn't really anyone answering those questions back then, and no one really knew, and so I was like, well, I'm gonna figure this out. And so he's talking with other people on YouTube when they're sharing tips about what does well and what doesn't work well. At this point, he was working actually as a youth pastor UM and he's the way he talks about YouTube a lot is very similar. He feels that this is a channel for sort of
changing people's lives. And I had this like aha moment, like, man, if you really want to have big impact, you really want to change people's lives and reach people literally around the world, I was like, YouTube is like the perfect posess like perfect platform to do this. Um, Like on my blog, I could write about something and tell people about something, but like in a video, I could actually make them feel as if they were like experiencing it with me. I can invite them into it. And he
got really passionate about it. He went and worked for a marketing agency that worked on consultancy, whether it's big companies like HBO, Disney or just small video creators how to perform well on YouTube. In I believe, he starts his channel called Video Creators and decides to go out on zone and build this consultancy where he gets people to pay him to give him advice about YouTube, how it works if you're looking to serve your audience on YouTube and earn a full time income all doing it.
I am really excited to make this course available for you. So by it. And to be clear, he's an independent consultant. He's not paid by YouTube to do this. Yeah, he's he's one of their, Like I'd say, like dozens of people right that that fit into this kind of orbiting YouTube. They don't work directly for YouTube. He certainly has a good relationship with the company, right, he's one of their kind of beta testers, which means he gets versions of
products early. The company trusts him with that. Um, he's definitely talks to a lot of peop told me, talks to people the company maybe once a week or so. Um, because it's important for for YouTube to get this sort of network of trusted partners who understand how YouTube works and can explain that and basically deal with a lot of the problems that YouTube wants to keep it arms
lengked with with its creators. So what does a YouTube consultant to So he spends a long time on video conference calls before we get started three minutes, but um, long hours with his clients. Uh, well, they all sort of signed in on video chat software. So he's standing in his office there and they come in. At one point, there were eighteen different sort of creators um talking at
one point. Uh, They're all in their own home offices or just their living rooms, and he gives these long sessions, and that one in particular was about just about keywords. How many of you guys do keyword research for your videos? How many of your okay, hands down, can raise your hands again? How many of you have seen keyword research make a significant impact on your channel growth? A little bit, a little bit. But another part of Tim's consulting business
is what he calls office hours. So he just sort of us some time where any of his YouTube creator clients can come in and ask him questions. Yeah, well I was there on a Wednesday. There's only one creator who called in. Her name is Lucia Olivario. She runs a cooking channel, lives outside of Sacramento, and one of the things that Tim advises her on is to identify who her target YouTube viewer is. Rich way, is your
target audis? Think about it? Well, that I don't know yet. Um, I was trying to figure out who my target audience is, and so I'm figuring it. And and the advice of Tim gave when you talked to people, and even we talked to me, was a sort of counterintuitive. I'd always expect him. Here's someone who spends years studying YouTube. It's like, Okay, here's the best way to beat the algorithm. Right, You're gonna do one, two, and three, and then your videos are just going to take off. But a lot of
his response, his advice is is sort of emotional. Right. It's like, um, build a channel, make videos that somehow appeal to this viewer that you've never met before. Right, But you want to build this sort of bond and that is going to be more important than any sort of technical tactics that you take. We'll be right back. So the same time, that Tim's been running this business and video creators. He's also kept this old YouTube channel that he posted from two thousand and six. And for
a long time that channel was all about his family. UM. They called them schmovies. They would make these home videos UM where they're doing everything, playing with friends, visiting amusement park. Um. More recently, in the past few months, they've actually changed directions entirely. So there's new channel is called Reclaiming Motherhood and it's it's Tim's wife talking about experiences with parenting. For a typical birthday, I like to let the kids
open up their gifts first thing in the morning. There are sort of applying the same lessons that he teaches in his consulting business to their own channel, and you can hear that when they record the latest video for that and sort of talk through as they're recording, is it's gonna work? Well, why doesn't this work? Well? Should we do it this way? Should we not do it that way? Any other points that you can think of, Well, what's the main point, what's the main story you're telling here?
Like what's someone's about how he's but what what like give us the title of this? One's gonna click on. I don't know, we didn't talk about that before, because that's then you need to go back into your hook, like your opening hook stop recording. And is this because of the FTC crackdown on children's content. Well, they are going to face a lot of the same issues that
the family creators face. So they're not going to have comments on these videos because the prior videos feature kids and they have the same sort of financial and certainty about advertising going forward. But Tim said, the main reason why they changed the channel is much more personal. My wife's been pregnant or breastfeeding for eleven years straight, and
her body's like taking a toll on her. And so that now that's been almost two years since our our last one was born, Like she's coming out of that thinking like, oh man, I have a lot of encouragement I want to give to moms. You know, we started our conversation today with all of the changes that YouTube's implemented and how that's made a lot of creators pretty mad about that. What's Tim's take? Um, you know he has he's again he's sort of an optimist on this. Um.
We talked about this quite quite a bit. His thought here is that, um, YouTubers think of themselves as sort of employees at the company, which may be true. Um, and and they're not right at the best, they're sort of contractors. Um. So his mantra is that YouTube creators should think of themselves as entrepreneurs, as business women and men, and that they should be able to build these sort of businesses off YouTube um where they don't need to
rely on the company or even its advertising dollars. And how do you do that? Yeah? So YouTube has been trying some options for a while without much luck. Um. One of them is a membership program where you say, like a dedicated viewer will pay a monthly fee to get exclusive videos. Um. Or they have ways for you creators to sell merchandise right below the video. They can sell a T shirt or some sort of product they're selling.
Tim talked a lot about how, you know, he's built a business where he has his consultancy, he sells e books and he makes more money from that than he does from ads. Right, But you can't really scale Tim's model to everyone else. I mean, then everyone would just be a YouTube consultant consulting for each other. Yeah, it'd
be pretty unbearable. You can at this point a vast majority of the creators on YouTube who are making money are making money off ads and these changes that YouTube's implemented. Did you get a chance to ask Tim's kinds about that? So Tim was kind enough to let me stand in front of his he's a standing desk, and I was standing in front of these eighteen different YouTubers um on
this conference call um. But I did get to ask him A question that I'd love to ask creators is if you were standing and sitting across from Susan what CHICKI, who's the CEO of YouTube, what would you ask her? But how much do they care about small time creators? The demonetization pisces off a lot of creators, and they're trying to look for other platforms. What would it take to sort of say I'm gonna I'm gonna go elsewhere? Um,
I guess for another platform to start paying people. Okay, So Tim's client just told us that he would consider leaving YouTube if another platform paid him, And I guess that's what's at stake for YouTube, right. YouTube needs these smart and interesting and funny people to keep making good videos so all of us viewers keep coming back to the platform, which in turn drives advertising dollars for YouTube.
But realistically, other video platforms like Netflix and Hulu aren't going to pay these small time creators to start their own shows for them. I think YouTube's their only bit. Yeah, that's the cynical take us that YouTube actually doesn't need these people that they have. They make enough money from the big creators. There is enough interest from new creators coming on, and that's why you hear from a lot of people that YouTube has left some of these smaller
creators out the dry um. Typically, you know, Tim does not agree with that. He's got a much more optimistic view. Do you think do you buy the theory that there's sort of YouTube is now kind of split two And some of your clients were talking about this, like this premium world of like really high end and then sort of everybody else, and that they're the company has been sort of giving preferential treatment to the premium world and
not to like the everyday creators. So I know a lot of people who work at YouTube on both a professional and a personal level, and I say with a confidence that there is no one there that I've met who is like who doesn't care about the little creator.
You know, Mark, I've been thinking about this, and I think you can think of these small time creators as kind of the civilian casualties of this war that YouTube is waging now on all this toxic, gross content, even though the vast majority of them have nothing to do with that stuff. Right that they're not making all the jihadi content, they're not making the fake news that we're all mad about. And there's something sad about that. That's squeezing out the little guys who made YouTube what it
is today. Is the only way that YouTube can fix this mess. Yeah, But at the same time, these little guys aren't quitting, you know, They're still making a much of YouTube videos um and and YouTube is just continuing to grow um and in some ways that's that's good for for business. Like Tim's right, he is this chance to to walk people through this very confusing world. Mark Bergan, thanks for coming on the show today. Thanks for helping me. Decrypted is hosted by me Akio. Sean Ween is our
executive producer. Ethan Brooks mix the show today. Alisair Barr was our story editor. Francesco Levy is the head of Bloomberg Podcasts. We'll see you next week.