I’m not sure YouTube understands its website at all. The video sharing site just shared its “2017 YouTube Rewind,” its end-of-the-year-music video/advertisement for the site’s channels and content creators. And just like every year, YouTube failed to include most of the channels that keep the platform afloat. Instead, it chose to focus on “safe” cookie cutter faces and fidget spinners that won’t piss off advertisers or brands.
2017 was a pretty rough year for YouTube. In February, the Wall Street Journal posted a story regarding Felix Kjellberg, the star behind one of the largest channels on YouTube, “PewDiePie.” When the 27-year-old personality shared a highly controversial video that featured disturbing anti-Semitic jokes, advertisers like Disney, Pepsi and more left YouTube, fearing its ads could be posted on content considered inappropriate or risque. Almost just as quickly, YouTube cooked up a new algorithm that targeted content that might not be “ad-friendly,” which caused a major paradigm shift. Content creators who had survived for years suddenly saw their videos flagged left and right for benign mentions of sex and LGBT issues to anything that had to do with the news or violence. YouTubers who had made a living on the platform for years were struggling to survive, and called the event the “Adpocalypse.”
Content creators like h3h3 productions, Boogie2988 and Pewdiepie made a huge fuss over the change, which fell on the deaf ears of YouTube’s employees. Many influencers on the site felt neglected, confused as to why the site that only exists because of their hard work can ignore their suffering and pleas for help. Since the initial bomb drop, things have gotten slightly better, but videos with anything a bot on YouTube views as “not friendly for all advertisers” will lose out on a ton of revenue. Although creators can repeal the bot’s decision and have a human being look at the actual content, but a video usually gets the most views in the first few hours it’s posted, meaning most of the revenue is gone.
In this tumultuous year for YouTube, Rewind could have been a saving grace by including YouTubers across the platform and showing support for those who suffered at the hands of the site’s ineptitude could have gone a long way to making content creators feel appreciated. Instead, YouTube decided to go the other direction and only featured the site’s prettiest and least threatening to throw paint at each other. There were some odd choices, like Sssniperwolf, who had her gaming channel rise to previously unimaginable heights by capitalizing on teenagers’ love for juicy drama.
Viners turned YouTubers stood center stage, with the most time being spent on Logan and Jake Paul, who are two of the most popular vloggers with hordes of teenage fans. Interestingly, the scene must have been filmed months ago as it included the Martinez Twins, who have disavowed Jake as a bully and left the Team 10 house.
None of this surprises me at all. YouTube Rewind has always been nothing more than a marketing gimmick. 2016’s video had the exact same problems, ignoring channels with huge growth on the site, like Ricegum or h3h3. Rewind is and will never be a show of solidarity to the YouTube community, no matter how hard YouTube tries to push it as so. It’s a dirty marketing trick in a year where YouTube’s scummy business policies have hurt those that work on their platform the most.
I’m not sure what I expected out of this year’s rewind, but I was hoping it wasn’t the horror that is RyanToyReviews and MattyBRaps.
