Last year, like 2024, 2023, and, well, probably most years since 2005, was the Year of YouTube. The video platform has become massively successful in every dimension: It’s got at least 2.5 billion monthly users; it’s doing more than $10 billion in advertising revenue quarterly; and its subscription product, YouTube Premium, is growing fast. On the web, it won the long-form video wars more than a decade ago, and its once-fringe creator economy has produced hundreds of genuine stars. Now, it’s not just competing with streamers like Netflix, but dominating them — even on viewers’ TVs.

YouTube leads all media, but legacy studios saw a live sports boost in Nielsen's latest snapshot of TV distributors: https://t.co/c2AUL0YXbf pic.twitter.com/m4Hd4g7cn9

YouTube seems unstoppable. But on the platform itself, the story isn’t so simple. Plenty of creators, new and old, are thriving and growing. In recent months, though, some longtime YouTubers have been getting anxious. They spent years building audiences, tracking platform trends, and internalizing official advice and YouTube folk wisdom, building brands and hiring staff. But sustaining viewership, some have said, seems to have gotten harder, growth has become less predictable, and occasionally the stats just go haywire, sending them into existential panic.

YouTube has been growing for decades now, with pockets of YouTubers speculating about its decline — or at least puzzling about why things feel worse for them — all along. In August, a cluster of established tech and science YouTubers noticed their viewership falling off a cliff. “After being on the platform since 2006,” wrote YouTuber Jeff Geerling, “I’m used to seasonal dips, adjustments after new tweaks to the algorithm or layout/design changes. But this was substantial.” Others chimed in with similar experiences, including Linus Sebastian, whose main channel has more than 16 million subscribers. “Overall,” he said in September, “the channel has been on the struggle bus lately.” In a series of videos, he and his producers speculated about the root cause. Had the recommendation algorithm changed? Had YouTube changed the way it collects stats? Gotten rid of a bunch of bots?

Again, not to be too glib about it, but on YouTube, episodes like this happen a lot: Something changes, and a bunch of creators whose livelihoods depend on the platform — and who have spent years of their lives developing intuitions about what works, what YouTube’s metrics mean, and how they relate to one another — make popular, sympathetic videos about the situation, wondering in front of their substantial audiences whether YouTube is “dead” or “dying,” or whether the “algorithm” has finally optimized them out or relevance (see PewDiePie’s temporary view depression in 2016; the “adpocalypses” of 2017, 2019, and 2020; or the recurring angst about the platform’s seasonality). Eventually, they move on, either satisfied with a particular explanation, mollified by improved stats, or resigned to working in a — slightly, vaguely, not-quite-comprehensibly — different environment.........

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