YouTube Rewind 2019: from publisher to platform
I am, without a doubt, convinced that Spotify spends the year subliminally tapping into our subconscious minds via hidden audio cues. Their purpose? Ensuring that, come December, every single listener posts their “Year Wrapped” summaries to Instagram.
Elsewhere on the internet, YouTube is facing a far less “must-be-hynopsis-induced” reaction to their very own summary of the year: the annual Rewind video.
From what was essentially a simple “Top 10 Most Viewed” video in 2010, over the years YouTube’s Rewind has morphed into a full-scale, big budget production, with shoots taking place across the world. In theory, the final product is a video celebrating the year’s most popular creators and the platform’s biggest moments.
In theory.
Last year’s video dedicated time to Ninja, a creator who found fame playing Fortnite on the rival streaming platform Twitch, and was opened by Will Smith, a celebrity who found fame… really everywhere other than YouTube.
It was, in some ways, the understandable by-product of a calamitous year for the site. YouTube was reeling in the face of numerous controversies, and it’s clear the video was seen as an opportunity to sanitise its image by showing off advertiser-friendly icons.
Some of the site’s largest creators, including PewDiePie and Logan Paul, were notably absent, having both sparked outrage at points in the year. Whether you wanted PewDiePie in the video or not, or felt any number of other creators were missing, the caution clearly present in the video’s editorial direction didn’t go unnoticed by the viewership at large.
The 2018 edition quickly became the most disliked video on the site, with its now 17.23 million dislikes trouncing the 10.93 million secured by the music video for Justin Bieber’s “Baby”. Getting more dislikes than Bieber was made an even more painful feat by the fact that it took YouTube’s Rewind just 8 days to accrue an amount of dislikes that took the musician 8 years.
Outside of conferences specifically for advertisers, Rewind represents one of the most overt ways in which YouTube communicates how the platform views itself and how it would like to be viewed. The 2018 dislikes were the audience pushing back against the perception of itself that YouTube was putting forward. Responses to the video echoed a longstanding complaint, often repeated by YouTubers of all sizes: YouTube doesn’t understand us and only cares about appeasing advertisers.
I’m simplifying — which is dangerous. That critique has many strands, and many issues contained within. But in a year that saw the platform react strongly to advertising controversies, in ways that left many creators feeling disenfranchised or uninformed, ending the year with a tone-deaf video that reinforced that position was the perfect storm for dislikes and criticism.
But this year, they promised “something different. for real.”
The 2019 video harks back to the early days of YouTube Rewind. It details various Top 10s for several categories, from fastest growing channels to most liked beauty videos. It goes a little further than that, celebrating the incredible growth of creators from select locations around the world, including Thailand and Germany. But it is, in many ways, a video rundown of site analytics, with limited editorial direction.
So, did they get it right? Well, it’s currently the third most disliked video on the platform, on its way to pushing Bieber further down one chart I’m sure he was never keen to top. It’s largely been received as “boring” and “safe”. However, it’s also close to surpassing 2018’s number of likes, so I guess there’s some small consolation in that, right? But this year’s Rewind has implications that reach much further than likes or dislikes. And I don’t mean into the comment section.
YouTube is facing a question not dissimilar to the one being asked of many major social networks, including Facebook and Twitter: platform or publisher?
While a platform exists to enable users to create and promote their content, with limited intervention from the team behind-the-scenes, a publisher plays a more active role in the curation and creation of that content. Each approach has flaws, and there’s no simple choice between the two. It’s always going to be a bit of both.
What this year’s Rewind shows, however, is a shift further away from publisher, and closer to platform.
Over 500 hours of content are uploaded to YouTube each minute: from extremist propaganda, to inappropriate videos finding their way in front of children; from creators abusing one another, to creators filming that which should not be filmed in Japanese forests. YouTube is grappling with the scope and scale of content on its platform, and it is frequently falling short. At the same time, it’s striving to show advertisers the value of a site that now reaches the bulk of people with an internet connection.
If Rewind 2018 was a symptom of this struggle, Rewind 2019 gives us an insight into a small part of YouTube’s solution.
YouTube will likely never escape its position as a publisher. For better or worse — and I’d argue for better — its creators are embedded into its DNA. It will continue to fund YouTube originals. It will continue to employ Partner Managers to help channels develop into businesses. And it will continue to celebrate much, if not all, of the content that it makes possible.
But it will take a step back, and its detachment from creators will grow. It will embrace its position as an enabler of content and, where necessary to maintain advertising revenue, it will adopt the kind of impartial stance and tone that the 2019 Rewind embodies. Because ultimately if creators don’t like that, there’s really not many other places they can go, while advertisers continue to have options.
If I’m right, creators may long for the days when Rewind was a cringe-fest, rather than an apathy-party.
The reality is that the problems facing YouTube are far more complicated than whether it’s made “the right” YouTube Rewind. YouTube will continue to struggle with its many controversies and shortcomings throughout 2020, and into the next decade. But this end of year summary gives a clear indication into what lies ahead.
It’s either that, or they also jump on the mind control bandwag- REWIND 2018 WAS GREAT. LOVED 2019 TOO. LONG LIVE THE ALGORITHM.
Sorry, not sure where that came from. May post it to Insta.
