The Vergecast
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How YouTube makes everything more extreme Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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This episode of The Vergecast is brought to you by Betterment. If you're not someone who settles for average gadgets in consumer tech, why would you settle for an average investing tool? Now, there's a smarter way to manage your money: Betterment. Betterment is an online financial advisor for people who refuse to settle for average. They use cutting-edge technology to build personalized portfolios and help you make more from your investments. Then they guide you along the way with advice to help you make smart financial decisions. All this for one low, transparent fee. So, plan for retirement, reach your financial goals, make the most of your money. Don't settle for average investing. Demand better. Betterment: outsmart average. Investing involves risk. Vergecast listeners can get one-year managed free by visiting betterment.com/verge. That's betterment.com/verge. Hey, everybody. It's Simon from The Vergecast. On this week's interview episode, we're doing something a little bit different. We just hired a great new reporter. Her name is Julia Alexander.
She was at Polygon before, our sister site. She is maybe the best YouTube reporter out there. She has been covering YouTubers, Twitch streamers, other influencers, doing a great job at Polygon. She actually started doing it because of the rise of game streaming over there, Polygon's video game website. But it turns out, that's a whole big story. And so she jumped over to The Verge so she could expand that beat, cover more about what YouTube is, where it's going, the relationship between YouTube and the creator community, between YouTube and the rest of the internet. It is incredibly interesting. It is the future of a lot of our media, to be honest. And I think Julia understands it basically better than anyone else. So I'm super excited. She's covering that for us at The Verge now. And I brought her on the show just to talk about the state of YouTube.
So check this out. Super interesting. All right. Julia Alexander is here. Hello, Julia. Hello. So, Julia, you are the newest reporter at The Verge. Yes. And we hired you. This is true. We hired you from Polygon, because I love to ruthlessly poach from our sister site, Polygon. Although, they did recently poach from us, so it's fine. It's just trading. We just trade every once in a while. You came to Polygon, you started covering streaming platforms. Yeah. YouTube, Twitch. And then that expanded radically into, hey, there's a bunch of people making stuff on the internet, and their interactions with these platforms are really surprising. Yeah. And I really wanted you to come to The Verge and expand that, Polygon's gaming site, expand that beyond just gaming and entertainment to everything else that's happening. So I wanted to talk to you today about YouTube.
I think you might know more about how YouTube operates with the people on it and as a business than anybody else I know. So just give me the one, like, quick overview of what's going on with YouTube today. Because it seems more controversial and more problem-oriented than most people might suspect.
I think the interesting thing with YouTube is that people are paying attention to it. So I think these issues have always been there, especially with creators doing ludicrous things. It's been going on since the dawn of YouTube. But suddenly, because of disturbing children's content and the alt-right being on YouTube and kind of YouTube's terrible recommendation algorithm and the radicalization, you've got a lot of people paying attention to it. And I think YouTube wasn't aware that this many people were suddenly paying attention to them, or their creators. So they're trying to figure out how to put on a good PR face while fixing their platform. Well, quote-unquote, fixing their platform.
What's broken with the platform?
So the number one issue, I think, is what we've seen in conversation a lot is the recommendation algorithm. It's radicalizing so many people. I spoke to a lot of kids, for example, who came up through Gamergate. They were like 13, 14 when Gamergate first happened in like 2014, who are now 18, 19. And they were saying YouTube is the main reason, that they believed, a lot of stuff they believed. Because they would watch a video from like someone like Sargon, and that would give them recommendations into this whole era of people, or area of people, rather. It's disturbing, and it's just opinions. And I talk to high school teachers a lot, and it's like, the kids that we talk to, they just use YouTube for news, and they're getting really bad sources to back up their opinions.
So I think that's the most disturbing part of YouTube, and it's not something that you know how to fix. It's not something, it's something they're interested in fixing, it's just not something they're capable of fixing. And I think that's a Google problem, not just a YouTube problem.
Why do you think they're not capable of fixing it?
I think it's-
Because, I mean, they're trying some things, right? They're labeling things in different ways. I think the Wikipedia links that they're now adding are adorable in their way.
Yeah, the moon landing happens.
Yeah. I remember, I won't, I won't name names, at CES one year, end of the day, long day, everyone's having a drink. And I just remember, suddenly, the conversation became about whether 9/11 was an inside job. I was like, dude, what are you talking like I I was an adult when that happened. I was like, that was 100% real. I promise you, and every journalist in America would be chasing that story forever if it hadn't.
Yeah.
But he's like, well, I watched a bunch of YouTube videos. And I just remember thinking to myself, oh, this is like a lot.
There was a moment with Kyrie, Kyrie Irving. He was on stage somewhere and they brought up the fact that Kyrie believed the earth was flat. And he very explicitly said, I was watching a bunch of YouTube videos and I got into this hole. And it's like, yeah, YouTube, it's super easy to find something. And it starts off really fun with like, oh, is the moon landing real? I'm gonna watch a conspiracy video. But that quickly becomes topics that aren't as ludicrous, that are even scarier. So you use keywords like liberals or feminism or conservatives. And it gets into scary territory where people have spent 20, you know, they spend a day formulating a very well put 20 minute argument that is based on bad faith. And it travels well. And then it spreads to Twitter and it spreads to Instagram.
And it's like this cross promotional thing. And I don't think YouTube knows how to stop people from gaming their system, which is upsetting. And that's the conversation I have with creators a lot where they outthink YouTube all the time. Abuse of tags, abuse of metadata is something that websites are aware of and YouTube doesn't know to fix it. And it's like the most blatant issue that is facing a lot of creators is like, they just put in however many tags they want. You could put Google or Android into a YouTube search and you're going to get far right conspiracy theories.
Because people just realize that you're searching for Android and they can game that pretty easily.
It's funny because on main Google search, they know about the SEO games.
And YouTube is the second biggest search engine in the world and they appear not to.
And owned by Google. It's funny, the joke I kept using was that up until 18 months ago, I, Google forgot YouTube existed. And then suddenly they were like, oh, there's a lot of problems with YouTube. And then on one end, you've got the platform and how people interact with the platform, which is an issue, and that's kind of the radicalization. And on the other end, you've got creators who are building these kind of parasocial relationships with people.
Wait, define the word parasocial.
Parasocial is a very intimate, one-sided relationships. The best example that you can use for a certain audience is soap operas were always the go-to because you watched it every day, you felt like you really got to know these characters and had a relationship with them. It's something that they explored on Friends, actually, a lot. So take that idea of your favorite TV show, your favorite character, and this connection you have with them, times it by a million, and you're barely scratching the surface of what kids feel like when they connect with YouTube creators. Because you watch their YouTube video, then you're watching their Instagram story, you're seeing their tweets, you're paying for Snapchats, which is a huge thing on YouTube, you're paying $80 to get a personalized message, and it's this connection that people have. And so that's the other side of it, where YouTube also doesn't understand just how
immensely important these creators are in people's lives, and they don't know how to reckon with the fact that a lot of their creators aren't great role models. Figuring out how to promote them, but how not to promote them.
So you said something really interesting there, that to me feels like the heart of the creator dilemma. You called them their creators, as though YouTube is accountable to them, or they are accountable to YouTube. And that seems to be like the breaking point, right? They're just using a platform and doing whatever, and they don't actually have any obligation to YouTube to stay there.
Yeah, and I think that would be fine if every December, every December, YouTube didn't put out their annual rewind, which was what they sell to advertisers, it's what they give to advertisers to be like, here's what our platform is. Up until last year, you didn't see anyone famous. Last year, they finally included like Stephen Colbert, but it was always creators. I mean, last year, they included Logan and Jake Paul. It was always creators that they sold, that they were showing advertisers, hey, here's what we do, here's what we can offer you. And I think at that point, when you're actively working with creators to sell things to advertisers and sell themselves to advertisers, you are taking some ownership over the fact that they are on your platform.
I think a really interesting conversation that happens a lot with like ownership of certain people is the Twitch-first YouTube dilemma.
Where Twitch wants exclusivity, YouTube wants exclusivity. And if you're offering someone a higher percentage of Google Preferred Ads, which are top-tier ads for YouTube, if you're offering someone incentives, you do have a relationship with them and you are asking them to stay with you and work with you on something. We're gonna offer you a YouTube premium show, like Liza Koshy, for example. And it's very much like she's a YouTube product in itself. And I think it's interesting when something like Logan Paul happens, YouTube's like, oh, well, we don't have control over what they do. And which is true, but you're also using their faces and their views and their channels to sell advertisements or to get advertisements. And it's insane to see how quickly they go from, we don't represent our creators, to our creators absolutely represent our platform.
Robert Kinkel, who's like the head of YouTube, so he's just like, wrote a book.
That he was very proud of, being like, look at all the great, all the great things that YouTube has enabled, right? And you read it and he's very clearly picked, I mean, he picked great creators, like Hank Green is in there.
Sure.
Here are the people that YouTube wants to hold out. And so much of very positive role models. And there's a dark side to that, which they kind of studiously ignore. And then when their chosen few do something wrong, they tend to just run in the other direction.
Yeah, the joke that I have ongoing, which, because I don't think it would ever happen, but like if Casey Neistat ever did something, YouTube would just not know what to do. Because he's like the godfather of YouTube at this point. When I was at Polygon, we were figuring out how to cover YouTube. And it was December 31st, I was getting ready to go out for New Year's and I got a push notification for Logan's video. I'm watching and I'm like, that's a, it's a dead body. I'm pretty sure it's a dead body. Emailed YouTube PR and they were like, oh, yeah, well, maybe we'll look into it. Got your friends, they're like, oh, you know, it's New Year's Eve. And then two days later, like Aaron Paul had tweeted about it and it became a whole thing. It was that situation where I was like, Robert Kinkel likes to talk a lot about how YouTube doesn't want to incentivize certain things when YouTube's algorithm does the complete opposite.
So you get into conversations about burnout and people feeling like you have to upload every day and people feeling like they have to compete for ads. Creators refer to ads as limited resources now. There's not enough ads for everyone, so they compete for them. It means they have to outdo each other. I can't confirm it, but there's been a lot of creators who are like, Ads are a limited resource.
That being said, there seems to be ads on videos that I watch, so I'm not sure.
I feel like you watch a lot of videos. You haven't reached the end of the advertising.
And I don't use YouTube Red or YouTube Premium because I need to know if there's ads.
Oh, no. Oh, how you suffer for your art.
A lot of ads that I suffer for.
I buy that stuff as fast as I can.
But yeah, so I think it's interesting because creators constantly feel like now more than ever that they are competing against YouTube in order to profit off YouTube. And they're competing with kids coming in from new platforms like Vine. All the Vine kids went to YouTube when Vine shut down. And they brought over with the millions of subscribers. That's like your David Dobrik's and the Paul's. The next one will be TikTok, which is a big app. And once TikTok becomes passe, people will move over to YouTube because it's monetizable.
Wait, so this feels like a big trend that YouTube hasn't really contended with. Other social platforms start, social video platforms start. They burn bright and then they fail because honestly, they cannot extract advertising dollars because YouTube has them all.
I'm sure Verchess listeners know, but Facebook and Google control like 85 to 90% of the digital ad money that exists in the world. So there's a duopoly. So you start a Vine or a TikTok or Musically. And you have to come up with some way to make money that isn't ads because you can't peel. Snapchat has this problem right now.
Snapchat is a big platform that can't make money because they haven't figured out how to steal ad money away from Facebook and Google. So YouTube hilariously has this problem where competitors start, people get famous, the competitors fail, and the people flood onto YouTube. Apart from Vine, which they seem to be like, yep, your videos can be longer now. Like, same idea, just longer. Apart from Vine, they haven't really figured out how to do that well, it doesn't seem like. Or how to bring other communities onto their community and have the same set of values.
Yeah, and I think the only reason that Vine, the Vine creators refer to as the Vine invasion. The reason that I think the Vine invasion went as well as it did for a lot of people was it's hard to monetize Vine because of ads, but it's also hard. It was hard for creators who were getting like agents through Vine to continue living in LA and continue doing what they were doing, but just being on Vine. So they went to YouTube and suddenly they are recording vlogs with Will Smith and they're getting Nike ads. And it's like they're making a lot of money. Around the same time, you see a bunch of Vine kids realize we can all live in a big house together and just vlog together and create content 24/7 and make a lot of money.
So you see this kind of huge explosion of like vlog squads, which is happening in LA all the time, more so in LA than New York. There's a really big difference between the New York and LA vlog scenes, and I think like that's particularly interesting. But in LA, it's a lot of 20-year-olds who have like dropped out of college and high school.
And are full-time YouTubers now. I think TikTok, Musically rolled into TikTok. It's interesting because when I went to VidCon and Tanicon, which was failed, uh, which did not go well.
Did you, you didn't go to Tanicon?
I went to Tanicon.
Well, you were, you went to a hotel.
I went to a hotel. I went, I was in the lobby of a hotel before we got kicked out. There was all these TikTok stars.
Can you go to an event that doesn't happen?
That's all I go to. There's, uh, but all these Musically kids were there and these Musically kids were 13, 14 and talking about how their parents moved them out to LA and trying to get into YouTube and how YouTube was the next step. Or a lot of them are just like, well, we'll go to Twitch because Twitch has this like actual subscribers. And they're like, well, we can just stream for 10 hours. And so you see this a lot with different platforms where they start off somewhere and they build an audience, but the goal is to move to YouTube because it's the only way to get money.
Really?
Yeah. And now that's
Not even Twitch?
People are really intimidated by Twitch and I totally understand why. I livestreamed before and I hated it. Talking for eight hours and interacting with people is insane.
It seems exhausting.
It's exhausting. It's difficult if you're playing a game to keep that going. I give someone like Ninja a lot of credit because he's very good at gaming and he's also very good at entertaining. And Twitch, Twitch is like a fraternity, Twitch's community, if you're not in it, it's really hard to break into it because there's like a whole secret language and handshake that you have to understand. Whereas YouTube, You can luck out, you've got, maybe you have an audience, something goes viral, so you're collabing with someone else. Like, there's a way to kind of break in and form a community around yourself. So I think if you can make it on Twitch, having subscribers is better, because it's direct money coming into that you know you're gonna get. Versus YouTube, you're relying on AdSense, and that differs, especially if there's a demonetization
wave, which we've seen. But YouTube is kind of like, it's still the golden platform, become a YouTube star. And now that, like, Will Smith is on it, Reese Witherspoon's on it, like, it's just the next, that in-between wave of Hollywood.
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Right now, it seems like the two platforms people can choose from are YouTube and Twitch. Yeah. I don't want to call it conventional wisdom. It's like an enduring myth is that, well, of course, the platform will fail and there'll be a next platform. Right. Right? Friendster will fail, then MySpace will fail, and then Facebook will rise, and then Facebook will fail, and then something, right? And/or... Democracy will fail. Whoever comes first.
The platform of democracy will move right along. But this is like a thing we talk about all the time. There will be Windows, and then there's going to be iOS and Android, and there's going to be something else. It seems like you almost want to apply that to YouTube. You want to say, well, YouTube is messy. It's got all these great people. They're not in love with it. We actually had Casey Neistat on this podcast earlier this year, and he spent most of that time talking about YouTube and Twitch. Yeah. And so you have this feeling that, okay, here's a bunch of people. They're on YouTube. They love YouTube. They have this relationship with YouTube. They don't actually have a very personal relationship with the company. They don't seem very handled by YouTube. No. There's not like an army of sort of like suit guys being like, their pawns are great.
They don't have like a personal connection to this company. It's just a platform that they run that is like kind of mysterious. And so it always feels like, well, they're just all gonna leave. But there's, is there somewhere to go? How does that even exist?
The number one thing YouTube creators love to talk about is why they hate YouTube. And it does so well. All those videos do so incredibly well. Yeah, I think that's the thing, right? My favorite person to talk about this, another like godfather of YouTube is Philip DeFranco. And DeFranco will talk about this over and over again. And he'll say, there is nowhere else to go. Like, as much as we hate YouTube, no one else has figured out advertising. And like you said, right? Google and so much of it. No one else has figured out the audience size, which is huge. No one else has figured out how to actually directly pay creators in a way that is sustainable, which is another big deal. The thing that we, I'm beginning to see more of, and I think it says more about our political climate, over the last two years, but especially over the last four years, if you consider
gamer gate a turning point for a lot of stuff, is you'll see blockchain type video sites opening up. So like BitChute will run and BitChute is basically saying, hey, come to us. We don't do censorship. We don't, all this kind of very keyword stuff, freedom of speech. And so you'll see a lot of people on YouTube kind of tell their audience to go there and watch their videos there. And then they can use like digital wallets to pay for stuff. But they're still uploading videos on YouTube because they're still getting most of their hundreds of thousands, millions of views from YouTube. And that still works out to be a decent amount of money, depending on your CPM with YouTube. Depending on who you are, you've got really, really, really great CPM and you can live off AdSense.
And depending on the type of topics you cover, you've got to expand. Someone like Philip DeFranco, who talks about war in the Middle East, gets demonetized every single day because advertisers get to choose what they want to put their ads on. And sensitive content includes news a lot of the time. So people who talk about news often get dinged by demonetization issues, which is upsetting. So he's got like nine other ventures that he has. He's got Rogue Rocket, which is his company. And he's working on making sure that he has his income coming in from different places because he can't rely on YouTube. And he's arguably one of the biggest creators on the platform. But then you've got someone like a David Dobrik, who... Every time he makes a video, there's two or three million views within a couple hours, or within a day, I should say.
And he's doing pretty well on just AdSense and like sponsorships through SeatGeek.
Yeah, well, it seems like all these creators are actually running a business of their own.
That relies on YouTube managing an advertising business over there that they have no visibility into. And that, to me, is a guy who like built a media business here and I don't even have visibility into. Like, I'm, I think we have a good CEO and I'm like, I trust that guy and I think we have a decent sales team. Like, you're great. You just, you just stay over there and don't bother us. Like, but I would never say you should, you should build a business where another giant company can literally just turn off your money whenever they want. And so I think everybody figured that out kind of intuitively. And so they're doing branded content. They're doing these weird merch deals.
And it's interesting because sometimes that blows up, right? I mean, like the BetterHelp controversy, which just happened with a lot of creators, was a huge.
Explain that one.
So BetterHelp is a mental health app or mental wellness app. And the idea is that you sign up, you pay like $260 a month and you get access to a therapist every week. Their terms of service, which got into legalese issues with like, they couldn't promise that people were licensed. It became this whole issue about YouTubers selling a mental health app and using their own stories, which many people thought were like fabricated because of sponsorship deals. There created this distrust between people who watch the videos and the creators. And if you lose that trust, you're done. Like, that's what people, you need that trust. And so what we're seeing now for the first time in a long time is sponsorships becoming more frowned upon than usual. The YouTube audience is aware that sponsorships have to happen.
They get that YouTubers need to make money. It's a huge talking point in the community. But there's certain sponsorships now that people are like, I'm not gonna watch your videos if you use this company because I don't like the way that you are selling a product. And the other interesting thing that's happening that I talk to my friend and Atlantic writer Taylor Lorenz about a lot is that more than ever, it's kids and teenagers are learning that they can monetize their hobbies faster than I did. I wish I knew in high school I could monetize things instead of working in like a record store. But like, so you have these, one of my favorite YouTube creators, a girl named Emma Chamberlain, she's 17, she dropped out of high school and she was 16, moved to LA, and she figured out how to run a company very quickly and like figured out how to separate what she
does with sponsorships and her YouTube channel and working with agencies. And you'd hear them talk about it, these like 16, 17 year olds, and they're like, nope, I understand how I have to run my business on YouTube and how YouTube is just a platform for me to pick up an audience. They understand the importance of like collaborating with other people and the importance of like market share stuff. And it's wild to hear them talk about it because when people think of YouTube creators, they just think of people sitting in front of a camera and talking. And it's become just a huge, huge, huge factory for turning out people who are just as big as-
Like media executives.
Like actual media executives.
So this is really, you obviously know far more YouTubers than I do, but I know a few. And I always think of it as the darkness. There's the person you meet and they're often lovely people and they hang out and what do I do except, you know, talk shit about cameras with them? Like, and I can do that, like, that's like an easy way to make friends with any YouTuber for me. And then there's the sort of like YouTube persona, which is often that same persona, just like turned up a few notches and much louder, they're all yelling now. And then there's what I think of as the darkness, which is there's like a ruthless business person just waiting to talk to you about CPMs and branded content deals and how if they grow the channel to a certain size, they unlock another category of business deal that they
can do. I understand it, like again, we work at a media company that we helped start, so I see it. But we are insulated from it because we make journalism. At no point is like our revenue tied to something. And so I'm like, I can't tell if I should be extraordinarily impressed because this is a whole set of skills that I just don't have and was never asked to to build. Or if I should just be terrified that like another 22 year old I'm hanging out with is basically the world's most ruthless ruthless media executive.
And like the
And it's I think it's good or bad. I just always think of it as as the darkness.
And the craziest thing, too, it's funny you bring that up. When I think about the fact that like I care to know about what a company's revenue is or like how they're using certain things to increase page views. It's such a New York media subject where you're like, oh, no one else cares about this other than other journalists. On YouTube, the audiences care so much about like CPM and like Social Blade statistics, Social Blade tracks. It's basically a YouTube analyst firm because it's in every video like it's creators are very open about when they're getting paid, when they're not getting paid, how they're getting paid, how much other people are getting paid. So one of the big topics with like Logan Paul, when it popped off was all these YouTube creators talking about his CPM, Google preferred, what this meant, his sponsorship.
And I was like, and you've got these 14 year olds commenting and they understand what's going on. And like, I wouldn't have given a crap when I was 14 about how someone was getting paid. And so it's so interesting because YouTube is its own little insular world where everyone understands the lingo of the company and the business model. And it's just a ongoing daily conversation with like, everyone's open about their CPM. Everyone's open about their deals, their sponsorships. They all work with each other on it. And it's weird to see happen because unlike journalists talking to other journalists about how their companies are doing, it's like a YouTube creator talking to millions of people about
Their fans.
Their about their media strategy.
And there's like an active conversation going on about it.
So there's a part of me, I tend to be an optimist against my own. Best instincts, but there's a part of me that says this is actually great.
Right? Like, we're, here's an entire generation of extremely savvy media creators and media consumers who understand how the money works. And that's great. And the creators, particularly the ones who are really open about money are, they're being transparent. So that's good. And then I'm like, that stuff gets imputed to everyone else. So we run two big YouTube channels. Polygon runs a big YouTube channel. And that's not how our channel works at all. Like, not even a little bit because of, you know, our aspirations to be journalist. And so that to me is really, like, that's, it's a dark side. And then I think I'm just old. And I'm like, all of this is fake, right? Because YouTube is just a company run by a bunch of people.
Literally, there's no historical parallel for this. So they made up a bunch of rules and terms like YouTube preferred.
And someone sat in a room and made like a PDF that said, here's what YouTube preferred means. And there's a slide deck and, you know, a webpage. And that seems real and you can like live your life based on the reality of that thing. But tomorrow, you know, Susan Wojcicki could leave, YouTube could get a new CEO, and that reality just could get upended.
And I, like, that to me is like the scary part. Like, if you accept some corporation's definitions as real forever, you're making your first big business mistake. And I think that's where YouTube like screws up. They're not, they don't communicate well enough that like, hey, we could change this on a moment's notice.
These aren't real contracts. This is what our platform says.
The other thing that I-
And if you do think they're real contracts, every one of those contracts that every platform puts out has a section that says, we reserve the right to change this contract without you being involved.
It's based on the conversations I've had with different people at YouTube, like, different sources. YouTube is, it's insane just the level of like disconnect between YouTube staffers, people who work at the company, and YouTube, like creators and the community. Insane. The amount of times that I will, you know, reach out to someone and be like, hey, I'm working on this story. I wanted to show you guys these things. And like the responses are like- Don't know what this is. Don't know what's happening. But cool, we're gonna look into it. And it's one of those situations where I had a source be like, oh yeah, like, I saw one of your stories on The Verge and like, shared it around the company, because it was like, didn't even know this was a thing. And I was like, yeah, it's one of those situations where YouTube is so big, and it's an ecosystem,
and there's little tiny pockets, that it's hard for anyone to pay attention to what's happening across the entire platform. But you've got, on one side, creators who really work well with YouTube as a company, and that's your Liza Koshy's, I would imagine Casey Neistat probably works really well with YouTube. And then you've got people like PewDiePie, who is still the number one creator, and whose whole mantra is, "I'm not dead yet." His whole mantra is like, YouTube has tried to destroy me in any way possible, and I'm still here, and I'm still their number one creator. And it's like, for him, he views YouTube as just a place. He loves his community, but he's like, eh, like, if YouTube ended tomorrow, it'd be fine.
So why can't one of these, sort of like, white-label creator video platforms take off? Why, like, the Zeus Network, which is like, King Batch and Amanda Serna, like, why doesn't that take off?
I think it's the audience size, and how built-in the AdSense mentality is to creators already. Like, creators get it, they understand it, they don't want to mess with it, especially ones who rely on it. And the audience, it's 450 hours of content uploaded every minute, like, billion, I can't remember, 2 billion views? I can't remember what the monthly thing was, but it's an insane number. And it's, you're not gonna get that anywhere else. And it's easy to game. Their algorithm is super easy, like, literally, it's-
I feel like we're doing something wrong.
Literally, I get, like, texts from creators, and they're like, which thumbnail should I go with? Because this thumbnail is gonna do really well because of the way their algorithm, like, tracks facial stuff. And I'm like, it's crazy how well people understand how to game that system, like, without putting in much effort. They just, and there's videos on YouTube, like, here's how to game YouTube.
Again, I'm just gonna remind everyone, it's just a bunch of people in an office that can change it whenever they wanted. So it goes. All right, Julia, well, I'm super excited that you have chosen to come hang out at The Verge and write about YouTube and these other platforms because I think it's incredibly important. Super stoked. And I hope Vergecast listener, I certainly learned a lot about how terrified I am in the future. But we're gonna have Julia on The Vergecast many more times. Thank you for joining us. Thank you. All right, that was Julia Alexander, who's the new reporter at The Verge. You can follow all of her work on the site. We're gonna have her back on the show tons of times, I can just tell. You can also follow her on Twitter at @Ladymouthjulia. Thanks to her so much for coming on. We'll be back this week with The Vergecast on Friday. It's gonna be a really exciting one. I can't tell you why, but it's gonna be a good one.
And we'll have more interviews coming up real soon. Let me know how we're doing. I love hearing from all of you. This episode of Vergecast is brought to you by Merck. Here is a word from our sponsor, Merck.
Merck scientist Daria Hazuda has failed countless times. But from those failures, medical invention was born. From years of trial and error researching infectious diseases, Dr. Hazuda has helped to develop medicines that help treat HIV and hepatitis C. For the next generation of inventors, Dr. Hazuda's passion, coupled with her commitment to eradicating the world's toughest diseases, proves that failure is a teachable moment. Daria is just one of the many Merck scientists dedicated to inventing for life. See why we invent at merck.com/inventingforlife.
Page updated October 17, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
