Creators, Consumers and Commenters

I’ve had my YouTube channel going for about 10 months now and the experiment is going well, my goal was to create 1 video a month. For the past 10 years I have been a consumer of videos and I wanted to see what it’s like from a creators perspective what the YouTube platform is all about. I really thought it was about creators and consumers (people that consume the content), but there is a 3rd category…commenters. Let’s talk about these 3 categories of users.

1. First up are the creators. I thought it would be easy to create content for YouTube but that’s just not the case. Video production is not easy and it’s one of the main reasons I stayed away from having a vlog but as I saw more and more content on video, it was clear that’s the future. Once you get past the video production drama you have to have interesting/compelling content and a style that people like. Now just upload content on a daily basis or every 2 to 3 days and you have a winning formula to monetize your YouTube channel. I would say 5% of the people are creators.
   
2. The consumers. As with any property on the internet, you need people to view the content and also to view the ads that are inserted into the videos to get paid. These consumers are fickle, what’s hot one day can be dropped like a hot potato for another YouTube channel. This group makes up 80% of the overall audience and this is what most content creators are focused on.
   
3. The commenters. Or as some creators call them…tormentors! This group makes up 15% of the audience and honestly it’s the one group I didn’t really think about till I started my own channel. Luckily my target audience is pretty sane but I’ve seen some channels where the comments section is a complete shit-show.

The comments section is a great way to get feedback and also get user engagement but it can also turn dark very quickly. In India, the YouTube comments section can be boiled down to 3 things that people end up fighting about if it gets heated:

• BJP vs Congress (politics)
• Hindu vs. Muslim (religion)
• India vs. Pakistan (nationalism)

I’ll probably continue my YouTube experiment till the end of the year and then stop. It takes too much time to create quality content and I rather just blog here instead! Oh and I’m pretty sure no one wants to hear me talk about cars since there are 1000’s of channels that do the same thing.