The Odyssey: The Deafening Noise

Twenty years ago, the internet was a collection of basic HTML pages that alluded to the massive potential of creating some digital endpoint on a growing world wide web. There were content creators, but not in the sense that we recognize the creator today. With the democratization of the content creation and global visibility came a great flood of content. And the deafening noise began.

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If we are going to talk about popular content creation platforms, we have to talk about Youtube, the video sharing platform created in 2005 that now dominates the world in terms of hosting original, user-created content. How does Youtube connect people with content that means something to them? They don't really, but they managed to achieve this initially.

At first, Youtube was simply some website on the internet that allowed users to post videos to their servers to share with friends and family. There wasn't really the notation of a global, worldwide audience of a new digital and connected age.

Youtube was more of a clever tool rather than a global platform. But due to the lack of any real competition in the space and great timing with people migrating to the internet with the rise of social networks, Youtube took off.

So, how has Youtube obtained such a wide audience? The simple answer is that they conquered the visual medium on the internet before anyone else could. They dominate their market. People go to Youtube because it is the most popular and because it had good content.

People are attracted to good content. This is the reason people pay for content within subscription models. Last time, we discussed how Medium was able to serve quality content by taking the time and effort to find and showcase it and building a paywall to finance that endeavor. But Youtube didn't build it's empire on the subscription model. It has recently joined the table in offering content behind a paywall, and this addition to the platform ins't the one that has defined Youtube's success.

So, how did Youtube initially grab people's attention? Part of it was technical advancement. As mentioned earlier, video hosting sites hadn't really been able to grab large enough of an audience prior to the mid-2000's to be sustainable. But look at who was creating the content. Ordinary people with ordinary lives with a passion for showcasing a side of themselves on screen.

While social networks fought over the best way to connect people with each other, Youtube was creating a central repository of people creating stuff and connecting a new audience to that content.

In the early days, with no incentives to create content, those that did focused on the audience as people rather than a metric to be maximized. The signal to noise ratio was lower because there was no incentive to produce noise and access to camera and filming equipment was as ubiquitous as it is today. Back when Youtube was founded, there were no smartphones that you could shoot videos from.

In contrast to today, the signal to noise ratio is actually a lot poorer. Youtube has attempted to counteract this by using algorithms and artificial intelligence to guide users to content they may like, but at least to myself, the content that is being delivered lacks some of the spark that the site had in its earliest days.

To some extent, some can argue that the novelty has worn off. And to a greater extent, the video creation industry has been corporatized and there is a greater incentive than ever before to generate noise in hopes of receiving fame, money, and fortune in return.

Also, due to the popularization of creating content as a job that started with Youtube, the passion projects are being replaced with formulaic content sprinkled with advertisements. The viewers and audience are reduced to metrics to be churned through the attention machine to milk money out of.

Of course, even though Youtube appears not to really care about its creators all that much, it does still care about its audience. That why it has begun offering ad free content and original quality content behind a paywall. Because it knows that all the audience wants is to be connected with the good stuff rather than trudge through the trash.

And while Youtube has done a decent enough job building algorithms to separate the fresh from the rotten, the popularity of the site pushes more mediocrity into the mix as well as those looking to maximize metrics a means of profit-maximization than providing a good product in return.

The deafening noise grows on Youtube and it grows on other upstart platforms as more and more individuals seek to use the attention of their peers to their advantage. Where a market exists, there will be folks to compete for it and some folks will look to exploit others weaknesses rather than showcase their own strengths.

While the freemium model appears to work well at providing users with good content in the early stage of the platform, it looks like at a certain point, algorithms and word of mouth struggle to parse through the sheer amount of volume that the internet can provide. But that complication leads to new opportunities. When curating needs to be done, curators are found and the quality content discovered or generated is hidden behind a paywall in order to make up the cost of delivering it in the first place.

So it appears, we still don't have a good solution. As Youtube grew in popularity, so did the noise. As Youtube grew in popularity, so did the incentives to create noise. So, what solutions to we have to navigate against the deafening noise? Two so far:

1. Reduce the incentives for noise.
2. Put more effort to curate content as noise grows.

The obvious problem with the first solution is that it also reduces the creation of the good signal in the first place. However, when you do have a good signal, it's clear and not tainted by the allure of incentives. But such a localized model is clearly not scalable and only really applicable to a small set of passionate individuals. In other words, while you might be able to build a blog around it, you aren't building a platform using this approach.

And then there's the second approach. The effort part. The popular implementation is the subscription model that we discovered last time when talking about Medium. This implementation is the most popular in the industry in terms of connecting users to content they care about. But is there another way? A way to beat the noise?