The more experience I have with creating content on YouTube, the more I realise the problems that came with it, and why so many creators experience burnout.

Audience vs Me

The biggest challenge is the difference between what the audience wants and what you want to make. That is quite common across many genres of content on YouTube, not just me (but perhaps actually less common in the education niche).

For me, I have described in this very website that there are two main types of videos I make: traditional topics explained in a new way, and novel topics that aren’t even in normal math curricula. I have a feeling that a lot of viewers want me to produce the first type of videos (i.e. traditional topics), possibly because they want to understand a certain concept they encounter in their own course, like Jacobian, or complex analysis. In fact, one of the most positive comment sections I have was the complex integration video.

Novelty

However, I personally prefer the second type of videos (i.e. novel topics) much more than the first type. This is not to say that I absolutely despise making videos on more traditional topics, but given the choice, I do want to go for the more novel topics. There are 2 main reasons behind this:

1. Personally I have never used YouTube as a “learning platform” - if I encounter some difficulties in my course, then I would just Google it, and most likely it leads to some Math StackExchange posts, or some Wikipedia page (the most common page I visit being the Del in cylindrical and spherical coordinates). If that’s not possible, I just ask the tutors (we call them supervisors in Cambridge) or professors, and very rarely I use YouTube to “learn”. I view YouTube as a more leisurely watching platform, where the educational creators are more like friends telling you what they are passionate about, rather than a teacher explaining a certain concept. In some sense, my view when making videos is to inspire, not to teach. This is why I love doing more “novel” topics - it feels truer to my intention of making videos in the first place.

2. Personally I prioritise novelty of content when it comes to watching videos on YouTube. Whenever I see a YouTuber trying out completely different type of content, I instantly love the video a lot more, and actually, more likely to click on it. For example, one of my favourite channels JOLLY, which usually has food content, but my favourite videos off of the channel are Ollie gifting Josh weird birthday / Christmas presents (but those videos generally perform worse). Even if a channel is not doing something completely different, I would love it more when they cover more novel topics - why would I want to watch a video when I already know what it is going to be about? Just to be clear, it isn’t about the novelty of the style of the video, but the content or the topic itself - I personally don’t like to think of rehashing content in a different style “novel”, which is why I don’t think of me tackling the more traditional topics “novel”.

Note that all these begin with the word “personally”, because these habits and priorities are indeed quite personal, and there are definitely nuances there - I did really enjoy making the videos on Galois theory and matrix transpose, both of which definitely fall into the “traditional topics” category, but I enjoyed them because they answer some of the questions I had in the past. But I think the two reasons stated above really sum up what my instincts would be when I saw my favourite channels uploading videos. I have even got to the point of thinking that channels uploading the “traditional topics” category run out of video ideas, because for me, it is definitely the case: if I have to make these types of videos now, it’s because I run out of video ideas (and as of writing, I have run out of them) - showing how much I prefer the “novel topics” category.

But whenever I saw the comments on my videos, they often have requests about what they want to see in the videos, and of course, by the very nature of novelty, they can only request videos in the more “traditional topics” category. And indeed, if I have to meet a goal of reaching a certain number of views, e.g. in sponsorship deals, then the “safe bets” would be those videos. There always seems to be some sort of dissonance between me and the audience regarding what to like and what not to like.

Topics of interests

I would say that my interests are quite broad, but it isn’t like I love Shakespeare as much as I love differential geometry. And actually within the mathematics community, I still find myself liking topics that are not as broadly appealing. For example, on 3Blue1Brown’s channel, the most popular videos were the Bitcoin / cryptocurrency series, and neural network, but honestly those are the videos that I haven’t even clicked to watch. It seems like if I want to branch out to even more audience, then another safe bet would be to make videos on computer science, but while I am not inherently resistant to computer science, it remains a lower priority compared with maths.

The way I think about computer science is that they are the “tools” to help me with understanding maths, like creating tools for me to animate certain stuff (while GeoGebra and Mathematica are the main tools of animation, some “coding” is involved there, or at least technology is involved there). This is why I consider them to be more like an assistant to help me learn math, and why I have less interest in knowing how that works. But I do know that a lot of people think things the other way around - they see math as a language, a tool they need to learn to develop certain projects. This is why they would want to see videos that are more on the math of computer-y topics, so that they know the principles behind some of the codes they use.

It’s not just computer science, of course. There are many topics that fall under the category of “I am not averse to it, but it is not top priority”. Those different topics or even different niches affect how broad your potential audience base could be, and of course this affects the size of the channel and the number of views you can potentially get. YouTube Creator Insider channel, an unofficial channel from people at YouTube, even used the example of football and golf - way more people are interested in football than golf, and so if you make golf content, you find yourself in a smaller bubble than making football content. That again feels like a dissonance between what the general public, not just my audience, likes versus what you like to cover in the videos.

Solution?

This phenomenon of the difference between what the audience wants and what you love producing does not only affect me. I have seen other channels talking about this as well, along the lines of “if you make videos that you love, it will get few views”, which in itself is pretty sad, and is perhaps the source of many creators experiencing burnout. The even sadder thing is that this problem is just inherently not solvable. You can’t control what people watch on YouTube, and honestly the algorithm does follow the audience to a certain extent.

The paradox is that, if you experiment with your video format and topics, the audience does not necessarily like the change that much and either dislike it, or simply don’t click on the video because it isn’t a topic that they are interested in. However, if you look at any creators with a relatively long career (like 10+ years on YouTube), you will realise that they do have to change up a bit, because the audience will slowly get bored of a certain type of content.

It feels weird to end on that we don’t have a solution to the problem I discussed, but there truly can’t be any solution. And so, creator burnout will continue, or at least, creators will still feel the discrepancy between what they love to produce and what the audience love to watch.