Fran Blanche was talking in her videos at one point about project videos and thumbnails because she relies on youtube and patreon to make a living. And she prefers to do project videos or technical information and not appear in the video, but that even though her audience is dedicated and very topic specific, it's true that if she puts her picture in a video or sits in camera view instead of showing projections from first person view, the videos do a lot better. All the while, the comments are filled with begging for more project videos "like they used to be" and when the project videos come up, through some combination of YT not recommending the videos or people not clicking on them, doing legitimate content plain videos without the zany faces or whatever just doesn't work.
I put the blame on YT, but YT does what's good for them. In a blanket opinion about them, they cater to the stupid.
I've got two solutions - one, to their ad pushing, I won't watch anything on YT without brave at this point, and sponsor block. If YT doesn't like that, I can do something else. And two, any time any woodworking video maker comes up, I quickly hit "don't recommend content from this channel". the content is so dumb and so repetitive if it's allowed to roll in the background through woodworking that it's aggravating. It's a teacher of last resort for beginners and nothing else. if there ever is a real purpose-type question that you're searching for to get a legitimate answer, it can be worked through the search function, but quite often, that's also a waste of time.
It's everywhere. I'd like to foam clean the evaporator in my van's A/C system. it isn't something you can do without removing one of the covers and pulling insulation back so instead, if you search for cleaning the core, you get endless videos of people changing the cabin filter and spraying some kind of "buy it here" can product through the outside vent into the car. It's clearly a better medium for zany face pictures and copying something someone else already said.
I won't even go far into stuff like my older subscription channels that have been de-incentivized because they either don't have the ability to be a veiled sales pitcher, or whatever - if I even search for their actual channel, youtube attempts to show half a dozen videos that aren't them and make the return for the actual channel that I have spelled correctly to the letter...a little tiny icon that is hard to find, and easy to still accidentally click on the crapola around the tiny icon for the actual channel.
