YouTube was once a revolution. It was the place where a new genre could emerge, where talent didn’t need a record label, a studio budget, or industry connections. A teenager with a cheap webcam could speak to millions. A musician recording in a garage could build a global following. A comedian filming in a kitchen could become part of cultural language. The illusion, and also the truth, was that the playing field was open.
But in the summer of 2025, that changed. A large algorithm update rolled out quietly, never formally acknowledged, never explained. But the effects were unmistakable. Shorts began dominating recommendation feeds. Long-form releases stopped reaching even loyal subscribers. Music videos that once drew steady audience traffic suddenly received only a fraction of their typical views. This wasn’t an accident. It was a business decision: optimize the platform for advertiser-friendly, low-risk, infinite-scroll content — even if it means discarding the types of creators who built YouTube in the first place.
Caught Between TikTok and Television
YouTube now exists in a confused identity space. On one side, it wants to be TikTok: fast, light, short, addictive. On the other, it wants to be a premium viewing destination: cinematic uploads, episodic formats, and high-budget productions meant for the living room. But chasing both directions at once results in neither identity working well.
The algorithm now prioritizes clips built from trending audio, recycled edits, reaction splices, and minimal-effort compilations that encourage quick swiping rather than time spent with a creator. Meanwhile, creators who put weeks into narrative videos, music storytelling, or thoughtful commentary are treated as noise.
You can see this in numbers that are not theoretical. A mid-sized music-focused channel with around 8,000 subscribers that consistently saw 5,000–10,000 views per upload throughout early 2025 can now release a new music video and see 300-500 views in two days. The audience didn’t disappear. The algorithm stopped delivering. The platform changed what it considers “valid content.” This isn’t an artistic shift, it’s an economic one.
This didn’t just change what gets shown, it changed what looks successful on paper.
The Illusion of Growth
YouTube’s internal metrics look excellent right now – and that’s exactly why the problem is hard to see from the outside. Shorts have created an explosion in raw view counts, session length, and daily engagement. Those are the numbers shown to investors, PR decks, keynote stages and earnings calls. They look like growth. They make the platform appear stronger than ever. Managers get bonuses for those charts.
But none of it converts. A million Shorts views rarely lead to a sale, a signup, a show ticket, a Patreon pledge, or a product purchase. It’s attention without intention. Large advertising agencies haven’t fully felt this yet, because most of them plan budgets a year in advance. They’re still operating on last year’s assumptions and last year’s data dashboards. On papíře to stále vypadá dobře.
But smaller agencies already ran head-first into the wall. They see the drop in real conversions. They see that “viral reach” doesn’t move real products. And they’re quietly shifting spend toward platforms where audiences actually behave like buyers — including Rumble, Odysee, and other alternative ecosystems.
This is how bubbles form:
not through lies, but through metrics that are technically impressive and economically empty.
The MTV Comparison Isn’t Metaphor — It’s Pattern
MTV was once the cultural center of youth identity: music, visual style, attitude. But once advertiser pressure pushed the network toward “safer” formats, the music disappeared, replaced by reality TV and lifestyle filler. The platform didn’t shut down, it simply became irrelevant to the culture that birthed it.
YouTube is now following that same trajectory. Not because people stopped creating interesting work, but because the system stopped rewarding it. Instead of unique identity, we get homogenized “safe content.” Instead of music videos as cultural artifacts, we get lyric-only videos and AI slideshow visuals because they are quicker, cheaper, and algorithmically compliant.
The platform no longer rewards vision. It rewards format obedience.
Creators as Business Risk
This is the part many creators don’t want to admit: creators are no longer seen as the core of the platform’s value — they’re seen as instability. A creator with personality, voice, and an actual point of view is harder for large corporate brands to place ads on. Not because the content is bad — but because it can’t be guaranteed to stay “perfectly neutral.”
The irony is that the brands that actually sell real products don’t care about neutrality — they care about reaching real buyers. But YouTube’s system is now tuned for the Coca-Cola/Disney type of “sanitized advertising environment,” not the markets where people actually spend money.
This shift is visible everywhere:
– Notifications stop reaching subscribers.
– Community posts barely surface.
– Videos with stable watch-time still see revenue cuts.
– Viewer reach collapses without cause or explanation.
Meanwhile, YouTube Premium revenue continues to grow, but the majority of that subscription money does not meaningfully reach creators. Creators bring the audience. The platform keeps the profit. In business terms, creators are lead-generation bait for a subscription model they do not benefit from.
The Economic Blind Spot: Real Customers Aren’t “Brand-Safe”
YouTube’s fixation on brand safety has created a paradox: the platform is becoming increasingly inhospitable to the very advertisers who sell real products to real people. Automakers, tool manufacturers, alcohol brands, firearms retailers, outdoor equipment companies, they’re not trying to go viral with teenagers. They’re trying to reach the kind of audience that actually buys things.
But that audience, working-class, middle-income, blue-collar, doesn’t live in Shorts. They’re not doom-scrolling cat edits and sped-up reality clips. They’re watching long-form reviews, tutorials, commentary, and music with identity. And these formats are exactly what YouTube has begun burying.
The shift toward Shorts inflates view counts, but it kills conversions. No one decides to buy a truck, a bottle of whiskey, or a power drill after a 12-second dopamine hit sandwiched between anime memes and reaction cuts. Even when there is a click, it’s often accidental, or from someone who was never a customer to begin with.
In trying to look “modern,” YouTube has forgotten something basic:
not all views are equal.
Real customers follow real voices.
And those voices are leaving — taking the customers with them.
And here’s where it gets tangible: this isn’t just a “creator problem.” We work normal jobs. We collaborate with advertising agencies. And in the last few months, those agencies have started telling us the same thing over and over:
“We’re cutting budget for YouTube and testing Rumble, Odysee and alt platforms — because your actual buyers aren’t on YouTube anymore.”
They’re not chasing memes. They’re not in Shorts. They’ve left the room.
Rumble: Potential, Not Salvation
Rumble is not a utopia. The interface is rough, the recommendation algorithm lacks nuance, and the audience is smaller and skewed. Discovery can be slower. And yes — if Rumble grows large enough, it could one day adopt the same advertiser-driven incentives YouTube has.
But the difference today is structural: Rumble still needs creators. That means creators have leverage.
CPMs are frequently 2–3× higher than YouTube for comparable view numbers. Music videos are treated like regular content, not pushed into a separate ecosystem like YouTube Music, where visual storytelling becomes irrelevant. Creators are not quietly penalized for tone, language, or thematic expression. The value of Rumble is not that it is perfect. The value is that it has not abandoned the idea that creators matter. And that alone is enough to shift momentum.
We’ve moved too. We publish our work on Rumble alongside YouTube, and the experience is different in a way that matters. The audience that finds you there actually chooses to be there. It’s slower growth, but it’s real growth.
If you want to see what that looks like in practice, here are our channels:
• VibeFoundry — https://rumble.com/c/VibeFoundry
• Redneckverse — https://rumble.com/c/Redneckverse
• RAI (Redneck AI) — https://rumble.com/c/RAIRedneckverse
The Cultural Cost of Format-First Systems
When a platform prioritizes format over voice, culture thins out. Music without visual storytelling becomes just audio. A creator forced to sanitize personality becomes replaceable. A community that cannot see its own creators becomes disconnected. YouTube is not dying. It is calcifying. The platform will continue to exist — as MTV did — but without the energy that made it a cultural force.
The Question That Actually Matters
The real question is not whether YouTube survives. It will.
The question is:
How many creators need to walk away before YouTube understands that the value of the platform was never the format — it was the people who made anything worth watching?
Creators build culture. Platforms host culture. And creators are no longer trapped where they are.
Switching platforms is now one download away.