How to Destroy Your Career

I felt this was worth writing about, so I thought I'd do it now before I forget again.

So, Cory Williams aka SMP Films announced on his Facebook that he was "done with Youtube."  He listed off a myriad of other websites like Newgrounds as examples of other places which he has also been "done" with in the past.  He went on about change, and how that's good and necessary.  Then he said there was another place for SMP Films instead of Youtube, and to stay tuned.

The comments to this Facebook post where about what you would expect, with a mix of the typical "I'll support you no matter what" from the brown-nosers, and people expressing some degree of concern that this perhaps wasn't a smart move.

If you've read this blog for any period of time, you've probably guessed that I would fall into the latter category.

If we look back at Cory's career, he had his initial success on Newgrounds.  That was in a time in the pre-Youtube days when vlogging and internet video was still very young.  Lots of people still had internet that was so slow, and had to use plugins which were so crappy (RealPlayer), that streaming video wasn't exactly the most desirable media at the time.  But to his credit, he still managed to get his start, with the right technology appearing on his heels, to turn his initial success at Newgrounds and Myspace into something of an actual career.  Particularly so with Youtube rolling around when it did.

But that's the thing.  His career now is on Youtube.  It presently revolves around the partnership program that Youtube provides, based on the tens of thousands of subscribers who regularly view his videos, which allows him to buy his food and pay his rent.  When you cut Youtube and his subscribers out of the equation, suddenly the career part kind of goes away with it.  Your options for making money outside of that environment are not nearly as easy or advantageous, and to cut off that huge resource of user and monetary potential without at least gradually migrating to something different is pretty much how you destroy everything you built so far. 

Now sure, Cory is sometimes premature in his excitement, and prone to positive and negative emotional extremes.  One time he'll be so excited to tell you how good everything is going (like right now), and then suddenly a week or two later he'll be totally depressed again.  I think he gets his hopes up on things which have a good chance of not working out, or he doesn't think something through, and disappoints himself.  It was like with that whole stupid wrestling thing, which lasted all but a month before you never heard about it again, despite fans telling him from the start that it's a crazy idea with all of his back problems.  That may be all this is, and he might be on Youtube for years to come, but his impulsive nature makes it hard to tell at this point.

If that's not the case, then his options are a bit iffy.  There's Vimeo, the only other streaming video site which has had anywhere near the success of Youtube.  Then there's sites like Ustream, too, but they tend to cater to live streams as opposed to uploaded media.  He could have his own custom website made for serving up his videos, too.  But the problem is that there's absolutely no revenue in any of these by default.  I'm fairly sure that Vimeo and Ustream still lack any kind of affiliate or partnership programs.  He could always use these services to host video on a custom website, but then that begs the question why not just use Youtube's player?  You could put ads on a custom website of course, which makes it really the only option worth looking at, other than ads inserted into videos themselves.  But then you still have the problem of viewers, making your revenue source a moot point if nobody's watching.

Let me be blunt here.  Cory's success is almost entirely based around the communities of the websites he's been a part of, not by the quality of his content alone.  If someone had to actually go and look on a separate website to find his stuff, his career would have likely never gone anywhere.  Convenience is a huge factor in success.  I subscribe to things on Youtube which I would never bother going to find elsewhere on the internet.  Hell, that even applies to him and Kate, and any other vlogger I've watched over the years.  I wouldn't actually seek out vlogs normally, it's just convenient for me to watch them when in my list of other subscriptions.

There's also the potential of using social media these days to promote yourself entirely, of which he already has a Facebook and Twitter presence.  But he only has around twenty-two thousands likes on Facebook at the moment, which is a drop in the bucket compared to his Youtube following.  And even then, you're counting on people sharing the video to ever branch out to new subscribers, because Facebook isn't designed to promote media randomly to others like a dedicated video site is.  Youtube's been doing this for years, they have the "related videos" thing down pretty well now.

So basically, any other website Cory moves to means an immediate and drastic drop in views.  That also means an equally drastic drop in profits, other than money he'll continue to make from stuff currently uploaded there (assuming he doesn't delete it).  People don't want to leave Youtube, people don't want to check another website, and people don't like being abandoned.  I've seen it before, when someone thinks they're sick of Youtube and starts posting click-through placeholder videos on Youtube linking to their actual video on Vimeo.  People get pissed, they thumbs the video down, they leave a bunch of angry comments, and they never click through, out of spite and/or laziness. 

And I recognize that he specifically mentioned SMP Films, which perhaps excludes Mean Kitty from being moved.  And if I'm to be honest, Mean Kitty is the only one of the two channels I care much about.  Though, still being honest, the Mean Kitty videos as of late have been a bit lackluster. 

So I dunno, it's just all silly if you ask me.  What I do know is, for a guy who has complained about money problems on more than one occasion, he sure doesn't seem to think these things out very well.  While he can legitimately and proudly consider himself a trailblazer in internet video, that time is over.  Crazy videos of guys doing stupid shit are a dime a dozen on the internet now, as are cat videos for that matter, and he's not going to stand out from them while doing what he's always done, regardless of what website he might take them to.  There are ways to reinvent yourself without shooting yourself in the foot in the process.