“I think this is the year that there’s going to be a lot more of these,” he said of farewell videos like his own. “I think the dam is gonna burst in a lot of ways.”
YouTubers retiring is nothing new. The last few years have seen the exit of many beloved creators including Jenna Marbles, Tyler Oakley, and Tanya Burr — some due to criticism, some due to declining views.
Others, like Zoe Sugg, Lilly Singh, and Corpse Husband have scaled back their content massively, focusing more on their other pursuits such as comedy, business, or music.
But this current wave of departures feels different and may be the tipping point for a whole new era of YouTube — one where MrBeast reigns supreme and smaller creators struggle to compete for views against his extremely expensive, cinematic stunts, and where AI-generated content thrives.
It is unclear just how quickly AI-generated content has grown on YouTube, but one recent investigation by Wired found some channels with such content that appear to be targeting children. In September last year, the BBC also found children’s YouTube channels that were labeling AI-generated false scientific information as “educational content.”
The problem is already so widespread that YouTube is bringing in new politics to address the issue. In October last year, for example, the platform said it would require creators to disclose if they had used AI technology in their videos.
MrBeast, meanwhile, continues to dominate, growing from 91 million to 244 million subscribers in the last two years. This year, his videos hae so far amassed more than five billion views.
Experts believe if the trend continues, it may usher in a future where relatable and authentic friends people used to turn to the platform to watch are fewer and far between. Instead, replaced by a mixture of exceedingly high-end videos only the MrBeasts of the internet can reach and sub-par AI junk thrown together by bots and designed to meet our consumption habits with the least effort possible.
MrBeast, YouTube’s biggest star, takes a selfie with a young fan.
Dave Kotinsky
2024 has already seen major players leave
Matthew Patrick, better known as MatPat to his millions of fans, looked back on the different generations of YouTube stars, and how they came to be on the level of traditional celebrities when he announced his departure in January.
Back in the 2010s, “YouTuber” was a novel career title, and creators built strong connections with their fans as more relatable, approachable celebrities they could actually interact with, he said.
Patrick said many of the creators who cemented being a YouTuber as a career in the early days have started to phase out, citing their age, burnout, and the increasing pressures and difficulties they face due to the platform’s ever-changing algorithms and policies.
For Patrick, it was a mixture of the timing being right, and the fact The Game Theorists is now part of a much bigger machine. In December 2022, Patrick and his wife and business partner Stephanie sold their company Theory Media to the startup Lunar X.
This gave them the opportunity to step back from the limelight and take up more operational positions behind the scenes. The Game Theorists, with its 19 million subscribers who watch eagerly for theories and lore behind the biggest games, and their multiple other channels, will all live on but will be fronted by different team members.
Matthew Patrick, better known as MatPat, is leaving his YouTube channels this year.
The Game Theorists/YouTube
Patrick was not alone in making the decision to scale back his career as a YouTuber. Tom Scott ended his famed “Things You Might Not Know” YouTube series on New Year’s day after posting weekly videos about the way the world works from flu camps, to bear-resistant bins, to the Suez Canal, on his channel for a decade.
In his final video, he said being a YouTuber was still his dream job, but “it’s a job that keeps getting bigger and more complicated and I am so tired.”
Speaking with the Guardian, he said he’d seen many of his peers reducing how much time they were dedicating to YouTube.
“Everyone I know is noticing their views slowly falling, and therefore their ad revenue reducing,” he said, adding it’s “going to be a difficult few years” on the platform.
YouTube can be a frustrating platform for creators
Zoe Glatt, a digital ethnographer and feminist media scholar, told Business Insider she thinks the number of “high-profile OG YouTubers” leaving has to do with already existing problems with being a content creator being exacerbated in recent years.
“Content creation has always been precarious,” she said, fraught with “uncertainty and burnout” caused by how unpredictable it is to build a career on a platform that is constantly changing, and that has “opaque algorithmic systems and unreliable monetization mechanisms.”
Despite being generally considered one of the top social media platforms for creator compensation, YouTube has struggled in the past with combating hate speech and conspiracy theories, making its copyright claim system fair and consistent, and how to balance free speech with being advertiser-friendly.
Glatt said a few elite creators have managed to navigate all the changes to cultivate their presence for 10 years or more. That’s why some of the recent departures have been so shocking, she said.
“But when we look at the longer trajectory, it becomes clear that this shift has been a long time coming,” she said.
Jenna Marbles said goodbye to her YouTube channel back in 2020 after criticism over her old content.
Jenna Marbles / YouTube
Since TikTok exploded in popularity circa 2018, other platforms have been playing “catch up” in the game of short-form content, Glatt said.
There have been many complaints among creators about YouTube’s prioritization of shorts, for example, over longer videos, she added.
When YouTube prioritizes one metric or type of content over another, she said, “This sends ripples across the platform ecosystem, upending previously successful creators and entire genres.”
The result is that even long-standing creators with large followings don’t feel like the work they are putting into their channels is paying off, leading them to pivot, or even give up altogether.
“The creators who have left recently have seen this process happen time and again,” Glatt said. “And for one reason or another this time round, they have decided to leave.”
OG YouTubers are growing up
A lot can change in a decade. Many creators who skyrocketed to fame in Patrick’s era are at a different stage of life now.
Patrick, 37, is a father to five-year-old Ollie. Spending more time with him was one reason he gave for wanting to dedicate less to the internet, saying “he’s the coolest little dude and he’s getting older by the minute.”
He’s made good on that plan already, saying he was playing video games with Ollie on the first day of his retirement on March 10.
When creators like Patrick started out, they had fewer responsibilities, Glatt said.
“Many of them are now in their 30s or 40s, have children and mortgages, and simply cannot afford to gamble on such an unpredictable career,” she said.
Hannah Witton, who has been making videos since 2013, also made a big pivot at the end of 2023, following some major life changes, including having a baby. She decided it was time to retire her sex education channel, where she has over 700,000 followers, after “a lot of soul searching.”
“I knew something needed to change,” she told BI. “I could feel I was close to burnout, I wasn’t feeling motivated, and things were becoming financially unsustainable — but I didn’t know what to change.”
She decided to say goodbye to her main channel and her sex education podcast “Doing It” in favor of more parenting content on her second, smaller channel.
“A decade is a long time to be doing anything,” she said. “And in other careers, it’s totally normal to move on and change what you’re doing after you’ve been in it for so many years.”
Hannah Witton has closed down her sex education channel which she started in 2013.
Hannah Witton / YouTube
Scaling up in an AI world
Witton said she’s always been aware of the “growth trap” creators can fall into. When they find success, the logical step is to “scale up” with more channels, businesses, and responsibilities.
This can be great, Witton said, but it turns creators into managers, “and creates a separation between us and our audience.”
“The growth trap is just one of the reasons why we’ve seen a lot of creators taking a step back recently I think,” she said. “And I’m sure we’ll see it happening again in creators who are now in the growth stage of their careers.”
Christine Tran, a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto studying social media platforms, labor, and gaming cultures, told BI the online world demanding constant growth may mean it is now collapsing in on itself.
“Creators feel the crunch to diversify their incomes on other platforms even further,” they said. “Which often looks like a strategy of leaving platforms as much as joining them.”
Advances in AI-generated content may also be making more YouTubers question their future, Tran added. It’s streamlining the editing process, and more and more accounts are springing up all over social media that regurgitate other content and gain millions of views.
It’s a vastly different landscape to the days when YouTubers had to work tirelessly as their own talent, editors, graphic designers, social media managers, and everything else. Many still do, but they are up against a different beast now.
Some popular accounts across social media now, for example, are “Wikipedia summarizer accounts” that mostly use AI-generated content and are set up by people with a bit of spare time.
“I’ve seen cheap five-second videos of just an AI voice reading a summary of a movie,” Tran said. “There’s an immediate quality disparity between automated and human-creator content, and I’m guilty. I sometimes get absorbed into the reel, like, what does this robot voice say about this movie from 1999?”
Some of these accounts throw out 20 reels, shorts, or TikToks a day, relying on algorithms that feed it to millions of people, who are now able to casually absorb a whole movie in a few minutes. It’s perfectly mundane content for people with few minutes to spare and don’t want to think too much about what they’re consuming.
“How can you compete with that?” Tran said.
YouTubers like Emma Chamberlain have quit the platform and returned. But this era of departures may be different.
Jacopo Raule/Getty Images
Closing the chapter on old YouTube
Old YouTube may not be dead. YouTubers have quit and returned multiple times before, and there are still communities that continue to thrive, such as gaming, podcasts, and commentary.
But it certainly looks different from how it did a decade ago, and up-and-coming influencers may find it hard to reach the success of the people who inspired them in the same way.
That’s not the concern of the people who are ready to close a chapter, though, and focus their careers in a different direction.
Witton, for example, is positive about her future, having seen an increase in Patreon subscribers since her farewell video — a sign that if she says goodbye to YouTube, her followers might too.
Change is scary, she said, but she knew she was ready. All YouTubers are likely to face similar crossroads eventually.
“It’s always better to go out on your own terms rather than feeling like you’ve been forced out,” she said. “For me, the importance was about ending well, and I feel like I accomplished that.”
