No, not just Twitter.

Honestly, I suspect YouTube will end up feeling the worst of the consumer shift first. Now, if you are taking business advice from me, you should not be in business. I can barely sell snarky tee shirts so I’m not the gal you want writing your business model.

Politics, however, I know a bit about.

Most businesses avoid politics like the plague. Ticking off customers unnecessarily is generally considered a bad sales tactic. Corporations love politics because political influence can shift the regulatory environment to favor your business over the competitors. Very few businesses are involved in the political sphere as part of their actual business – lucky me, huh?

This stupid mess works as long as your brand doesn’t get tied into your politics AND your politics publicly reflect most of your customers. Sure, Patagonia can wear its liberalism on its brand sleeve but that kind of edgy political marketing only works in a very narrow clientele. Fine for ski gear in Colorado, not good for hardware in Pennsylvania.

There are a lot more people who buy hammers than ski boots. Why you’d want to tick off people you’re selling hammers to is a whole separate question.

But, but Home Depot!

In a word, Lowes. HD was the big boy going national all alone, then it decided to invade the culture wars back when very few people even used the term. It turned people off. Those who cared found other places to shop. Lowes just sells you a danged hammer, not an alternate lifestyle.

HD stopped the in your face culture war stuff a long time ago. They didn’t change their politics but they stopped putting politics ahead of hammers – at least as far as their brand was concerned. Most people nowadays have no idea they were ever boycotted and those who do still go to Lowes.

Not every cautionary tale ends in complete disaster. YouTube seems rather determined to buck that trend.

Like I said, I am not the girl to write your business model but even I know who they are selling what to which is more than I can say for YouTube. They don’t even seem to know where they get their own advertising from or what their product even is!

All the videos and books on business say that’s a bad thing.

Let’s help YouTube out, shall we?

First: Product. YouTube sells Mark I Human Eyeballs with added ear attachments. YouTube does NOT sell ads. No one buys ads for their own sake – they buy ads to get their own brands in front of the heretofore mentioned Mark I Human Eyeballs. Human Eyeballs come attached to wallets. If the Eyeballs like what you’re advertising, they will open up those wallets in your direction. Advertisers couldn’t care less about ads – they want those Eyeballs!

Eyeballs are the product. Ads are just currency.

Second: Supply. No Human Eyeballs watch YouTube just to see the stupid little red play button. Those Eyeballs are there for the videos. Entertaining, educational, informative, funny, snarky or just background noise, it is the videos that produce Mark I Human Eyeballs for YouTube to sell.

Let’s get this straight: your product is never a freeloader. Worse, those Eyeballs frequently share videos ALL OVER everyone else’s social media platforms! Freeloaders, nothing – those Eyeballs are free advertising any sane company would kill for!

Third: Production. Content creators produce the videos that attract and keep attracting Mark I Human Eyeballs. They have been content to do that for a relatively small return of the ad revenue that THEY are generating.

YouTube is just newsprint. No one gives a flip about the paper unless they need to line a bird cage. They want the CONTENT. Bird cage liners are plenty cheap enough and frankly, you can’t line a bird cage or wrap a fish in pixels! The money comes from the advertisers because creators have attracted Mark I Human Eyeballs. No creators, no YouTube. Period.

So what does YouTube do at the beginning of the Panicdemic frenzy? It declares war on its creators. Oh, advertisers might get skittish. Baloney, the skittish ones were the Democrats who desperately needed something to run against Trump. Trouble with being in bed with politicians is that eventually, they expect you to pick up the stuff on the floor.

So social media, with YouTube in the lead, becomes the vanguard of the war on misinformation. Same idiots that don’t understand their own business are trying to tell DOCTORS how to practice medicine. That has yet to come fully back to bite – and it will.

Cancel culture in all its lack of glory comes to YouTube. YouTube goes from no real competition to multiple competing services. Rumble has only gotten bigger and better over time. Good going, YouTube!

When they figure out that conservatives do know how to file complaints with the FCC and that there are entirely too many ‘deplorables’ to make ticking them off a safe business plan, YouTube starts backing off. No apology and no attempt repair the lost trust between the company and their creators, but they do soften the anti-conservative hate mongering. Yay, all better now.

Not really. Been on Rumble lately? All the testosterone sports seem to be hanging out there. Every live stream every day, from my Recommendations tab, anyway. Rumble isn’t all mopey conservatives drowning their sorrows – it’s edgy and fun. The interface still needs work and Search on Roku is a joke, but people are there for the content. Sound familiar? That’s how YouTube started.

Just in time for the venture capitalist party to end. Suddenly, Big Tech needs to actually make money.

YouTube should be perfectly positioned. The storage/bandwidth costs have been coming down for over a decade. But Alphabet, the parent company, over hired and over paid for virtually everything. A leaner operation would be profitable long since. but YouTube is stuck scrambling for profitability along with all the other tech companies.

Okay, okay, that’s not fatal. Sure, it’s a bad time to have real competition in the wings but YouTube is still market leader by a country mile. It can weather the storm.

Oh, yeah, YouTube started attacking its supply of Mark I Human Eyeballs. YouTube wants them to pay for the privilege of being sold to advertisers.

Seriously, what are they teaching in Harvard Business nowadays? Oh, right, gender studies.

Big things like countries and corporations fall slowly – unless your Enron or Lehman Brothers and decide to be overachievers. The normal giant corporations tend to come down very slowly. Sears committed hari-kari in the Nineties and it still has what, four locations left? Oh, no, it has 21.

Sears was Walmart only bigger for nearly 100 years. As a kid in the Seventies, I used a Sears catalogue to sensitize my pony to having heavy things on her back – the thing weighed in at five pounds! Sears was THE store. Now there are only 21 left.

Point being, YouTube won’t go out of business overnight. But it also lacks the brand loyalty that Sears enjoyed and tossed. Rumble gets a few more things squared away and it may just start eating at YouTube. If it doesn’t, someone else will.

The comically named Fediverse which seems to be the social media answer to the World Wide Web (guys, ‘instances’ are just forums with less independence) already has its answer to YouTube in PeerTube. Why that matters is that the Fediverse seems to be mostly left leaning – really left. The same people YouTube was bending over backwards to please four years ago are creating their own alternative to YouTube.

So, force feeding your politics to your Mark I Human Eyeballs didn’t work, why are you expecting the war on adblockers to somehow end up better, YouTube? Let me assure you, it won’t. Attacking your supply of the thing you ACTUALLY sell to advertisers is NOT a winning strategy. Funny as heck to watch, granted, but not winning by a long shot.

People LOVED Sears but Sears managed to betray that love one time too many. No one really loves YouTube in that brand loyal way. Those who really support YouTube, creators and consumers alike, are becoming fewer and farther between. Let’s just say that while YouTube won’t fall overnight, it also won’t hang on for 30 years.

Myself, I think the cloud is itself running out of steam. Desktops and servers are dirt cheap even now in an inflationary period. All those Google engineers looking for jobs means that the tech workers necessary to fuel a hardware revival are available. Why bother with a video aggregator when you can host your own videos from home? Sure, not gonna happen tomorrow but five years from now?

Rumble may not be YouTube’s only competition by then. Heck, why bother with any platform when you can platform yourself and not have to kowtow to Byzantine and vague Terms of Service that only end up weaponized against you and your customers?

The Big Corporations are built on Big Tech. Anyone else noticing that Big Tech has feet?

Those feet may very well be made of clay.