THIS Is How Youtube Dies, The Content Wars HAVE BEGUN

We've recently seen a wave of mass demonetization and banning on YouTube, and YouTube is one of the biggest, if not the biggest, social media platform in the world, and it is currently facing an existential crisis by which the platform can actually die. Now, there's two sides of this coin. Many of the individuals who are producing what we would describe as AI slop content are arguing that by banning all of these channels, and YouTube did some massive purge of like 150,000 channels about a year ago, and they've been mass demonetizing many of these channels. They argue if we can't produce content and you can't make things that improve, like content that people would rather watch, everyone will go somewhere else. Simultaneously, many of these people argue that the restrictions on how they can produce content means they're going to go to other platforms that will allow it. I am on the other side of this coin. YouTube will die if this, what you are seeing on the screen, is permitted. And with all due respect to Higgsfield, I'm not trying to rag on Higgsfield. I've got a bunch of stories for you that outline all of these things we'll go through. YouTube absolutely is dying right now, and there is a war being waged behind the scenes by YouTube to try and stop this, and I don't know if they will succeed. And I'll give you the very simple version of what this is about. There's a very, very simple reason why this right here, this is Higgs field saying, recreate a $39,500 a month faceless YouTube channel with AI. If YouTube allows this to happen, YouTube will die. And I'll tell you why. But again, as I pointed out, there's a lot of people saying we need to be able to produce this content. And we have this story, True Crime Channel, EW slams YouTube's extreme censorship after losing monetization. This was only from a couple of weeks ago, and it's just one of the major stories that we've had recently. Now, YouTube did restore this, but we are seeing massive amounts of mass demonetization. So here's what YouTube is doing. YouTube understands. That if anyone can go onto Claude, and you can, and anyone just says, analyze YouTube, make a video, the platform will be just nuked by millions of slop videos. Now, here's the problem. Slop videos are not slop so much anymore. In the early days of AI-generated content, what we were seeing was the weird, the videos weren't particularly good, and people were mass-producing shorts, and it was like Spider-Man hot dog stuff. It was creepy. People would go on AI and say, what keywords generate the most views? Spider-Man, hot dogs, and Joker. I'm not joking. Literally that. And they'd make weird videos where, like, Nightmare Spider-Man was throwing hot dogs because the AI video wasn't particularly good. We called all of these videos AI slop, and the reason it's slop is because, I mean, you just think about the kind of content that it is, right? When someone presents you a delicious ribeye garnished black garlic, some potatoes, potatoes au gratin, and you're like, that is well-made. If someone took all that food, threw it in a blender, and went whack onto your plate, you'd call it slop. And that's what AI was mass producing. But now, my friends, I tell you unto this, this is how YouTube dies. If they don't succeed and hoping that they do, because there's going to be a massive overhaul hitting YouTube in February. So for everybody who uses this platform and wants to understand, I need this from you guys. I need you to comment and let me know what you think about these videos, about the faceless stick figure, AI voice, long form videos that are just splattered all over the platform. So we've got this from Tech Republic. YouTube tightens monetization rules for AI-generated and low-quality content. YouTube is clarifying monetization rules for repetitive AI-generated videos, synthetic personas, and low-effort content in its partner program. This is from July. And this is important. If I, producing this video, right? So this video required me as a human being to do some basic labor. And that is, I am here on camera. I am talking. I have no script. This is all from my head. I've been reading a bunch of these stories. I've been tracking these stories because it relates to my business. My business here at Timcast, the company we have, we have a handful of the biggest podcasts in the world. I believe that my channels rank around like 800 to 1,000 in terms of the biggest channels in the country. Maybe the world, I don't know about the world, but in the country. So I'm not saying I'm like, I'm the biggest, like ranked number 1,000 is pretty far down there, but I do have a collective like 7 million subscribers on YouTube and across the board total, I have about 12 million subscribers everywhere with YouTube being the most dominant platform. We actually do it really well on Rumble as well because Rumble is a home for people who want to say things that the other part of the internet doesn't want you to say. Now, here's the problem, particularly as it pertains to Timcast IRL and why this is why I'm saying this will destroy YouTube. Spotify just launched, not just, but they've launched a video feed. So if you open up Spotify, you can actually go to a video feed and scroll it just like YouTube. It's got view count. It's got videos. And people are posting videos, not podcasts anymore. Spotify is massive with a massive audience, largely in music, and they're pushing those people to video. Spotify costs money to host on. It's not free like YouTube is. So people, for the most part, aren't going to find the same degree of success with AI generated trash content. Which means YouTube is facing an existential crisis for which it must absolutely obliterate AI-generated content. Now, hold on. It's not so simple. Let me first start by saying this. The cost of producing Timcast IRL, a sit-down conversation show, is decently high. We've got rent for the office. Before rent for the office, we had a studio. We had utility costs, air conditioning, travel. By moving our studio to D.C., we're closer to the action in Washington, D.C., and we reduce our footprint and overall costs, but we add rent to the mix. So we're basically saying the principal reason for moving, to be completely honest, to D.C. is because a lot of really high-profile individuals want to come on the show, and they don't want to come to our West Virginia studio. So we still have the West Virginia studio, which we'll still use for some reasons, depending on what happens, maybe weather or whatever. But for higher profile guests who live and work in the DC area, we can get access to a lot of politicos and inside baseball stuff. So we made that move. We've got producer costs. We've got staffing costs. All in all, it costs us a fair bit of money to run that. Now we produce a two hour show on YouTube every single day and rumble, but rumble is the extended two and a half to three hour show. So if you want If you want to watch the Uncensored on Rumble, you can do that. Now, here's the deal. As long as, so every time you open up the YouTube app, we and our show competes with more and more content. I'm going to say it right now. I don't know that based on current trends, TimCast IRL can't survive. Look, and I've had people say, Tim, you can't say this because you've complained about IRL before because it's expensive. And I'm like, guys, I'm not saying this to be a whiny little bitch, you know, because I have in the past. I'm like, oh, I just, I'm sick of this. But what I'm saying right now is. We have staffing costs. We have travel costs. We book people. We bring them out. We do a sit-down show. Even among podcasts and conversations, what people are doing is just digital and virtual. I don't like that. It's not a great conversation, but it doesn't matter if our product is premium. It does not. What matters is, will people in the long run choose us over the competition? And the answer is, they will not. So you take a look at, we'll put it a few ways. My morning show, this show right here, nukes TimCast IRL, just obliterates it. I got a video from yesterday with half, like one's got 400,000, one's got 500,000, just on YouTube alone, not counting on Rumble and Facebook and X, but Rumble where it's the second highest. And then on the podcast platforms where we don't do video, but we're going to start one, one mini video like this on YouTube. Not always, but often will just crush the viewership of Timcast IRL for a few reasons, and it is particularly this. So herein lies the big challenge. High quality content like Timcast IRL used to be the biggest generator of views, but something has changed. It is too expensive for most people to produce, so they have shifted their conversation shows into Zoom calls. It'll be one or two people, and they'll be on a digital call. That would dramatically reduce our costs, and then we could do the show with relative ease. Like, if I was live on TimCast IRL from this studio in West Virginia, and the guests and the other hosts were just calling from their homes, we'd have almost zero overhead. It would just be basic staffing costs, and then it's minimal. But because we want to do a show where I can look someone in the eyes and argue with them and have those conversations, it costs money. The problem, you open YouTube, and what do you get? Every day, the easier it gets to make long-form quality content. And I'm not saying AI slop. The less likely it is that a high-quality show like TimCast IRL will be viewed. Now, again, many of you may not like TimCast IRL. You might say, you guys are stupid. Your opinions are bad. Yeah, all that's fine. I'm talking about production quality. I'm talking about the expense of the cameras, the rental space, the proximity to DC, and the talent that we bring on the show. All of this costs money, and the show is very, very profitable. However, as time goes on, YouTube is facing a serious challenge. Anyone now, again, Higgs field. You can open up Claude. I'm telling you this right now. You can literally type in, give me a script for a YouTube video based on what does best, period. And they always give you, like your channel should have a niche so that the subscriber base develops and it works. And then what you do is, what these people have been doing is, I mean, look at this, estimated revenue, 1,000. Listen, this is real. This is real. What they'll do is they'll say, okay, write the script out. Okay, now AI generate the voiceover. Okay, now edit the whole thing. Done. They'll upload it to YouTube, and what do you get? Rapidly generated, repetitive content. And there's a bunch of problems that YouTube is trying to address. One of it is in their own AI development. Okay, so the apocalypse happens with the AI recursion loop. This is one of the AI apocalypse scenarios that YouTube must stop for the sake of humanity, but also for the sake of themselves. You open up YouTube, and let's say it's rather difficult to produce content. Timcast IRL has produced at a smaller budget than say Fox. Fox is the five. They're similar shows. They're kind of different, but they're similar. The five costs way more money. Big studio production, big cameras, all that stuff. We do ours a lot cheaper. So for them, they need to make way more money to sustain that show. They have TV and they have contracts, so they do. But you open up YouTube and every day you see Timcast IRL live at 8 p.m. Monday through Friday. And you go, I think I'll click this. It's interesting. I don't know. I'll click on it. And you do. We get a view. We get a concurrent viewer, we make ad revenue, the show succeeds. Now, there's 300 videos alongside it of a comparable subject. You open up YouTube, and YouTube is now suggesting thumbnails, algorithmically, that it feels do better. They are AI-generated to be perfect, to get a high click-through rate. Timcast IRL is just us in a studio making thumbnails by hand. We do use AI-generated graphics for a base of it, but the frame and everything, it's done in Photoshop because we put the guest name and the title. Well, the only problem is the AI can produce a thumbnail that would crush ours. And so that's less important. All that really matters is attrition. So when AI videos, let me explain it like this. One of the reasons I'm successful is not because I'm particularly, I'm not smarter than anybody. I'm not funnier. I'm not more talented. If that were the case, I'd have way more views. But the truth is I'm talented enough and I'm articulate enough and entertaining enough. But I work my fingers to the bone. I produce a stupid amount of content and always have. This is called the lottery ticket method. So YouTube can only show you about what, like eight videos when you open the front page in the desktop and like two if you're opening it on mobile. And then if you're swiping, you're going to scroll past. So the issue here is if I produce six personal morning show videos per day and my nearest competition is producing one per week. I'm going to appear on your feed substantially more often. That is, I will have 36 lottery ticket opportunities for you to see my video and click on it. And when you do, you are telling YouTube you like my content. Well, if you stick around. Now. The competition produces one per week, which means even if they make it, they're still one against six on that day. And because I have six times the chance for you to click my video, their video falls down in the algorithm. And that means the next time they post, they are less, they're less likely to be viewed. This is not good, but it's how the system works. Now you've got people producing 100 videos per day of AI slop content. And I hate to say slop, but that's the term for it. But it's actually good quality stuff. An animation, a voiceover explaining something, and it's interesting. The first problem this means is that channels like mine, where I do the work, produce the videos, and make a show where I show my face and talk to you, which is better for the long run in the health, it's human-made content of real ideas from a person that are developing this social space. It is much more difficult for me because now I'm on the other side of that wall. That is, if someone produces 100. 30-minute videos in one day and uploads them every 15 minutes. The chances that YouTube recommends one of my videos in your feed drops substantially. And now, viewership is going to go down because the space is flattening. This means shows like mine are less profitable. And that means shows like Timcast IRL, which are premium, cease to exist in the long run because we just can't produce enough shows and we can't break through the recommendation algorithm unless YouTube does a few things. Intentionally seek out premium content they know is hard to produce and promote it on the front page, which they do not do. Or obliterate all of these channels and disincentivize them, which is what they've been doing. This is the silent war happening behind the scenes at YouTube right now that most people don't know about, and it is the most extreme we have seen in a long time. Since the dawn of YouTube, they have fought against slop. In the early days of YouTube, it was people who would just put a bikini woman in every thumbnail, just boobs. It didn't matter matter what the subject was. And YouTube went, okay, this is a problem. Because there will be a video where someone's walking their dog, but their thumbnail is just boobs because that's what people will click on. So they banned that and said deceptive thumbnails and headlines. It's an Insta ban. You can't do it. Right now, we are seeing reports from tons of these various channels, and it's not just AI slop. It's what YouTube considers repetitive and generic content. They're eliminating it because it does not sustain the platform. Here's another Auditor channels. What's an auditor channel? So there's a bunch of people. Actually, I'm a big fan of these, but they are generic and repetitive. What they do is they go out with cameras and they film things, just literally anything. People invariably get angry they're being filmed and it starts a fight. These people then upload what are effectively the exact same videos every single day. Guy walks up, says, you can't film here. There's some kind of conflict. They upload the video. It is generic and repetitive. YouTube is trying to sustain content and make money for creators that are expressing original ideas, producing original videos, not generic repetition. So they're nuking all of this right now. They are nuking the faceless AI-generated channels, and this is the best thing they can do. I'm going to tell you why. Imagine you're logging to YouTube and you see, as you're scrolling through, 100 videos of the exact same thing. How to lose weight, how to lose weight, how to lose weight, how to lose weight. It's the same script, the same narrative, and it was generated by AI derivative. There's a bigger problem here called the AI recursion apocalypse, which I'll explain in a second. But people are going to start leaving. They're going to go to other platforms and they're going to be like, this is terrible. And they're going to go to Spotify because Spotify requires you to pay to post your videos. So this is where it gets real interesting. If you want to post AI slop on Spotify to try and make money, and the money is much better on Spotify than YouTube. Sorry, YouTube, this is a fact. Spotify programmatic ads pay way more for whatever reason. That's always been the case with podcast side of things, even if it is video. But if you've got to pay money to upload that AI content and it's not going to reach people, then you're just burning money and no one will do it. But YouTube uploading is free. They absorb that cost. You then upload, so everybody can just nuke the platform. There's two big problems with this. First, as I already mentioned, people are going to get inundated with garbage they don't want to watch in the long run. They stop coming back. The second is that YouTube has to pay to host all of this stuff. YouTube would rather one real good video, just one real good one, that gets a billion views like Mr. Beast. Because the hosting of that single video is low cost. It's one video. It's probably like two or three gigs, 4K, MrBeast videos. Maybe they're a gig or two. Depends on what codec uses to render it. They host that one time, and then they're going to deal with bandwidth. The bandwidth costs are going to be the same regardless of if it's a million videos or one video because it's about how many people are downloading the content. But now, they've got this video, they compress it, people watch it in whatever quality they want, and they only have to host the one video. But if they have to host 5 billion videos, they need more server space for all of that data. It's not particularly expensive, but it does add up because the snowflakes eventually form an avalanche. And now, my friends, my favorite part of why YouTube must stop all of this. With all due respect to Higgsfield, because I'm not an anti-AI guy, AI is here, it's great technology, and I do use it. I use AI for quick editing in my 4 p.m. shows and my weekend shows, but I actually am reading those scripts, and I am speaking these words, and it is only semi-scripted. So to stress, for those that watch my 4 p.m. weekend videos, because they are faceless, I do have a teleprompter set up so that I can actually read the camera. I've done one of them where it was a mix between voiceover plus some on-camera hosting. The main reason is it's semi-scripted in that I produce a script beforehand, but when I read it, I'll ad-lib a little bit here and there where I think it makes the most sense. And the AI does the editing for me. That is the difference, of course, being these are my ideas and my speech being edited. That's why I say you can't outright ban AI altogether, because then you'd be banning Photoshop, too. But now for the AI recursion apocalypse. If AI-generated content from individuals with no thought dominate the platform, Google's training data for AI will become a recursive loop. It'll start training itself on itself, and then it will death spiral. and burst. This has been theorized, hypothesized by AI researchers for a long time as to why we cannot allow AI-generated content to dominate cultural platforms, because it will stop the development of AI, create a recursive loop, and then humans are consuming AI-recursive psychotic garbage, and we all go insane. Therein lies the big problem. This war is being fought, my friends. If YouTube does not get a handle on it, we're cooked. There's good news for people like me, because obviously I'm at war with a lot of these channels, and there's good news for society as a whole. YouTube is revamping everything. They're currently just carpet bombing all of these faceless channels. And I'm going to stress this. There are people of talent, and there are people of no talent. And that's an unfortunate reality to life. I am fortunate enough to have a degree of talent that affords me the ability to make the content that I do and make a lot of money doing it. I don't need to make billions of dollars or millions of dollars. I'd be happy just getting by and being able to have my ideas flourish and my company grow. But for the people that are making faceless AI content, not all of them, but most of them have no talent. And I'm not saying this to be derisive. They have a degree of talent in that they're willing to try and solve a problem for themselves to make something that makes money. And that is not their fault. In fact, this is what the tools allow. When the gun, when rifling and the cartridge were invented, we no longer needed to train warriors. It used to be that warriors, like the samurai, were cherished because you had to be trained as a little kid to be a great warrior. Then they said, here's a gun, hold it, point it, anybody could do it. The samurai lost its prestige. These things happen, and I recognize that. However. We cannot have an AI recursion loop, and that is a problem. So what you get is there's a dude, he's 20 years old, he doesn't know much about what's going on in the world, he's not well-read in history, and he didn't get good grades or anything like that. He did most of his homework with existing LLMs back in the day, which LLMs are basically gone, they're all AI now. And so he goes, make a video that makes money. And then what happens is he doesn't understand it. He doesn't know it. And he did nothing. He spent, there's one guy who was, who was profiled. He says, you know, he works two hours a day and he makes 200,000 bucks per month. Why? He just goes onto AI and says, make the video. And then he just spam blasts YouTube. That's destructive to the YouTube ecosystem. People will start leaving the platform. It will cause an AI recursion loop, and it is pulling money away from shows that actually have high production costs, in which case they eventually make themselves the only game in town, recursion loop ensues, we're cooked. So my friends, this is how YouTube dies, but they're fighting it, and I do think they may succeed in the long run. If they do not eliminate slop content, they lose to Spotify. That's just it. And I wonder what happened with Rumble as well. Rumble just reported profitability, massive numbers. And it's funny because they've tried so hard to crush Rumble and they have just failed. Now Rumble's profitable. They finally made it. Hey, look, Rumble's been around for a long time. But in terms of the Zeitgeist, it's been several years and they've worked really hard. And now they're a profitable company. And everyone said the views are fake. And those are all lies. The reason they said Rumble was fake was because they could not censor us anymore. So they had to come up with a reason why people should not be on the platform. Sorry, the views are real. They were investigated by the SEC. We use Google Analytics. It's the same tracking as YouTube. It's legit. So if YouTube doesn't stop this stuff, recently Rumble announced a new partner program, 90-10 split, 90 for the creator. It's massive and they're profitable. So it's really interesting considering Rumble is also free hosting. But Rumble is rejecting a lot of content. People are mad about it. I'm sorry, I'm not saying it's perfect, but Rumble needs to have a control the way YouTube does not. YouTube just started nuking all the monetization of these channels. That's good. Otherwise, we all suffer. I'm going to wrap it up there. This one was a bit personal. I know it's not big news of the day, but I've been tracking this stuff, and this is a very serious concern in the space for you as a consumer of this content and a viewer of YouTube. I'll wrap it up. Smash the like button. Share the show. Stick around. We got more coming for you, and we'll see you all in the next segment.