Is YouTube Animation coming back? I remember the exodus of every animator back in the day like the charlie the unicorn guy because of the algorithm change that favored watch time. Now that there's extra ways to support creators like Patreon or sponsors/merch are we going to see an influx of animation? And also why is it that YouTube creators increasingly become more commercial over time? Before people just made videos and now they consider themselves companies with marketing strategies for their content and such.
 It's All Fucked Shirt $22.14 |
 Nothing Ever Happens Shirt $21.68 |
It's All Fucked Shirt $22.14 |
Basically what I'm asking is, is animation on YouTube still not viable? Why/why not
>is animation on YouTube still not viable?
It's not
Use Zeurel as a case study. He just put out a 30 minute episode of his show. It cost $50k to make, and that was with him doing half of the work basically for free. That's a steal of a price for the level of quality
According to him, 25 million people would need to watch that for him to break even. It only works because of Patreon funding and grants from our lord and savior Tom Fulp
The storytime crew are mildly successful, but they're basically taking advantage of lonely nerds (the viewers who want a virtual gf), and clout chasing amateurs (the animators making far below industry standard wage to churn out the product)
You cant make a living off of YT as an animator, and you can barely do it if you have a sizeable fanbase
Would you consider digital circus an outlier?
very much so
its extremely rare for a youtube video to make over 100 million views unless its a music video or something tied to a well known celebrity
consider that an average video from:
Nostalgia Critic gets 150k views
Game Grumps gets 250k views
Game Theorists gets 2 million views
Worthikids gets 2 million views
Meat Canyon gets 5 million views
JaidenAnimations gets 7 million views
These are all huge channels.
People say that 1 view gets you $0.01 in revenue from YT, so take that versus production costs. GG is extremely low effort, it's just two dudes talking while playing video games. Even though the view count isn't really high, they can drop a new episode every day, so it's bringing in a pretty steady paycheck. But on the flipside of that, even with a viewcount as high as Meat Canyon's, he still has to pay a team of people to work on those cartoons, and he it's so much work that there's no way he can drop a new one every day or even every week.
>People say that 1 view gets you $0.01 in revenue from YT
Unfortunately, it's actually 1 view is $0.001-$0.002 for animation.
It's becoming that for everything else now too
nta but we have no idea if Digital Circus is breaking even
We know Pomni Plushies are selling far more than any other indie animation merchandise ever made but so far Glitch didn't release any numbers of how many Pomni plushies were sold.
What is just stupid imo since the merchandise was shilled under the premise of supporting the show rather than patreon, fans should know how much money they made from this "support" so far.
yes because people forget to mention that the australian goverment helps fund glitch productions as well as the smg4 channel
not saying that it's not pricey regardless but you don't need the level of animation Monkey Wrench has to make a successful project.
>It only works because of Patreon funding
wtf he makes $5,152/month, that's more than enough to fund him. He doesn't need any ad money, he's just fricking b***hing at point.
depending on where he lives and if he has a family to support it really might not be enough especially if he has to hire people as part of his workflow
>Is YouTube Animation coming back?
Did it ever go away? No. And to answer your question here: No, it's not viable. That's why some animators have to shoehorn ad-breaks from their sponsors into the video to get money. Other ways of getting revenue is Paetron or Ko-fi so people can support them that way, and it's not just animators doing this because many content creators suffered after the whole adpocalypse shit. Another way is selling merch of their cartoon online, I don't know what percentage of income they earn from this but that's another way they get money.
>TL;DR
No it's not viable.
t. animator and yt partner on israelitetube since 2009
>Adpocalypse
You can always tell the outsiders by how little they actually know. You remember a buzz word.
Basically animation is not viable because it's very high-effort content, but search and discovery is ranked by bots that lack qualitative context. The bots cannot tell what is a "good" view or a "bad" view, it only knows that something was viewed. Hence, it prioritized channels that got more viewership, regardless of the quality of the viewership. Promoting low quality views led to an absolute spam churn or low quality content, which is now the dominant content of the site.
That would be bad enough, but to make it worse, "subscribing" is treated as a polite suggestion to the system and isn't respected. That means even if you subscribe to an animated, the system may still decide not to promote their content to you if the animator fails to meet the site's meta criteria. Youtube just wants to run more ads, they are not trying to create an audience for talented actors and in fact would prefer if talent is downplayed, because people with disposable skill and broad, moderately distinguishable appeal are easier to abandon and replace.
This system works with almost no human intervention. It's almost totally emergent and responds only to whatever fine-tuning Google gives it. You don't outsmart it or out-work it anymore than an ant out-works its own colony.
It's not about ads. Losing advertisers was what Google cared about, which is why it's promoted as the central issues. It's about viewership being monopolized, comodified, and then raced to the bottom because a dollar is a dollar to this machine.
Normies just recently learned that the reply girls, the controversy and algorithm change that killed the animation scene to begin with, were a thing. Much less would they understand how the algorithm changes actually worked.
Reply girls was an excuse. What, you think let's play spam was somehow better for site quality than reply girls? The change increased retention and ad viewership. Nothing else mattered and they did it for the money, not to stop Reply Girls. Reply Girls just weren't doing long enough videos as far as YouTube cared.
Bringing up "reply girls" is just demonstrating the only information you followed was Youtube's PR teams. None of the actual business analysis was talking about "reply girls" as being cause for anything.
Reply girls fisaco happened in 2012. Morons don't realise that Google/YT has been tinkering with the AdSense system post 2012 quite a bit. It's not just watch times that can generate revenue now. I've been a YouTube Partner since 2009 and I've seen this shit first hand. I remember even getting in trouble when I told my viewers to click on ads on my videos and that was a big no no.
>Google: We want people to click on ads we place on videos. We will pay you artists more if this happens
>Artists: Please click on the links, viewers, it really helps me out
>Google: !!!!! NO NOT LIKE THAT
Yeaah, Google's terms of service was (and still is) dogshit moronic. I wouldn't be surprised if other partners requested their subscribers to do the same thing. I also forgot to mention that Reply Girls aren't the only culprits from this, but there was a huge percentage of people becoming partners around that time and many made videos with devious clickbait thumbnails that have absolutely nothing to do with the topic at hand at the time. People seem to ignore that part, but I can understand why because Reply bawds were a plague.
>I remember even getting in trouble when I told my viewers to click on ads on my videos
Are you proud of that, leading kids to click on scams from shaddy unkown companies.
No? I'm pretty sure those who did click on those ad banners immediately tabbed out afterwards since there would be nothing of interest to them anyway. As far as the companies that advertised at the time, I remember some adverts were from big name companies that made either skincare products, food, or car adverts.
Is that you, Tamers12345?
Yes but you have to believe in our lord and savior max whose channel will die for all our sins and he will resurrect from death three days laters with an angry tweet before rising to remember that guy status
Only by believing in max will your small projects become successful and you will be able to support yourself above the povery line not giving in to algorithm or teenage grooming temptations
No, unless you collect rainbow lightning in a bottle, you're not breaking even. It's like thinking literally anyone can be a vidya streamer making a killing, when that shit requires good ass charisma and personality, and you're lucky if you're getting beer money.
Imagine that, but now you're working your ass off and spending thousands on animation, you're not even making beer money.
You know you can lower your costs until your cost/payment ratio is more favorable
Adding to this, consumers are completely ignorant of how animation works. They think if there's detailed drawings it's "good animation". There's a whole korean YouTube anime with insane cost cutting animation by just having mouth flaps.
?si=Xp09F1Sy3sWllOCR
I personally think its the future of web animation like how flash was back on the day. Also I feel like people online bashing pilots if they have less than professional quality animation should be disposed of. They need to realize animated content usually made by one guy cannot produce content cheaply on that scale and get used to it. Vivziepop kinda ruined web animation by making people think that's how it should be.
hazbin is amateurish as frick, get over yourself
That's hard to do, because you have to hit a certain level of animation quality to even get on the radar. ADC and Hazbin/Helluva are good examples. That alone is costly, but you also need to have
>professional (or near professional) quality voice acting
>appealing character designs
>enough marketing or prior recognition to get the ball rolling
>luck
All of these things (except luck) cost money. In totality, it's probably more expensive to home-grow your own (successful) cartoon than it is to pitch one to a network.
See
I acknowledge your point but 1.1m barely qualifies as "on the radar." Cartoons with less-than-stellar animation seem to do better pitched to a network than they do in the miasma of YouTube. Smiling Friends, for example.
Yeah but cable is dead and streamflation is killing streaming. Internet is the way to go and YouTube is the largest free "streaming service"
Do you think YouTube will continue to get more and more commercialized til it hits a singularity of capitalism or have we already gotten to that point with Mr beast?
Aside from paying animators and voice actors, what causes some animations to be so expensive? The only other thing I can think of that the money is going to is softwares and probably paying for sound effects
Imagine a smooth animation, now imagine having to draw every single frame or at least making sure every single frame looks acceptable, all the time and effort you have to take out of your day to do it.
The problem being there isn't really a good way to monetize it, youtube payouts aren't very much unless you get crazy viewership. Western animation has traditionally been supported by commercials/advertising and merchandise. Even if you get ad money from YT its often not enough, you need the merch side too. Anime exists because it's alright if it functions as a loss leader, the purpose is to get people to buy the manga or light novel it is adapting.
At the end of the day I don't think the medium can exist without money being exchanged for (typically) physical goods.
It's literally just grifting animators.
It's a task that can't be easily replicated currently, and takes years of practice to learn. Charging a lot isn't grifting. Unless you mean Hollywood animation, in which case yeah they are grifting, but it's not going to the animators it's going to everyone else.
It's grifting if it's unwarranted. Years of practice doesn't justify any number. Online artists have a culture of constantly overcharging.
>but it's not going to the animators it's going to everyone else.
This is also wrong, and having this opinion just shows what camp you're in. You would have Hollywood animators grift even more, lmao.
>Overcharging
If you don't like a price don't buy, it's simple economics. Anyone can charge whatever they want for a product, it just depends if people are willing to pay for it
I'd be very surprised if the per hour pay is even above minimum wage if you take every bit of work they've done and do the math. People always say they overcharge but it's almost literally never true
sure it is, but you probably wont get rich (you were never going to get rich working in Hollywood anyways unless you blow someone)
the future is short films > series
if you have a story to tell, just move to the cheapest possible living situation you can and as long as you have internet and a computer you are good to go. you will probably need a normal PT job but this isnt bad it gives you character and you can meet people so you arent totally isolated and weird
Yes, but Cinemaphile doesn't like what new animators do.
hell, threads about actual animation discussion are in page 10 or 8 without a single reply.
It only makes money if you put out regular content. Typically a 10 minute video, once every 7 days, and it has to make more than 10K views.
That is fricking impossible for animation.
A single video that is half an hour long that generates 5 or more million views will barely make any money at all. If Youtube agrees to monetize it at all. Most youtube channels will make a shitload of videos, and release them all together, with a new 30 second or one minute short at the beginning, compiled with 9 minutes of old stuff.
Where are you getting these video posting stats?
The channel I am a part of
which is?
>My uncle works at Nintendo
Frick out of here larping homosexual
>Guys, I'm really cool and make stuff! I swear!
You guys realize that lots and lots of people put shit on youtube weekly that are not frickhuge celebrities that make tons of money right? And a lot of the cartoon channels actually do employ a lot of people so you might have someone who does work on them and makes about $400 or so in monthly side money? Why is this hard to believe?
This is just fricking sad anon
This guy is right. The small streamers with 90-120k subs I watch have to put a video or 2-3 every day to stay afloat and even then they have spikes in their views because YouTube is really shitty when it comes to notifying their subs.
You have to produce a LOT to stay afloat. Or follow the big trends.
I heard if you don't put out at least 3 videos a week the algorithm acts like your channel is inactive
Youtube is now liking short term content more due to trying to compete with TikTok. Basically making something last 60 seconds is the norm for getting views, but you barely get paid unless you are an automated channel. Auto channels are a thing that have come up, they basically take stuff from tiktok, and mash them together or they use chatGPT scripts with text to speech over gaming footage for dumping a lot of content.
unless if you can make your animations really cheaply, no.
youtube as a career has done a huge disservice to youtube
>mfw randomly caught one guy's stream where someone asked if he would make a video on some topic about a game he makes videos on and he shut him down immediately as the video wouldn't 100% get minimum 100K views and he won't make a video if it gets less than that
"Art" being taken as a full time job instead of a part time job just isolates the artist and causes them to get either an inflated ego or go crazy alone.
Like even if you have a good youtube channel, take it easy man like dang.
I know another youtuber that said pretty much the same thing. He put alot of hours in making an entertaining review of a horror book, but because it didn’t get the amount of views he wanted he never made a sequel with any of the other books. And it ain’t like the video bombed. It still got plenty of likes. But not enough views.
What's probably disappointing isn't that they give up, it's that a lot of people head into Youtube for the sake of monetization. Don't get me wrong, everyone needs to earn their bread in this economy, but it's kinda sad to know that most if not all of them will always make vids tuned specifically to the algorithm.
someone needs to make a YouTube just for indie animators. you pay 5$ per month to the website and then a price to rent the animations set by whatever the creator wants. 30 second shorts? $1. 30 minute short film? $10. all profits go to artists so they can keep making stuff and the website stays alive by its monthly fee.
fans pay for whatever they want and this cuts out the antiquated Hollywood middle men out.
whoever makes this website will be rich
newgrounds already exists
No one is going to pay for a non-porn animations, moron.
ok let's just work for the corpos until we get replaced by ai
ai will replace us regardless if we were using your moronic idea.
1. It's called Newgrounds
2. You are competing against Google so you will show up in the third page of the results and your website will die in the cradle, and for various reasons US courts are absolutely 100% fin with that.
>It's called Newgrounds
Newgrounds has paid animations?
Newgrounds has started giving out sponsorships again. First was Salad Fingers, second was episode 3 of Monkey Wrench, and third is Necro Nancy 64.
>Necro Nancy 64
Damn, this would be kino if not for the male VAs, I would even be ok with the ghost VA being male with the sassy voice, but not both.
Eh, I can excuse it. 90% of these internet cartoons are being made by one guy economizing on everything to begin with.
>Eh, I can excuse it.
Well I can't, it's piss easy to get VAs if you have any animation to show, even female ones and if they are shitty free ones he could replace them later instead of having his own voice. Amateur VAs will jump at the opportunity and will even do it for free.
Well, maybe the creator doesn't do it because he'll spill his spaghetti from instructing a woman to act out the inflections of a young moody teenage girl or something lmao.
Alt sites for Youtube stuff have failed for a reason. The only way for such an idea to work is if it's somehow the flavor trend of the month by some viral animation, otherwise it'll just be another failure.
Funny, I'm wrapping up development on something of equivalence. Netflix business model with a >$10 subscription for viewers and a smaller sub for creators that would cover the majority of hosting. View payouts divided per individual and what they watched in a month, Also set it up so any artists that have patreons can integrate the two and let their supporters watch for free. Vidiation, the domains down but that's the place to go if something like this is on anyone's radar, I'll start shilling it on my twitter when it's live (at)rubealubea
Wait I fricked up I meant less than $10 for the subscription
Bump
Don't die thread
When the adpocalpyse happened it basically killed 99% of animation YouTubers overnight and while Patreon is a good fix it's still not a solution, just a bandaid. If Patreon goes down, you're basically fricked and I've seen plenty of creators who's Patreon gets shut down for reasons they'll never know. Livelihoods, gone.
So is YouTube animation coming back? Frick no. Just because those homosexuals in the Digital Circus stream said it was the "golden age" or whatever, it certainly fricking isn't. Those days are long gone.
It's amazing listening to Tony Bankroft change his tune
in 2020
>Whoa! We are in a new golden age for animation! Everyone needs content and animation is in its highest demand ever! Things are looking great!
then in late 2021
>Whoa! Animation is in a new dark age. Everything fell apart, every studio axed their animation departments, everyone is out of work, there is nothing on the horizon
and in mid 2023
>Guys...it might take a few years before the industry can overcome this slump, just hang in there and work in a different industry for another two or three years, we'll bounce back I swear
No
it's because of hazbin hotel
This made me realise, where do animators even go these days? Youtube? Newgrounds? Does anyone even animated for fun anymore or is it all "GIVE ME 100 DOLLARS ON PATREON FOR MY 2 MINUTE ANIMATION"
They go mostly to twitter and youtube and thousands of artists animate for fun, you will simply never heard about them because their videos get less than 10k views and it's very, very hard to find genuine projects in a sea of clickbait and content farm with youtube awful search engine and tag system
>Newgrounds
Newgrounds is dead, some of there suggested top page vids have only 500 views, and the most was only 70K.
Poor monkey wrench, it's just not that good writing wise though.
HH and TADC are really donna be outliers huh? We sure Viv and Gooseworkx aren't industry plants?
Helluva Boss is not really that special, Spooky Month, Murder Drones, and Mystery Skulls got just as many views. Digital Circus in the other hand is a whole new level.
That depends. Despite the most common info about Glitch, the Australian government only funded Glitch's first two shows (Meta Runner and Sunset Paradise). Murder Drones and TADC rely on YouTube revenue, merch sales and out-of-pocket money, and Glitch is firmly dedicated to releasing on YouTube only, which could just as easily screw them over at any time.
Part of me wonders if ADC only did so well because audiences prefer 3D animation for the novelty and because it was actually good unlike glitch’s other stuff…
As a whole glitch’s stuff tends to do pretty well for itself
And here's the information in a neat little graph
And here's a more easy to read version
So basically its like the old days of Cartoon Network, the two to three that resonated with audiences would have absolutely been given the green light and other 6 to 7 would have been given the boot.
Audiences have crap taste for not liking LGG
If Mike Lu and Og can get greenlit then anything is possible
i have seen minecraft vids with better quality than TADC. 3D being cheaper than 2D is not a meme.
Those animations are usually made by actual professional studios you know, afair the 2 most popular ones developed their own video games by themselves.
Wasn't poppy playtime made by a collection of minecraft video people?
It was mostly hired freelancers, they are constantly hiring new people for other projects as well, just look at their twitter afair none of the big minecraft animation channels with good animation are just one guy, those are all small studios that hire animators
I think the clown show got extremely lucky because the glitch audience is a mix of kids and autistic twitter users.
God, Monkey Wrench is such as sad existance.
>is animation on YouTube still not viable?
On it's own, animation on YouTube is not viable. The algorithm will never pay out enough to make a livable wage. Youtube is a convenient method of distribution because everyone uses it, it's free for both creators and consumers, and it's readily accessible. Without having a Patreon and/or selling merch, it's not sustainable.
>And also why is it that YouTube creators increasingly become more commercial over time?
Animation takes a lot of time and effort. I think it's fair to explore ways to monetize the media if the creator is making something that a lot of people seem to enjoy especially if it allows them to spend less time at a day job and more time working on their production. Why would that be problematic?
For some reason it's reasonable to expect that anyone else providing a service would get paid for it, but artists are expected to work for free "for the art". Frick that. You don't get paid based on how much you hate the job. Jimbo can make money with his auto shop while enjoying working on cars. Vanessa can make money with her bakery while she enjoys baking goods. If an artist is making something that a lot of people enjoy, why shouldn't they also be able to monetize their skills?
I don't know if this post is off-topic but i'll bite.
i've always wondered which artistic medium i should pick. i ask that because for most of my life, i've been a cultural sponge. I read a lot (comics of all kind, non-fiction and novels), I've saved countless classical/pop albums on my hard-drives, i've binge-watched a bunch of movies, cartoons and short films (most of them being on YouTube) and then archived them in the best format there is, i'm always tuned to the news whenever possible, i've saved hundreds of scientific/philosophical studies about stuff that i find to be interesting, etc. This has been going on for the last 10 years or so. But at some point, it gets annoying real fast. You feel like producing something back.
I'm a non-existent, talentless midwit wageslave in his early 20s who feels like doing something with himself that isn't wasting his time compulsively eating heaps upon heaps of fried, grilled, sugary garbage, getting shitfaced, taking happy/sleepy pills and consuming fatalistic media in my tiny hermit bedroom, as the walls and my crappy Yamaha piano rust.
I just feel lost you guys, i have no affiliation to anyone or anything. I'm very much spending all my time alone, all by myself, mostly because I hate normies and this dogshit planet I resent so much and I can't imagine for myself a viable future considering all existing parameters. I don't want to live past 40.
But still i know i've always been a creative type of fella ever since i was young, and i feel like i've got nothing to win or lose by pursuing this. It's not like my train of thought, or my destiny will change by doing this.
I do remember being obsessed with the YouTube animation community, thinking i could be part of it. And now i realize it's shit like Glitch Prod that gets any traction, not my autistic ideas (not that they're any better, they're niche and probably infeasible to make out) (1/2)
So this last year or so, I've felt like picking up a medium to diffuse the angst i've kept for me after all these years. I always daydream about what-if scenarios about the stuff i've mindlessly consoomed and write jokes and dialogue when it flashes.
When i wake up in the morning, i reach to a tape recorder in order to recollect my dreams.
These thoughts always play in my head like a "movie" or so, down to the characters, editing, lighting, sound/music, etc... and i wish i was able to get them out somehow. audio and video together in motion.
Problem is...well, like i've already said, i'm a lonely talentless fraud. Don't know how to write, don't know how to draw, don't know how to play any instrument, don't feel like building a social media fanbase since it's a total losing game where you become the plaything of unconsiderate nobodies.
So in all seriousness what would you guys suggest me to do? I really need some lifecheck fellas (2/2)
Draw with stick figures gay. That's what I do. Then you can go back and see if the writing is ant good and redraw it one by one with better art
For story I am under the belief that anyone can intuitively tell a story. You tell your friends stories all the time, like the other day when yo went to a store and saw a crazy crackhead. Also realize you have the internet you collosal homosexual. You can literally final instructions for how to do literally anything. You write like you're 20 years old or younger. If you want more professional writer teaching I recommend Tyler mowry's channel on YouTube. He teaches three act structure and screenplay writing and I learned from his stuff. Also nice hijacking the thread
Also write down your ideas in a dedicated idea doc or notebook. Ideas are your fuel. Best of luck if you end up learning from tutorials on the internet. We're all gonna make it.
If this 18 year kids pilot he made in his bedroom with crappy art, voice acting, concept, or marketing can get traction with 150k views anyone's can
?si=FfoQ5pcLKMxQyeFt
Also nice blogpost
What other options do animators really have anymore?
You need to go where there's the largest audience. You can pretend that you can post things on newgrounds or some on video hosting site and it'll make waves but if the audience isn't there, its not going to be seen. Companies don't want your pitches anymore either, they want safe choices with recognizable names
Nothing literally everything is collapsing
Bu...buh...muh stock market is going up! That means people have more money, doesn't it? D...doesn't it...?
Is this real? Could I get some more context, babe?
I don't like spoonfeeding but basically "streamflation", streaming services are making their prices too high
Too many streaming services, greedy price increases alongside threats of commercials all the while quality lowering and canceling series left and right
Basically they killed cable only to try and become cable themselves.
Streaming isn't sustainable. You have too many streaming services splitting up viewerbases. It's inconvenient and confusing for viewers but it also means that unless all viewers sub to every service then your potential viewerbase gets split. Streaming has shitty discoverability too so its easy for good stuff to get overlooked.
The monetization is also really funky. In theory, having millions of people subscribed to your platform should get you plenty of money to play around with to invest in a bunch of different shows. But improved metrics strongly suggest that the most logical things to invest in is shit like Ice Road Truckers and 90 Day Fiance because it is really cheap to produce relative to other things and tons of people really like it. And actually maintaining these platforms is also really expensive. I'd love to see deeper insights into the financials but what's trickled out is heavily suggesting that streaming isn't actually as profitable as the old model.
Animation further used to be funded by:
> advertisers (who would bid for ad space)
but viewers don't tolerate ads anymore
>merchandise
but none of the streamers seem to know how to make merch
>direct payment
this is movies and OVAs, but viewers get offended at the prospect of paying for anything
I don't think even AI can save the Western animation industry because as compared to Japanese anime the West just doesn't have the underlying payment structure that makes anime possible/profitable.
>Streaming isn't sustainable. You have too many streaming services splitting up viewerbases. It's inconvenient and confusing for viewers but it also means that unless all viewers sub to every service then your potential viewerbase gets split.
Yeah Nettflix said that, it' just don't work with so many services, it should be only 4 huge ones at the very most but so far we have 10 big ones
More like its in its death throes
Not really, unless you're like MeatCanyon.
MeatCanyon's giving up though. He also coordinated several teams and used rigs up the wazoo.
I know that, I just used it as an example of how this kind of effortless stuff is the only thing that gets popular now.
>Namegay can't even reply to the correct post
not surprising