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19 YOUTUBER^ I^^34
CONTENTS APRIL 2019
COLUMNS
VLOGS:
How to Keep Vlogging Fun
EMILY EATON 54
BUSINESS:
6 Steps to a UNIQUE and Effective Patreon
QUINLYN TESAR 61
TRENDS
GIFs are Improving Modern Language.
SCOTT NISWANDER 43
STAYING WILD:
COYOTE PETERSON
Brave Wilderness Host Coyote Peterson Endures Painful Stings and Dangerous Environments in
the Name of Education and Conservation. JORDAN MAISON
46-53
COLUMN: SUPER-NICHE
What Makes the Best Video Essays So Great?
SCOTT NISWANDER
53-55
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YOUTUBERI 35
APRIL 2019
Special Edition
SHORT:
CONSPIRACY THEORY
Bots + Face-Swapping = A Whole
New Nightmare ERIK FRITTS
37-38
STAYING WILD:
COYOTE PETERSON
Brave Wilderness Host Coyote Peterson Endures Painful Stings and Dangerous Environments in
the Name of Education and Conservation. JORDAN MAISON
GUIDES:
How to Become the Biggest
YouTuber Ever
TOM GRENNELL
39-42
THE ONLY COMPANY THAT
CAN COMPETE HEAD TO
HEAD WITH YOUTUBE
Currently, there are no serious com-
petitors to YouTube. And although
people have suspected that YouTube's
main competitor would eventually
be Facebook — i.e., the other half of
the advertising duopoly — the only
company poised to seriously compete
with YouTube is Twitch. And it's not
just about gaming content. Twitch is
poised to compete across all catego-
ries. Other potential competitors, like
Twitter, Snapchat or even Netlix, fun-
damentally lack key features required
to take a bite out of YouTube's pie.
In order to compete with YouTube,
a platform requires two things:
monetization tools for creators and
viewers hungry for content.
FACEBOOK TRIED
AND FAILED
Facebook, and by extension Insta-
gram, has been everyone's expecta-
tion for the company most likely to
eventually compete with YouTube
in the online video sphere. Ater all,
Facebook and Google make up the
two halves of our global advertis-
ing duopoly. Both have businesses
built around capturing attention and
serving ads. Yet Facebook has failed
to draw either viewers or creators to
their long-form video platforms.
It's easy to point to the public's
distrust of Facebook and their
cavalier attitude about privacy as
the source of their failure. That may
be part of why Facebook failed, but
the real problem lies in advertising
greed. Facebook has shown that they
prioritize revenue over everything
(including democracy itself). There's
little chance they'll ever launch an
advertising product that shares any
revenue with everyday creators,
something YouTube has ofered for
over a decade.
Of course, Facebook has other
problems as well, namely their user
behavior and miserable search.
First, Facebook users spend a lot of
time on Facebook, but they gener-
ally aren't there for long-form video
content. But even if they were, they
wouldn't be able to fi nd it. Part of
YouTube's success was built on the
fact that they are a highly-functional
search engine — the world's second
largest. Facebook has a hard time
helping users fi nd their own his-
torical posts, let alone high-quality
video content on such obscure topics
EDITORʼS NOTES
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