The Rebirth of Animation on Youtube

Animation and YouTube. The two have had a rocky history together. The ability to create and upload content on your own without any company interference should be the independent animator's dream. Yet this history has obstructed animation's reign on YouTube. Up until recently, when YouTube began to be reborn on the platform, but I'm getting ahead of myself. We must start at the beginning.

Now imagine a world where the newest phone is the iPhone 3 and the Shrek pentalogy's fourth chapter was released. (Quick sidenote: In the research of this article, I discovered that there is going to be a fifth Shrek movie and that the creator has had the plot of all the movies planned out since 2002. Sorry, I just thought that that was interesting.) This strange, bizarro world is known as 2010, and it's where our story begins.

A website called Newgrounds provided a forum for content creators all over the world. This content included online games and comics, but the main feature of this website was its animation community. Great artists like Egoraptor, RubberRoss, and OneyNG all got their starts on this website. Most of these animations were absurdist comedies that usually parodied or celebrated video games with crude humor and violence. Eventually, these creators shifted focus to YouTube as Newgrounds popularity was fading while YouTube provided a new forum for their animations. The algorithm of YouTube at the time was that the amount of money you made was based on your view count. Meaning that if your video was 12 seconds and got a million views, it would get the same revenue as a 43 minute video with the same amount of views. For the next few years, these animators made their living on the platform, being some of the most popular and successful people on YouTube, until 2014 when everything changed. (Dun dun.)

So around 2014 animators began to notice a problem with their videos. A video that was getting the same amount of views as a video they made a year ago was making less than half the money. So what was happening? Well, the problem was that YouTube was changing its algorithm. Now, instead of being paid based on the number of views a certain video has, a creator's income was now being determined by the amount of time spent on a video by a watcher and the frequency of uploads by a content creator. It is believed that this was done in response to a group of YouTubers known as "Reply Girls" who made videos based on popular video trends and news in order to get views. Most people only watched these videos for about half a minute at a time, until realizing the trash that they had clicked on, so in response, YouTube changed its algorithm to help prevent these videos from being made.

This sounds like a good thing, getting rid of people who were manipulating the system for monetary gain, but as you may have guessed this had very bad effects on the site's group of animators. There was no realistic way for these creators to sustain themselves on animation in this new system. Some moved to other media on the site like video game let's plays. Others were forced to leave the site altogether. After this change, the only animators on the site were large-scale companies and people not looking to make a living on the site. This was how things stayed on the site for a while until once again, YouTube's ever-changing landscape of creators shifted once again.

August 30, 2014. A prominent comic writer on Tumblr known as TheOdd1sOut posts a video on his YouTube channel, titled "A Book I Made as a Kid." It features a story that was very mundane in its content but was made entertaining in the way it was told by TheOdd1sOut. The video was different not only in its jokes and storytelling format but also in the way it was animated. It featured a simplistic style and was not animated in a traditional style. The way it was animated was a bunch of different pictures edited together without in-between frames like a normal animation. It was more detailed than an animatic but less so than a normal animation.

These videos began to gain more traction and at this time TheOdd1sOut has 5.3 million subscribers and there are numerous other creators making videos done in this same style. The fact that this content is more personality-driven allows for each of these different creators to seem different. This new generation of YouTube animators has a fresh perspective and lots of somewhat-what fresh ideas. It's very interesting because by all standards these videos should be impossible to profit from given Youtube's algorithm. Although they are longer and can be made more quickly, they still are a lot more difficult to make than other content on the site.

Nonetheless, these YouTubers have defied the algorithm and found success in a part of YouTube that many had thought were long dead.