Waveform: The MKBHD Podcast - TikTok vs YouTube with Hank Green

Episode Date: February 4, 2022

It isn't often that Marques speaks with someone who has been making videos on YouTube for longer than he has! In this one we bring on Hank Green to talk all about social media monetization and what it's like to be a creator on multiple platforms. Marques and Hank dive deeper into a video that Hank made discussing the TikTok creator fund and why it likely isn't a sustainable option for creators who are trying to make a living. Links: Hank Green video: https://bit.ly/3Hs3Co9 Twitters: https://twitter.com/wvfrm https://twitter.com/mkbhd https://twitter.com/andymanganelli https://twitter.com/hankgreen https://twitter.com/AdamLukas17 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wvfrmpodcast/ Shop the merch: shop.mkbhd.com Join the Discord: https://discord.gg/mkbhd Music by 20syl: https://bit.ly/2S53xlC Waveform is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC optimum points. Visit superstore.ca to get started. What is good people of the internet? Welcome back to another episode of the waveform podcast. We're your hosts. I'm Marques and I'm Andrew. And today we've got a pretty exciting episode because like we talked about, we're going to have guests on and we have a guest this week. It is a pretty exciting guest, a fellow creator.

You'll hear my intro for him in a second, but I think most of you will be familiar with his work. It's Hank Green. And we wanted to talk to him because we were just talking about his recent video about TikTok, which has a whole bunch of really interesting points. It's linked in the show notes. If you haven't already seen it, watch it. It's really good. Sort of explains the landscape of monetization for creators on YouTube versus TikTok and the things that are different between them. And we talk about that, but we also talk about a lot of other things. It's a really interesting conversation. The one thing I should mention is at like halfway through, we had some technical

difficulties and did lose his video feeds. If you're watching the video version, that's what happens halfway through. But I mean, come on, it's Hank Green. You guys know what he looks like. Plus you get to see his beautiful face in the first half anyway. So without any further ado, let's get into it. So we've got Hank Green joining us for Waveform this week. Hank Green, if you're unfamiliar with Hank somehow, then you've been actively avoiding the internet for the past 15 years, in which case, welcome. Appreciate you for joining us. Hank is an entrepreneur, creator, YouTuber, TikToker, creator of VidCon, and half of the Vlogbrothers, and someone who's been creating for longer than I have, which I don't get to say very often. So Hank, welcome to the podcast.

Yeah. Well, it helps to just be older than you. Um, I really appreciate it. I'm a, I'm a big fan and we just established that we've never actually talked before, which is weird. Uh, and I'm very glad to be, uh, finally hanging out. Same. I, I want to talk to you about all the social media and this is one of the fun things about having a podcast finally, is I get to talk to you about all of the social media. And this is one of the fun things about having a podcast finally is I get to talk to people like you and having conversations about, I don't know, this whole world of social media, which it seems like you're all over it. Like obviously YouTube for the longest time, but we've got Instagram, we've got TikTok now. How do you, first of all, I just want to know what you say when you describe to people what you do. What do you say? Well, I go to the easiest thing, which is I make educational videos for teachers and students. And then people are like, oh, tell me more.

And I'm like, oh, you know, high school and early college and chemistry and all kinds of stuff. I have a company that does that. And it's much easier that way. It's just, it's rather than, and also I am kind of a personality and community leader and organizer that does philanthropy. And also I run a merchandise business that helps creators make money that has 50 employees and like, you know, I don't know. Yeah uh yeah my wife when someone asks that question it's like here we go here we go i don't i don't want to go through this again so that's the easy thing to do and like that is sort of the majority of what i spend my time on anyways the educational content yeah i like it i think i i've i've watched your youtube videos for a super long time

but the tiktoks have started coming back up. You know, I spend a decent amount of time on TikTok, probably more than I'd like to admit. I think we all do. And I always see your videos pop up in my review feed before I even followed you. I would just be like, oh, Hank's on TikTok now. Great. They're very educational.

He's got all these great ideas. I love it. Yeah. So I want to start with YouTube because I feel like that's the hub at the center of this creator economy of these videos that we've been making for so long. And when I tweeted your TikTok video, I sort of quoted one of the early points in the video, which is that YouTube actually does treat creators really well, like almost abnormally well. And I got some certainly now that like we've had some some more data points on the field, like when it was just YouTube, it was like, well, that's normal.

But now that we have other platforms out there showing us how they might do it, it does change the perspective. Exactly. Yeah. A lot of people push back just saying, oh, you know, they treat some creators while they treat a few creators you might know well. But it's kind of like just in general, there's obviously the they do a lot of things they back just saying, oh, they treat some creators well. They treat a few creators you might know well. But it's kind of like just in general,

there's obviously the, they do a lot of things they don't have to. The little plaques they send us when you hit a subscriber milestone is a nice example or having a contact at YouTube and things like that. But the sort of biggest point of that being the revenue sharing model. But just in general, now that you've been on YouTube for,

I think I'm, I'm going to say longer than anyone I've ever spoken to. How would you review YouTube as a platform as exists in 2022? If you had to give them a rating, if you have some pros and cons, how do you, how do you assess the state of this gigantic company? Yeah. I mean, that is difficult to, to like, you know, I feel like I need categories, you know, like the video player is like 10 out of 10. And I think people often sort of don't think about the fact that the video player is 10 out of 10. But like that is actually and like the upload experience is very good.

And I think that but like, I think a lot of the parts that I don't like about YouTube are just things that I that that are difficult parts of having done what youtube did you know we're like all the hoops that you have to jump through the moderation that is clunky and wrong often um the the you know demonetization and the algorithmic selection of this stuff and how it doesn't treat people fairly. All that stuff I find very frustrating, but I also recognize that it's a difficult problem that was created by virtue

of the existence of their platform. You couldn't do what they did without running into those problems. And I don't know how else to solve them except for the way they solved them. I had a weird random little meeting a long time ago where i think someone at google said something like you know they have this massive success and the scale

of their platform means that every tiny problem they have is now a problem at scale just because the whole thing is so big it's like oh we have a tiny little spam problem it's like no that's actually a massive problem now across the internet's video source. How do you feel about them getting rid of the dislike counter? Any strong thoughts on that? Oh, you're getting me into my most dangerous opinion on the platform. Interesting.

Which is that I don't think it's a big deal. Okay. So I recognize that it has like that there's like uh there are good parts and bad parts to getting rid of the dislike button like that's where i'm at uh and the the bad part for me like the the main thing that i don't like about it is that there are there are times when i would like to know instantly whether or not this video is going to contain useful information and that was a really good way to see that. And you might think, well, then why I get rid of it? Like if it's doing a good, then why, why get rid? And, but you, a lot of the

things you hear, I'm like, oh man, you asked me, I'm going to catch flack for this. A lot of what you hear from people is that they will say, well, how do we now tell a corporation that we didn't like their video? And to me, that's sort of like you took away my tool for mass brigading. And when we're mass brigading against YouTube or against EA or something, I'm like, I don't have a lot of sympathy for those people. They can deal with it. But I also have seen it happen over and over and over again to people whose content just ideologically doesn't align with other people.

And then you have these big groups of people who organize themselves on discords or subreddits and then they come in and make that person's life miserable and then all of their videos have this weird, permanent stain on them that you never don't see it's it's there for the rest of the life of that video where you're just stuck with this like 70 dislike and people look at those videos and they're like why do people dislike this so much what's going on and it's a it's just it's a it became used as a as an abuse uh tool and youtube didn't like that it was being used as an abuse tool and they were like how do we stop it and you know you and i can see our dislikes in

the back end we know how many people are liking and disliking our content which is useful um and i i don't i certainly don't think that it's a it's something that didn't have negative consequences i just think it also had positive consequences like I think there was a reason that they did it. I think they explained it fairly well why they did it. And I think that, like, it's normal to disagree. And we also sort of exist on, like, we, you know, the more time you spend on and the more sort of, like, you base your career and your business on a platform, the more you sort of like are actually having a relationship with it that's more like a citizen to a government and people don't like it when the government makes decisions that they don't like and that's a thing that happens and and and i also

think that it's fine for people to lodge their complaints uh because we don't get to vote for these people so we might as well uh we might as well yell about the thing that matters to us. And so I certainly don't hold it against anybody who's mad about it. But from my perspective, there's more worrying things. Yeah, I made my video talking about why there are downsides, obviously. And being a part of the tech community, I see like, okay, I want to, for example, install this doorbell and I want to make sure I shut off power correctly and follow tutorial.

I no longer see that the tutorial has a bunch of dislikes because it's dangerous to me. And that quick thing is just one of the negatives. My question was always just about all of the downsides that they are solving for here aren't really actually being solved if the comment section doesn't also get better because all of this mass brigading and hatred that follows people around via the like to dislike

ratio also follows them around in the comment section which needs a lot of work um so i i give the video players yeah i used to youtube has given creators some pretty good tools for moderating comments um a lot better than other platforms um Um, but that, you know, that took time for that to develop. So there are ways to engage with that as a creator. Uh, it's certainly, but it doesn't like take away the reality that people are still going to be, um, happily, uh, in group mobbing people. And like, it was just like one of the ugliest things I think about the internet is mobs of people being jerks. I'm like,

I'm eventually, I feel like maybe we'll get to the point where we realize it's actually really cringy and like embarrassing to be a member of one of those groups of people. But, uh, that's good. That's going to take some time.

I think it does. It does often feel good to be a part of one of those groups. And not to say that i've never been a part of them i i also am sometimes part of a mob of people who's mad about something yeah we we grew up out of the mob but then somebody else grows up into the mob so it's a it's a tough cycle um one of the other fascinating things that i just saw recently twitter is testing down votes i think so you can like a tweet you you can retweet a tweet, but they're testing downvotes specifically. How do you feel about Twitter as a platform?

Twitter's just sort of like all over the place at this point. I actually really like Twitter. And there's not that many pieces to review. But I use it more than I think any other social platform other than TikTok right now. Yeah, Twitter is such an interesting case because it is like far more influential than it is successful, especially by like market cap metrics

like Google and even TikTok. And of course, Facebook just dwarf the valuation of Twitter, but Twitter is extraordinarily influential and important and like the the people who use it are oftentimes um defining culture and really in specific and uh powerful places um it's big in journalist circles and then it's big in dc and so uh it's a it's a huge deal uh and and i like i like it as a platform and I like it as a platform, and I hate it as a platform. I like it when I can convince myself to use it in the ways that I enjoy it, and I hate it when I am subject to its whims and get drawn into things that I know aren't my lane and I know are just me being mad about something that I'm oversimplifying in my brain, which is something that all social media are good at.

And I just feel like there's a beauty in Twitter's long-term inability to innovate. Yeah. Because it just remains what it is. But there's also just a huge missed opportunity there. Twitter owned Vine and like they had this extraordinarily interesting, powerful short form video platform. Do you know how many employees Vine had when it closed? That's a really good question.

I could guess I'm going to guess Vine had a hundred employees. Had 50 employees. I had fewer employees than I do. Wow. That's insane. That is incredible. And like, just try to, just invest in it.

Just figure it out. But like, they can't, like, they just can't, you know, Jack Dorsey, obviously, has always been very drawn in many directions and not interested always

in focusing on one thing. And I think that that was not, all the love to Jack if you're listening. But I think it's not, it's a hard way to be a CEO. And I think that that was not all the love to Jack if you're listening. I think it's not. It's a hard way to be a CEO. And I know that because I'm the same way. And I think that there were a lot of missed opportunities at Twitter.

But at the same time, I kind of like that it's like chugging along, making zero dollars, having not a lot of intrusive advertising and not like launching shorts. Like the moment that that becomes interesting like all the other platforms have. Yeah, no, they kept it simple for sure.

I mean, that's kind of how it started. It started with just like 140 characters or 160 or whatever it was. Text message platform basically, yeah. Exactly. But I think maybe the most interesting platform of the hour is tiktok i mean it's yeah it's ever consuming what was the stat now it just passed it passed something right it passed uh one of the other largest sites in the world to be like one of

the top five biggest sites and i think by traffic they're probably one of the biggest period um tiktok is fascinating to me so we've got these top these couple top creators that are household names we've got the d'amelio's addison ray's all these at the time and everyone knows who these people are they're basically broken to mainstream and then you have the sort of upper tier of the biggest TikTok creators. And I pay attention to a lot of them because the For You page serves me videos from them all the time. And it seems like they're all sort of itching

to graduate from TikTok. And it's kind of fascinating to see. And a lot of them go to make a YouTube channel. A lot of them graduated from social media in general and they go on to do TV stuff. You talked about this in your video, but I'm curious for your like quick take on like, why are all the biggest TikTokers trying to just get out of TikTok, even though TikTok is massive and gaining momentum the way it is? I mean, so there's two reasons. One is, you know, the story that you feel like you're a part of.

And this was a thing when I was coming up on YouTube, every YouTuber wanted to be on TV. And so, like, they wanted to be a part of the story that their heroes were a part of rather than the story that they were inside of, which is just how we are. And that is a bad reason. Like, in my experience, YouTubers who focused on YouTube did way better than YouTubers who were like, how do I do TV now? Yep. There's not a lot of examples of YouTubers who made that transition well. But there are examples of certainly people who started on Vine and made the transition to YouTube really effectively and have become household names. household names um and i think that that is also a definitely an option for for tiktokers and the the other reason is a very good reason which is that uh you can't it's it is more valuable to be

a youtuber than to be a tiktoker and that is both economically like you make more money per minute of time people spend on your content but also because you develop a deeper relationship with your audience because you have them for more than 15 seconds or a minute or three minutes at the outside and that uh that is how you um that is how you like you know tiktok is very intentionally a user first platform and and like to the extent that that it will sacrifice everything else for the user experience. Ads are extremely easy to skip by. The content is

like, it's like, I know that you I know that deep in your heart you feel like you would want to give that creator who you vibe with, you feel like you want to give them more of your time, but you don't really. You want to watch this guy hurt himself on a snowboard let's be honest with ourselves and they're there maybe they're right so so like they are giving you what you not what you would choose but what

you actually want and that's wild and so that's uh that's why it's such a sticky platform but it makes it a more a harder place to build a business as a creator and to build an audience as a creator it's harder to develop a deeper relationship with people um which is democratizing it gives it creates way more opportunity for people to constantly be breaking in and getting that first exposure to audience and to attention but it is because of that you know opportunity for breakthrough you're there's always somebody ready to take your place. And so you have to figure out how to convert those people into something except for just a TikTok audience. And, you know, YouTube is the best place for that.

Yeah. And with YouTube launching and being successful about shorts, it does seem a little bit like maybe there is. It's amazing to think that this is the way I'm thinking now. But maybe there is a threat to TikTok in YouTube's short strategy. Interesting. Whereas, you know, a year ago, I would have been thinking like, you know, is TikTok a threat to YouTube? Now I'm like, I mean, of course, it's a huge threat to YouTube. It is the first threat to YouTube, really.

Like Facebook couldn't take them on, but TikTok can. And now I'm thinking like, how does YouTube take market share away from TikTok? Because YouTube is much better at making money. I was just about to say the platform i have a a stat just recently that youtube had a larger quarter four of last year than netflix in revenue i think it was like eight and a half billion dollars of revenue youtube is making a lot of money now it costs a lot of money to run but they're making a lot of money um and also one of the points you brought up earlier that i've

thought about a lot is like the intrinsic value of an audience on one platform versus the other like would you rather have 10 million views on a TikTok or 1 million views on a YouTube video and it's kind of still weighted for the YouTube video at that point yeah yeah so that's always been really interesting and you look at the numbers actually the the biggest piece of content I have ever created by views is a TikTok. Of course it is. And it's like 33 million views on a seven second video or something crazy like that.

But yeah, if you find yourself, like if you come up as a TikToker, you've built your brand, but not your business necessarily. You do as a smart person want to build a business around it on something more stable um like a youtube channel so it does make a lot of sense to what we see it being built are you you make tiktoks do you do you consider yourself a tiktoker at this point you've made enough of them you have like a presence there

at this point i it would be almost embarrassing to not call myself a TikToker. It'd be like I'm trying to pretend I'm not a TikToker. Yeah. And the other reason I kind of consider myself a TikToker is because I really admire a lot of the people I follow on TikTok. And we have, you know, in the same way as my colleagues on YouTube, you know, talked a bit on direct messages and stuff. And I just think that they're so cool and interesting and smart in the way that they are approaching their content and their audience that like,

I feel like if I, the only reason I don't have to call myself a TikToker would be like that I don't think it's a, that I'm embarrassed by it. And when I think about those people, I'd be like almost deriding their creativity and thoughtful content if I pretend like I'm not one of them. I mean, it used to be embarrassing to say you're a YouTuber

and now it's got a different connotation every month. But now it's like, oh, nice. Like I understand what that is. Which is that's like kind of funny because i've said to people i don't know that like an uber driver if you just say you're a youtuber they're like oh yeah i know i know some of those like they understand it already we're gonna take a quick break when we come back tiktok versus youtube and monetization BetMGM, authorized gaming partner of the NBA, has your back all season long. From tip-off to the final buzzer,

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To all the planners, now you can reserve your Uber ride up to 90 days in advance. See Uber app for details. Reserve your Uber ride up to 90 days in advance. See Uber app for details. But I think the thing that sort of ties all this stuff together is like YouTube has monetization built around sharing revenue on a percentage basis with its creators. And TikTok, in its attempt on its way up to stealing tons of market share from YouTube but wanting to keep creators on TikTok,

has decided they want to also give revenue to their creators, but they've done it with a different mechanic. They've built a singular creator fund. And your video has done a better job of explaining it than I ever could, so it's going to be linked in the show notes. Everyone should watch that at least before getting to this part. But the worst part about this creator fund is that fundamentally the better

tiktok does uh the less successful individual creators using that fund actually do um yeah is this a mistake by tiktok is this a greedy thing by tiktok it's a it's a weird obvious thing that they should have all obvious thought of by now so I'm curious why you think they decided to go with a creator fund rather than revenue sharing. It's super smart. Like it's, you know, and like if they don't, if they never experienced any pushback about it, like no, like it would just be smart. And so the reason, so basically the situation is there's a static pool of money and so if the so if if currently there's like let's say 10 billion views a day on tiktok and there's distributing that that fund among those people who earned those 10 billion views

then if if like six months from now there's 20 billion views on tiktok a day because the platform grew you get half as much money per view um because there's more views and the same pot of money so that's the that's the problem it's so it's amazing um and that is clearly the the uh the limitation of of the static pool of money but the creator fund idea itself i think is quite smart actually. We all together experienced that like it kind of was maybe bad for YouTube to be tying revenue, like people's revenue directly to the advertisements running on their channel. And also like advertisements running on a video

was a bit of a problem because then it meant that like, how does YouTube police where Coca-Cola's advertisements show up? And they have this like preferred program where like we promise that the content is not terrible, but sometimes even the people in the preferred content might make stuff that's a little edgy. And so we ended up in the situation

where like they have to have this tremendously complicated moderation system to decide whether or not something is worthy of certain kinds of advertisements it's a mess uh youtube and tiktok doesn't have to worry about that um the other thing that is great about a creator fund is that you can divide it up based on what you want to encourage so um so i get higher cpms than average because my audience is older and i make educational content and it's like really brand safe um but but on tiktok everybody basically makes the same cpm but you could make it so that a creator gets more money for their first million views than

for their second million views so that you're encouraging people to uh so that's because it's easy it's easier to get your second million like your second million views than your first million views it's just like how how it is um and you could you could make it so that you reward people for creating content that has more engagement or you could or like is less controversial like you can measure like controversiality scores based on how like disliked something is or how much sort of yelling there is a negative sentiment there is in the comments so you can like you can do that you could just sort of as a platform decide what kind of content you want to be encouraging with dollars and you can't really do that the way that on

youtube that's just decided by advertisers and where they want to advertise. So an example of a huge problem of this is like if you tend to make content for a black audience in America advertisers are less interested in buying that content because the average black person in America has far less money than the average white person in America. So like so you literally just because you make content for black people make less money yeah which is wild yeah yeah one of the weirdest uh uh questions that i've had literally about the like the the adpocalypse that happened back in i guess we've had more than one of them on youtube but about the the association directly between the advertiser and the content that they appear in front of i always thought it was pretty clear that uh a coca-cola ad appearing on a youtube video didn't actually associate coca-cola with whatever is in that youtube video at least i

personally always felt that way yeah for sure but it somehow became this really strong like reaction from all of these brands to pull out because they didn't want their brand associated and i'm like i've seen a lot of ads before a lot of like when i see an ad on tv for example on in between like quarters in an nba game a lot of times it's a product that's related to sports because that makes sense and that's where the audience is i don't remember the last ad I saw on YouTube and what video it was in front of. I don't even know. It's usually some reasonable product.

I don't remember. Do you not have YouTube Premium? I do, but when I'm signed into it, like the Shorts account, which doesn't have Premium, then I see a bunch of ads and I forget to switch back. So I'm like, I can't believe that that was such a massive driver of the adpocalypse, but it really was, like the direct tie between brands.

Do you want me to bore you with the deep reality of why that happened? I would love you to. Yes. So there's two components of it. The first is that the last like 80 years of television ads have been sold that way. They say you can reach this many people, but really what you're doing is you're aligning yourself with content. And in this case, the content is stuff that people feel really passionately about

or that makes them feel good. And so it was easier to monetize like sports, for example, because people have a lot of passion around sports content. So it's easy to much easier to monetize to sell ads around the Super Bowl than it is to sell ads around like CNN, where you don't really know whether like with a vibe of that day is going to be. And so so that's how that is how ad agencies have been selling brands on content on TV for decades. And so that is how brands think about it because that's how advertising agencies have talked about it to them.

And it's also how the content providers have talked about it to them, how the television stations talk about it to them. So that's been how you sort of like, beyond just the demographics and beyond just the number of people you're going to reach. That's how you try to like add the extra icing on the cake. So they talk about this a ton and how important it is. And then finally, and you switch over to YouTube and it's like,

it's not important anymore at all. Don't think about that. We're not advertising on the content. We're advertising to the person. It's just an algorithm. You are choosing the person to advertise to not the content you're advertising on., which is more or less how it works, that the content still matters. And then the other important piece of that pie is that during the adpocalypse and before, and also since, though it is getting a little less this way now, advertising agencies really hated Google. They hate them so much because Google is putting them out of business because Google does their job. Google says,

you don't have to work with an advertising agency. It's four clicks to figure out how to reach your audience. You can reach your audience better than you ever could with an ad agency. And ad agencies were like, that's wrong. We're in New York. We make $400,000 a year

and we need to continue making $400,000 a year because I have a mortgage. And like, so ad agencies were able to say to brands, look, I told you YouTube sucked. I told you Google sucked. They're putting your logo next to terrorist recruitment videos, next to people teaching other people how to stab each other. And now look what you've done. You've ruined your brand reputation.

And also the third piece is brands wanted leverage against YouTube. And this was an opportunity to exert leverage against them. And it worked. And it kept CPMs low for years after that. Yeah, this was one of the things. It was a very successful thing. It was very bad thing for yeah it was very bad for youtube it was like a chapter in internet history i do remember going to one of

the creator summits which by the way is another thing youtube does that i don't know that any other platform does but it's sort of a gathering where uh youtubers are talking directly to youtube and uh something that kept coming up was like well don't the advertisers need youtube more than youtube needs those advertisers that dropped out? That's always been the case I make. Yeah, they always need each other. But it's like, yeah, if you pull all of your advertising off of YouTube for whatever this reason you really believe in is, eventually you're going to realize you got to get back to that audience somehow. And those people are borderline unreachable any other way.

So come back well that's what that seemed to be what changed this year where youtube's revenue went from 20 20 billion dollars to 30 billion dollars in one year um and that's a wild number that is it's bigger than netflix it's crazy netflix has like like hundreds of millions of people who just give them ten dollars a month yeah and youtube's just doing it through almost all through advertising. Though, please sign up for YouTube premium. It's so much better.

I second that. I highly recommend it. The ad free experience is great. It is. Yeah. Yeah. No, yeah. There's a, and now,

so we're looking at shorts and like how they're trying to take a little bit of market share back from TikTok. And it's kind of interesting because I've made videos. Actually, we've done this sort of a fun game.

I'll make a short, a 45 second video in vertical i'll edit it and i'll publish the exact same short on tiktok instagram reels twitter video youtube shorts and we'll always guess like how we think they'll do our short channel is pretty new it doesn't have as many subscribers but we'll sort of guess like i think the the reel will do better for this one for this reason or i think this tiktok is going to take like a 24 hour slow burn and then sort of take off yeah um youtube shorts hasn't really taken off for my very young shorts channel but we have noticed the tiktoks fluctuate the most it'll go from like a hundred thousand to three million to two hundred thousand to twelve million and it,000 to 12 million. And it, it is the most, uh, reliable slash unreliable. The latest one we did, um, the YouTube short brand new 10,000 views after 24

hours on Twitter, 297,000 views, Instagram reel, 1.95 million, TikTok 1.7 million. And then the TikTok passed it just sort of unpredictable. Do you make your TikToks thinking about which platform it might be best for? Are you sculpting your videos for TikTok specifically? I make TikToks for TikToks. I try not to think about... To some extent, because the one-minute limit I think about, because I'd rather make a video that's

one minute because then it i don't think that you can do youtube shorts that are over a minute right um and that will probably change but i don't think it has yet and the so the so that's the thing i think about but other than that like i'm making tiktoks as a tick tocker like i i feel engaged in the culture of that world at the moment like i don't think that that will i will remain that way forever um but i'm engaged enough in the culture that i feel like i can i can do it you know in my own way as a 41 year old science teacher um engage with it in in a way that uh won't be seen as too embarrassing and the uh and then and then a lot of that stuff just won't make sense off TikTok and so it will not be reuploaded as a real or as a short um but a lot of it will and so it's it sort of comes down to like

the kinds of content I make on TikTok some of like if I'm answering science questions or doing a video about science, it's going to work anywhere. Whereas if I'm engaging with something that like that is like inside of the current moment of TikTok, it wouldn't even make sense if I uploaded on TikTok two weeks from now, let alone on YouTube. That's exactly right. Yeah. Yeah. I feel like I my philosophy has always been to upload

content specifically for that platform and if there are things that plug into the cultural nexus or whatever's happening in that moment then that's even better um but yeah we're just sort of trying to come up with good short ideas and good video ideas in the tech world there's lots of ideas out there and things to make but but on how to make them for TikTok is a question that I think about a lot. Yeah, I mean, it's a very different audience. It's not just that it's got the culture of the platform, it's the look of the platform,

but it's also just it's younger, it's more female. It's interesting, my science videos get like 70% female on TikTok and they're like 80% male on YouTube shorts. So like exact same piece of content. That is really interesting. I haven't, I'm going to check right now actually, because I notoriously on a tech channel. What would you guess that my male female ratio is typically on a tech video? I don't know. 85 to 15. That would be world class it's nowhere near that it's nowhere yeah that i've never seen a double digit uh female ratio

on a tech channel on youtube specifically wow but that's youtube um mine's like 97, three, uh, and so I wonder if Tik TOK is, if anything, an opportunity to reach a completely different audience because of the different people using Tik TOK specifically with different ratios of male to female. That's something I can't find the ratio right now. I got to look on a single video. It's in there. You got that Tik TOK analytics are not good. Yeah, they're bad.

I'll find it someday. I've got this weird, they're bad. I'll find it someday. I've got this weird page pulled up, but I'll find it later. But that's an interesting point. So, okay, TikTok's got a creator fund now. You've exposed TikTok's creator fund for being maybe a little bit short-sighted or a little too smart.

Do you think there's a world where they change it? Do you think there's a world where TikTok continues to grow, creators continue to start off on TikTok and they want to stay on TikTok and they find a reason to switch to maybe a percentage-based system to incentivize people to stay with TikTok long-term? which they don't change it somehow. And like, maybe I'm just being really optimistic, but I think that that change might be, we hear you, we're going from 200 million a year to 300 million a year. And like that to me does not solve the problem.

And like, there's all this, I didn't even get to the end of the list of advantages to this. But one of the big ones is that you get to control that line item. And so like as a business, you want to be in – you hate percentages. You want flat fees. So be in control of that line item. And like I think that they would rather like increase that number without making it a percentage but it doesn't really solve the problem until it is a percentage um and the other you know

the question that i think that tick tock is trying to answer is is the money is our money that we would like to keep important to the long-term sustainability of the economic ecosystems of the creator economy on our platform um and and i don't know i don't know the answer to that question like as a creator as a person who likes creators i hope that the answer is that like in order to become as powerful as youtube you need to build the same note that youtube built which is i believe that's the true i are the best place to be a creator on the internet yeah um and like twitch is also good but it's it's still not as good as i don't think it's as good as youtube uh because i think twitch is more work for the the money twitch twitch i had i saw an interesting analogy and it's it's as good as YouTube because I think Twitch is more work for the money.

Twitch, I saw an interesting analogy and it's similar to what I would describe YouTube as, but it's kind of like driving for Uber. You'll make money while you're doing it and then when it's over, when you stop driving, it stops. Yeah, and it's wild. The amount of money that I make from videos I made 10 years ago is like, really? That's still throwing off $50 a month. All right. Yeah, exactly.

At that one video. There's several. I mean, we all know the ones that show up and recommend it over and over and over again. We all have a couple of those. We'll take another quick break. And when we come back, we're going to talk about YouTube adding more features. You know what's great about ambition? You can't see it.

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channel and then YouTube quietly changes something or adds a new feature. And it looks like, this is always a question with YouTube and Google. It looks like this is something they're going to lean into pretty hard, but we're not, we're not sure if we want to jump in and maybe sacrifice analytics or what's what's going to change about our channel if we start doing a thing it seems like the algorithm or a new feature is pushing um shorts is one of those things where it's like do i want to post shorts on my main channel is that going to will those be separated like do you think about that at all do you i you do shorts on your your one of your channels right yeah we do shorts on scishow and we do shorts i i have my own like i basically repost

my tiktoks on my personal channel um yeah i mean it there are there are lots of uh times when youtube has launched an exciting new feature and it's like, should I go all in on this? Because I've seen these things flop, you know? And I felt like that initially about shorts, honestly. I was like, is this a good idea for YouTube to be doing? Like how all in on this really are they? How big of a threat is TikTok to them? Now I'm in the place of like YouTube not having shorts is like blockbuster not having streaming you're like all right maybe it's gonna hurt their bottom line a little bit but like they'll still exist you know they will continue to compete in the new future because i like i'm terrified like a lot of you know i don't know i don't ever get fear from any executives at YouTube who I talk to. They never exude anything except like collected, in charge, confident.

Yeah. But like, I think people are pretty freaked out by TikTok. I think that people like I think investors are. I think that people in the creator economy are. I think that YouTube people at YouTube are like, you know, this is a complete guess. But I would guess that 2021 despite being a year where youtube's revenue went up a lot it's probably the first year ever that youtube's traffic in the u.s might have gone down it certainly did not grow right like the way that

it has in the past and like because tiktok had to eat away from somewhere. It can't all come from TV. It can't all come from socializing, which is probably where a lot of it came from. So yeah, I think YouTube's legitimate, should be freaked out by TikTok. And I think that they have no choice but to be inside of shorts, which I'm ambivalent about. Part of me is like,

I don't want this on the platform because I want this to be a pure experience. I want it to be like Twitter, where it just like words and that's let's just be that the way i always liked it but i uh i i if i were in charge of youtube it would be a significantly smaller company that's for sure that's fair yeah it's it is definitely like um like the more we we've looked at vine like vine had this huge come up huge platform huge creators gone today and you know those creators are no longer obviously on vine it makes me think like no matter how big of a creator or sorry no no matter how big of a platform comes

up to challenge youtube youtube will always just have to find a way to absorb its features or its creators. One of those two things. And I don't know, you know, let's say YouTube makes a perfect clone, an incredible solution to the TikTok problem. And suddenly TikTok starts to shrink. It's like, well, that's about as good of a competitor as we've ever had to YouTube. And there is theoretically a danger to only having one video platform be successful. You want some competition. Yeah.

Do you ever think about YouTube as a monopoly or is that just, it's just like the internet's video archive? Yeah, I mean, absolutely. I think of YouTube as a monopoly in its space, you know, but like it sort of beg it, it, it sort of begs the question, like, where is the, like, where's the line you draw between these things? Like, is, is it, is YouTube like competing with Netflix? Is it competing with Facebook? Is it competing with, uh, with like, you know, like, so, so all of these things in the attention economy are basically, um, competing for your time. And so they're competing with everyone in media.

So in that way, they are not a monopoly. But in as much as the kind of content that I love to create, know how to create, have experimented with the craft of, and am deeply familiar with, you're like, yeah, I can't move my audience to another platform. I kind of don't want to um and you know and like but i think that you've also see people diversifying like obviously this podcast is on youtube but it is also wherever you can get a spot a podcast and uh and that's one of the reasons why youtubers make podcasts is because it's a a way have a deeper, you know, connection because you get to

like hang out for more than for a longer period of time. And also it's like, it's a piece of content that gets to exist outside of that ecosystem, diversify your sort of like content that you're making. And I think that a lot of people like creators talk about that all the time. Like how do you make sure you're not like a single platform creator because it's hard but like it's something people spend a lot of time working on and thinking about so technically youtube is certainly not a monopoly no one could actually argue that in court um as a person who makes youtube videos it does feel like they are because like there's no really other place where i feel like i would could successfully post youtube videos but I think that TikTok

innovates very quickly and um and if if the big advantage that YouTube has over TikTok is the is the ability and like the desire to share 55% of revenue it wouldn't be hard for TikTok to just do that you know it's not like i don't i'm pretty sure i'm pretty sure they're not hurting for money like they it may be that they have under monetized up to now but regardless like anyone would give them money like it's yeah the most successful thing that's happened in media the fastest rising thing that's happened in media ever so yeah um yeah i i think that they're going to continue to evolve and like that that might be different forms of video but i hope that it is also um more opportunities for monetization same it is it is kind of interesting to think about

framing youtube as a monopoly or not like if if youtube were to argue in court they would say oh no yeah we're competing with facebook and net Netflix and TV and all these podcast things. We're just another media company. But also, just like you described, in this world of creator-made videos in this certain way, there is no other place, which is really interesting. And like podcasts, for example, we make our podcast here, not just because we want to connect to our audience in like a new way, but also discoverability in the podcast world is awful unless you have a discoverability engine

and YouTube is just the best one. So here we are. So yeah, they have a lot of opportunities to branch out into new things and compete in new ways and so anytime another competitor pops up and they feel like they want to be involved in that space boom youtube shorts now they're in there yeah yeah and like the thing that youtube did and the thing that tiktok should be wanting to do um is is to sort of like they're they're not just like an application. They're like the operating system for the online video creator community, you know?

And, you know, there are competing operating systems. Like you can watch VOD videos on Twitch and like you can also watch live streams on YouTube, but like they are the one. They are the sort of ios of of video of uploadable video rather than sort of walled garden video love it that's a great analogy uh i have one more question for you hank and it's a little bit off the beaten path it's a little bit of a twist um i'm very curious how fast can you type the alphabet yeah this is this was a tiktok friend recently is that what you're referencing no even better even better this is a this is a classic end of the waveform podcast uh bit that

we're doing now which is every guest i'm to send you in the studio here a link, actually, to an alphabet type test. And if you can open this site and screen record your attempt at helping the alphabet, we actually have a leaderboard of previous guests on the podcast. And we may have bet on how well you do on this leaderboard, but I won't tell you what we've bet yet. uh if you could give are we doing three attempts three attempts if you could give your three attempts at typing a through z that would be pretty sick i gotta open

a screen record i'm glad that you just assume i know how to i can do a screen record which is true because i'm a youtuber but like i can are you on a mac or a windows uh i'm on mac i got it you got quick time yeah that's perfect yeah all right try and close all right make sure that there's no confidential information on my screen right now right it's like've got a sexy Garfield in the corner there. Are you on a mechanical keyboard or a normal keyboard? I'm on a normal keyboard, the one that comes with the Mac. Okay. Sick.

Same. Okay. And I should just go? Yep. It literally will just start as soon as you hit the letter a okay and it'll time you out three two one i don't feel like that was particularly fast that did sound that sounded pretty good does it give you a time i don't know i pushed enter and it went away oh okay okay if you i think as soon as you get to z it spits out a time and then i pushed enter

and i shouldn't have done that oh yeah yeah well maybe i missed the letter oh if you miss a letter Okay. Yeah. Hey, hey, hey. What the hell did I do wrong? Oh, I didn't hit G. Okay, well, let's start over again. It's harder than it sounds. It sounds really easy, and then you get to like W, X, Y, Z, and it's really tough. Yeah, my pinky gets tired. Okay.

Okay. Okay. Whew. okay 8.8 8.8 would you like to give it one more try we've got we've got a leaderboard here but i won't tell you where it is until the end okay okay i will give you one more try all right i'm going oh man well that's not gonna right. I'm going. Oh, man. Well, that's not going to do it. I'm going again. Okay. 7.2. Oh, that's a big jump. That's a big jump.

That vaults you up the leaderboard. 7.2 puts you right behind Colin and Samir for number 9 they do it together because they just love each other so much they took their best time of their combined attempts that is incredible if you could send me

that skin recording that would be amazing but anyway okay thank you Hank for joining us this has been an adventure. I like talking to creators about creating and the creator universe. Feels like being in a superhero, talking to a superhero movie,

talking to other superhero characters. It's kind of fun. It's kind of fun. Thank you. Yeah, it's super interesting. I really appreciate all the questions. It's cool. It's nice to finally meet you.

For sure. Hopefully we do it again sometime. I really appreciate all the questions. It's cool. It's nice to finally meet you. For sure. Hopefully we do it again sometime. I know you're super busy, but until then, I'll be watching more TikToks. All right. Just keep scrolling. For sure. All right.

Take care. See ya. Bye. All right. That's it with Hank Green. I, again, want to just take a second to thank him. He's obviously super busy and we're super happy to have him and have that chat.

I thought it was really fun. I think it really good we've talked about tick tock so much here and just like he's really deep into that and then along with the fact that it's really fun from an outsider watching you who's been on youtube for so long talk to someone who's been on even longer i mean like i have some some knowledge but watching two people like that just talk is is just fascinating to me. Um, I hope he can come on the show again. He knows so much about social media. So like if he wants to be our resident expert, I'd love that.

Kind of like how Neil deGrasse Tyson's our resident astrophysicist. Yeah. We should have Hank, our resident social media expert. I mean, he'd basically be a third co-host at that point, but I'm all for it. Um, hopefully Hank, if you're ever in the new york city area come over come visit us we'd love to have you actually sit down i'd love to be part of it too like we real question if he comes into the studio and does another episode in person does he get to do the typing test again on a new keyboard or does he have to stick with his old

result i don't know we'll have to we'll cross that bridge yeah yeah we'll just okay we'll figure that one out copy hank or hank underscore one final final dot mov um yeah that was great really fun conversation we will see you all next week peace i've never done the outro before that was weird that's perfect that's how it's done waveform is produced by adam elena we are partnered with vox media and our intro Waveform was produced by Adam Molina. We are partnered with Vox Media and our intro music was created by Vane Sill.