I agree that often the best don’t rise to the top, but you have bad examples here.
You are confusing expertise in different domains: just because one is exceptional in something, it does not follow they are good at teaching it or making videos of it. This is especially apparent in Bottura’s channel. He might be the best chef in the world, but his youtube content is mediocre.
You are confusing expertise in different domains: just because one is exceptional in something, it does not follow they are good at teaching it or making videos of it.
I agree about there being different domains, that each is important, and that expertise in one does not imply expertise or even competency in another.
You might be able to make points about how being brilliant doesn’t necessarily make you good on camera, or about how marketing and promotion matters a lot, or about releasing videos on a consistent schedule, or about how maybe they’re not producing the types of content YouTube viewers want to watch.
What I was trying to get at is that all things considered, if you encapsulated all of that in some one-number metric of quality, a) IMO all of the examples I gave were very high quality, and 2) in general, I have a strong impression that very high quality frequently doesn’t lead to success.
Maybe the one-number metric that matters on YouTube has a very strong component of how technically well the video was made.
Like, even if someone who “deserves it” makes technically great videos and gets tons of followers, most of them follow the channel for “wrong reasons”, that is, they would not have subscribed if the same content had lower technical quality. So if someone who “deserves it” makes technically crappy videos, they only get a few followers.
In other words, most people watch YouTube because they want some short funny visual experience. Not because they want to learn from world-class experts. Okay, maybe they watch something short funny visually attractive that allows them to pretend to themselves that they are doing it to learn.
That would kinda reduce your thesis to “the best at X frequently don’t rise to the top when Y matters”. The difficult part is figuring out what exactly it is that matters on YouTube (or on the market).
I agree that often the best don’t rise to the top, but you have bad examples here.
You are confusing expertise in different domains: just because one is exceptional in something, it does not follow they are good at teaching it or making videos of it.
This is especially apparent in Bottura’s channel. He might be the best chef in the world, but his youtube content is mediocre.
I agree about there being different domains, that each is important, and that expertise in one does not imply expertise or even competency in another.
What I was trying to get at is that all things considered, if you encapsulated all of that in some one-number metric of quality, a) IMO all of the examples I gave were very high quality, and 2) in general, I have a strong impression that very high quality frequently doesn’t lead to success.
Maybe the one-number metric that matters on YouTube has a very strong component of how technically well the video was made.
Like, even if someone who “deserves it” makes technically great videos and gets tons of followers, most of them follow the channel for “wrong reasons”, that is, they would not have subscribed if the same content had lower technical quality. So if someone who “deserves it” makes technically crappy videos, they only get a few followers.
In other words, most people watch YouTube because they want some short funny visual experience. Not because they want to learn from world-class experts. Okay, maybe they watch something short funny visually attractive that allows them to pretend to themselves that they are doing it to learn.
That would kinda reduce your thesis to “the best at X frequently don’t rise to the top when Y matters”. The difficult part is figuring out what exactly it is that matters on YouTube (or on the market).