 Hey everyone, I am Nathaniel Rumpeljansen. Welcome back to Nintendo Prime. We're gonna have a very interesting conversation today, this evening, whenever you're watching this. Maybe it's early morning for you. This conversation is something that really pertains to every content creator on this platform. It probably pertains to content creators on TikTok or Twitch streamers or whatever platform you happen to be on. I know there's other creative mediums as well, DeviantArt and ArtStation and lots of different places. I know there's specific places for music creators as well that are different than your typical content creation platform. So I understand that there is a fundamental issue that happens between an audience and a content creator or in my specific case, because this is what I can talk most about, an audience and a YouTuber. And that is what the hell happens to YouTubers as they grow. Why do they feel distant from their community and why do a lot of fans always as content creators grow seem to wish for the better days before the content creator got full of themselves and stopped caring about the community. And I wanna talk about this because I'm sort of in that in between stage. I'm still a small content creator by pretty much every metric out there, but I am also significantly bigger than I was four years ago. And not that kind of a stone throw away from even dreaming of 100,000 subscribers and who knows where we go from there. Do we ever hit 200 and 300? Is it weird to dream of a million subscribers? But there is this obvious disconnect that seems to happen that is blamed on the content creator that is sure partially the creator's fault. But I wanna talk about both sides of the spectrum because I've obviously been someone who's been enjoying YouTube for a long time as just someone who watches YouTube content. And I've seen this happen on various channels. This video is not gonna be calling out specific channels if you would like to do so down in the comments below. That is your prerogative. But before I jump into this, I wanna remind you, hey, this is the first time you've ever seen a video at Nintendo Prime. I would appreciate if you would subscribe and like the video, maybe comment down below, help spread the love. That would be wonderful. We did just conclude our big giveaway for last month, but we have a new giveaway event happening this summer called Prime Gaming Fest. We'll put more details out on this and we'll get closer to it. It will be happening in June. But yeah, hopefully you're subscribed and hitting that bell icon and sticking around for all the updates on that. Now, what am I talking about here? I'm talking about that as a content creator grows, it feels to the watcher, to the viewer, like they are more and more disconnected from their community. It feels too many that the content creator cares less about them. Now, some of this is just a basic psychological connection where there always is a little bit of a disconnect between the content creator who's on camera, on live stream, just talking to people that exist in a chat box. So there's always gonna be a level of disconnect there where sometimes the chat box will greatly associate themselves with a content creator like they're their best friend, whereas the content creator basically doesn't know anything about you, you're a username on a screen. And so that can obviously just be a psychological disconnect in that sense. But it goes beyond that because it is true that as channels grow here on YouTube, they change. And sometimes as they change, it feels like they're paying less attention to you or less attention to the community. And sometimes become even focused on things like, well, money because obviously it always sounds great to be a full-time YouTuber. And I'm almost there, not quite, but it sounds great to be a full-time YouTuber. But obviously, once you become one, you do have to care a lot more about the money aspect of things that maybe you dreamed about when you were a smaller creator, but now is a reality. And now this is how you support yourself. Maybe you have children like I do and you got to support your family. You know, you got bills to pay and mortgages to take care of and car payments and everything in between. This is not even counting when, hey, you know what, you should take a vacation at some point and try to enjoy part of your life and not just slave away, live streaming 10 hours a day, seven days a week, you're eventually gonna need to get away from that. And it's hard because part of being in this medium is if you take a break, if you walk away for even just one week, you could end up, you know, losing a huge chunk of your audience because algorithms are at play and they end up, you know, not suggesting your videos or putting out notifications. So then you got to plan ahead and somehow work double time one week just to have enough content for the week that you're gone. And when you're a channel like mine that covers news, that's really hard because news happens daily and I won't be covering it. You know, I'm going on a vacation this June coming up after our summer game fest or after our prime gaming fest, I'm going on a cruise and yeah, I'm obviously not gonna be making content when I'm on a boat in the middle of the ocean. Like that's just, that's not really gonna be possible. So there'll be some content coming out but you're not gonna get your normal daily dose of news. Actually I am working on potentially training Eric to get a couple news videos out that week so we get some of the bigger stories out but that's neither here nor there. I think personally that there is multiple things that are happening here. And one of them is if you're talking about the content creator disconnecting you in a live stream setting. And I hear this sometimes on my streams. I heard this last year when we did our E3 extravaganza. Some of this is because, well, as you grow, there are more people talking. This is true on videos but also especially true in live streams to the point that last year during the E3 extravaganza, I had to use slow mode for the first time in channel history because the chat was moving so fast. It was impossible for me to read it let alone a lot of you guys to read the chat as well. So this is less that the creator's changing more that the landscape the creator exists in is changing. So as you become more popular the chat is going to move quicker and because of that the content creator is gonna be able to read less and less of those messages and it gets to a point where you're used to the content creator responding to literally everything you say and it goes from maybe every 10th, every 20th, every 30th thing you say because there's so many people in the chat that creator's trying to pay attention to and sometimes it gets overwhelming and I can say this because I've had this happen. I've had live streams with over 1200 people watching live. It can be very overwhelming compared to my typical live stream that I'll do randomly during the week where I'm at 100, 150, sometimes 200 people live but that's a lot less than, hey, when we have 1200. Heck, that's 150, 200 people is a lot more than what we were just getting four years ago when we would have 23, 25 people watching this play Splatoon 2 in 2018. So you can already see that growth is there and so the chat moves quicker and it feels like you're maybe not getting the same attention from the creator and this is less the fault of the creator more just what comes with the territory of growing. Now, I will say there are some things that tend to change as you grow where a content creator may have shouted out and paid attention to every single even $1 super chat or whatever. Suddenly they're only paying attention to when they get like a $20 super chat and that is obviously a personal choice of the creator because you can get enough of those smaller donations that you're literally spending the entire stream shouting them out and that might not be what that content creator wants to do for two, three hours while they're live. Just sit there and shout out super chats all the time. I can say personally for me, my goal is to always make sure every single donation, every single super chat, no matter how small or big, it's the same amount of attention it's always got but it's also easy for me to say that when I'm not overwhelmed with them. There are times I have been overwhelmed and I love the community support but it'll feel like for an hour straight I'm doing nothing but celebrating and responding to super chats and that can obviously lead to feeling like oh, he only cares about the money and it's like, no, I've always said if you super chat, your question, your comment jumps to the top of the pile. That's always been the case. That's never changed. I'm just getting more of those super chats. So because I'm getting more of them it feels like you have to pay to get attention. That's not true. If people would stop paying I would give just as much attention as I normally do to people in the general chat and even when we get those super chats you guys see I'm still trying to read parts of the chat and keep up with the ongoing conversations there. Again, I can't always keep up with it especially when we got 1200 people live. I can't always keep up with everything but I do the best that I can and I try to make sure that we have moderators in place interacting with the community as well to make sure that they don't feel like they're being forgotten just because I'm not getting an opportunity to personally read your comment. Now, again, that's just part of getting bigger. That's just the reality of the world and you'll always have people longing for the days when it was only 10 people in the chat room and every single message, you know what was this big deal that the content creator would spend 10 minutes responding to one comment and I get that and unfortunately that's just something that comes with the territory of a content creator becoming more popular. Now it is true that some content creators and I wanna clarify this, this isn't every content creator but some content creators do lose sight of things and again, I'm not gonna call out specific ones but it can get to the point where the content creator is making content specifically just to make money. They stop reading the comments. They stop doing live streams. They're focused solely on just doing sponsored content. I've actually had some people raise this concern because this year we've already done more sponsored ad spots and sponsored content than we've ever done and some people have said we're really happy Nate that you are getting these sponsorship deals and making a little bit of extra money but you know, we're really worried that this is gonna cause you to be corrupt and pretty soon all you're ever gonna make are sponsored content and no, I have some rules of thumb when it comes to fully sponsored content like where you're, you know, those 10, 15 minute featured videos that are just about a sponsored product and that is if I put out a sponsored video that day that is not gonna be my only video that day. It's just a rule I have. That video will not replace my normal content. It'll be an additional piece of content that doesn't replace the normal content. This is because I don't want to lose out on what I'm normally doing just because somebody paid me for a specific video. So because of that, that actually makes more work for myself and I'm okay with that because I got paid for that one video. So why not put in the extra work? Am I gonna replace what I'm already doing with that video? I'm just gonna, hey, you paid me for my time. I'm gonna create extra time that doesn't take away from my other content to make that video. That's how I do things. Now, sponsored ads are a little different. If someone buys a 30-second, 60-second or 90-second, I typically don't go over 90-second ad spots in my standard video. Yeah, that obviously just goes into my standard videos and I try to make sure I time stamp everything so if you wanna skip the ad, you can. I know some people work on making the ads super entertaining and funny and that makes people wanna watch them. You can tell from a lot of mine, I don't tend to do that. I don't tend to have the highest production value as I'm a solo content creator, no one behind the camera, no extra editor. So I'm not gonna sit there and spend, let's say I have a $100 ad spot, I'm not gonna sit there and spend four days putting together an ad, like that just doesn't make sense to me. But I will make sure that the video is still focused on the content and that ad spot is just kind of its own thing sort of inserted, hopefully organically in some way into it. So that's just a general thing that I do as a channel. Well, a lot of other channels I have seen and again, I'm not gonna call out specific ones a large focus on just companies that pay them money. And that bothers me and I get what they're doing. They're chasing the bag. They wanna have as much money accumulated as possible. They got really popular and obviously, they don't wanna ask the community to give them money. They instead of be look, if all these companies are coming at me and they wanna give you thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars to make videos about their products, to do giant elaborate three, four, five minute ad spots in my video, yeah, take that money, put it in the bank and do your thing and I get what they're doing. Again, care about yourself, your family, taking care of those things first. I understand doing some of those but some channels do feel like they're just completely overtaken by that type of content. And I would say those are the channels that are losing sight of their community because they forgot what got them there. They forgot the people that supported them and subscribed in the first place and not only are they not interacting with those people anymore, they actually are just focused solely on the companies that give them money. I'll make a video if you pay me to make a video. And I hate that mantra and it absolutely does exist and that is where fair criticism comes in about content creators changing as they get bigger and caring less about their community. Another thing I will note and I've had this told to me by a number of larger content creators because you'll see me every now and then if you follow me on Twitter, I'll tweet out a comment that just really bothered me and have a deeper conversation with some others and I'll have a number of large creators. I mean, in the dozens DM me and talk to me privately and tell me, hey, what are you doing still reading the comment section? You are, you know, almost at 80,000 subscribers. Almost at 100,000 subscribers. You're getting 100 plus, 200 plus, 300 plus comments, sometimes more than that per video. What are you doing reading these comments? The negative ones are always going to stand out, stop reading the comments, stop reading it, stop this, stop. And I get what they're saying because these are content creators way bigger than me. They get 500 to 1,000 plus comments per video, but it also tells me at some point they stopped reading the comments. They stopped responding to the comments and that to me is wrong. If you or someone that originally read those comments, now, if you need to stop reading them for your own mental health, that's a totally separate conversation. But if you just stopped reading them because you didn't want to bother with it, that to me is yes, another disconnect with your community because your community is used to you reading their comments, dropping likes, responding to their comments, harding their comments. They're used to those interactions and then when you remove them or you only do it just a little bit, it does create a disconnect with the community and your community's right to say, hey, I long for the days when the content creators seem to give a shit about those of us watching and commenting on his videos. Because if you get to the point where you're making videos mostly for money, you are no longer responding to your community. On your live streams, they already feel like they're mostly ignored because there's too many people in the chat and only people they get through seem to be those that spend money. It gets to the point where the entire community feels like they're being left behind if they're not rich. And that sucks. That is not the kind of community I hope to foster here. And while I appreciate all of the monetary support, I'm always gonna go out of my way, especially on my normal videos to make sure that I'm reading those comments. In fact, I think I have read every comment ever made on every video I've ever done except for one. I have one exception and it's because I don't go back to it. There is a timeframe where I just cut off looking at an older video. So a video's like a week old. I probably will stop reading the comments on that video. We have a video that's actually got a couple of million views. You guys know my body is ready. No, we kind of created that meme. The thing is that video is constantly getting hundreds of new comments a month. I'm not going back and reading those comments. So you can argue that that's me disconnecting with the community, but that's also me realizing that's sort of a one-off. It's the only video we have like that that continually gets views every single month. And it's cool that kind of evergreen content's great. I don't really make evergreen content. It kind of hurts my channel that I don't. Maybe this is the sort of video that would be evergreen. Because I think this conversation we're having together right now is still going to be relevant a decade from now, right? Even if we're not on YouTube and some other platform, I think that it's always gonna be relevant that there is gonna be a disconnect. Some of it is just perceived. Some of it is natural and some of it's true. So what do I say to content creators out there that as you grow, you want to avoid this? Some things I have learned from when I was a really dinky creator to still a small creator, but I have a decent sized audience to what could possibly happen in the future. And my advice is to never forget how you got to where you are. You got there through the support of community. You got there through the very people that come and watch your video every day. And I understand, it might get to the point there's too many of them that you'd be wasting your entire day to read every comment and respond to every person. And I get that that day will exist someday if you keep growing. But never forget your roots, right? Don't forget the kind of live streams your audience enjoyed two years ago that maybe you're forgetting to do now. Don't forget the kind of content that you made that your community still longs for and used to long for. And it's not like PewDiePie, forgetting that people used to watch him for his horror streams and stuff like that. Don't forget about that. Like that's the number one thing is everything I do is focused on making the same content I already do but doing it better and doing it better for you. So you get a better product and feel more informed and have a less mumbling Nate where I'm fumbling to put words together and don't know what I'm gonna say next. And that's really important to me since I'm someone that likes to have my research like to know what I'm gonna do but not necessarily use a script because I don't want things to feel scripted because scripted can feel fake. Even if you're really good at acting scripting can feel fake. And I don't want my channel to feel fake. I want you to think or at least understand that the words coming out of my mouth are the exact things I was thinking on the top of my brain at the time that I said them. And I've always ran my channel in this way for the most part. Done a couple editorial ones where I converted some text things I wrote into videos. That's a little bit of a different kind of video of course, cause I'm just converting what I did in a different medium to YouTube but that's obviously a special use case. So I don't know. What I obviously want to know though is I've been a YouTuber now for years. I've been an enjoyer of other creators and watched a lot of them explode over the years and gotten some of these feelings is I want to know what you feel is your worst fear about a YouTuber getting big. What are you most concerned about? What concerns you now even with my channel? Do you feel like I'm already disconnecting with my audience? And why do you feel that way? These are things that I'm obviously always going to want to have this open conversation about and really interact with all of you. What are you worried about with my channel? What things do you think I'm already maybe trending in the direction you don't like? What things concern you about other channels and other YouTubers? And how can we as a community of content creators and or just watchers of content, enjoyers of consumers of content due to maybe be more understanding of all of the various situations that exist out there. All right, now I'm Nathaniel Ruffeljans from Nintendo Prime. If you enjoyed this video, hopefully you drop a like. Hopefully it was educational and I'll talk to you in the next video.