As a digital content creator, your job is to engage with your audience. The higher that engagement level is, the better.

You are building trust, providing solutions, taking them on a journey and making them feel better in the process. You want them to stay with you and your work longer, and come back more frequently.

Your goal should also be to grow your audience so that you can supply a wider range of benefits to a increasing number of people.

I was consuming some content on Youtube today and I came across a video that discusses the issues of burnout and going viral on the platform. There were some interesting points brought up, and I'd like to share my take with you today in a three-part piece I'm dubbing:

~ Clickability ~

How to produce viral content

Part One -- BURNOUT..

The video starts off with the creator discussing how he recently had a video go viral. But before getting into how that happened, he brings up the subject of Burnout among Youtubers, citing Casey Neistat and others who have recently posted videos discussing the subject.

The host of the video, Derek, believes that feelings of Burnout may be a problem with Anchoring. 'Influencers' in the industry could be feeling worn down and discouraged because of the disconnect between Expectation vs Reality.

He claims that the average youtuber has a life cycle. So, basically, 100,000 views when you are first starting out can feel amazing!, but after you've established yourself, that same number can feel like a horrible disappointment.

Even Casey Neistat admits in his own video, that, "unless you're PewDiePie, you're going to reach a point where you plateau."

In an article about the subject by The Insider, Kati Morton, a psychologist, and YouTuber, elaborates..

"Burnout occurs when the reward for whatever we do is not equal or more than the effort we have to put in. It's kind of like a state of physical and mental exhaustion caused by your professional life — so just feeling overwhelmed." _src

Derek observes that most creators blame themselves when burnout occurs.. feeling like the Quality of their content isn't up to par. If they were producing at their usual standard, there wouldn't be the dip in views and they wouldn't be feeling so deflated.

He says this kind of thinking makes the assumption that

Views = Quality

and this is where he puts forth the hypothesis of the video: "It's not necessarily the quality of the content that is driving viewership, but rather "The Algorithm" that Youtube utilizes to figure out which content gets promoted."

According to the video, Youtube's algorithm is the 'brain' of the site.
It's job is to connect audience to the content they will like. So it has to constantly track audience behavior to figure out what it is they're interested in.

Derek states, for Youtube, the ideal situation is where the audience is the algorithm.

However, in the real world, the audience changes. This means the algorithm is constantly trying to catch up. Content creators, on the other hand, use the algorithm to try to figure out what audiences like by following what's popular. Basically, it looks like this:

Content--> Algorithm--> Audience

This leaves a lot of pressure on the content creators, because youtube is constantly changing what it's algorithm is optimized for.

In it's infancy, it was all about getting views, how many people clicked on your content. But then watch time took over, how long did people watch the content. This was followed by latency, how often was content updated.

The continuous change of what the algorithm is optimized for creates an unreliable working environment for uploaders.

The video likens it to being a caged pigeon. The pigeon believes there is causality between acting in some superstitious behavior and being awarded food. The reality is food is given at random. So too are YouTube content creators acting in irrational ways.. trying to figure out what to produce by constantly chasing an algorithm that is ever-changing. They are looking for cause-effect where none exists...

It's enough to wear anyone down until they BURNOUT..

What can be done to combat Burnout? Have you experienced feelings of fatigue when faced with having to constantly deliver content to, what seems, an ever changing audience? Is there no hope for digital content creators to make a sustainable living?

Let me know in the comments below, and check out the continuation of this post to learn How to Make Viral content!

Until Then...

• Note-- all images in this piece are from this source