Creativity, Growth and the Inexorable March of Time

Do you ever wonder why your favourite artist, musician or online content creator is not making the content you fell in love with anymore? Have you felt alienated by their current creations to an extent where you have stopped enjoying it entirely?

I, like most other people I know, have felt at some point in their lives, but a video I watched recently about the rise and fall of Youtuber Noah Antwiler aka Spoony or the Spoony One really made me think deeper about the lives and motivations of the artists of different trades, be it Youtube content creators, musicians, writers or otherwise, whose livelihood depends on delivering content of a certain type and quality to maintain and grow a fan base.

To very briefly summarize the video, Spoony was one of the early content creators on Youtube, who did so-called Let’s Plays(LP’s), where he would play a video game while commenting on it. His content brought him popularity to an extent, where he could quit his day job and live off of making online content full time. However, as time progressed his edited gaming content started to give way to other, much less popular projects, which caused increasing discord with his fans and when that content completely ceased, so did his revenue.

The Spoony One - picture from Youtube

The fundamental problem with creating content of a certain style is that the people, who are attracted to this style of content will naturally start to associate your act with it and demand more of the same. However, as time passes, you mature and change as a person, and as such, you will want your content to reflect that and that runs the risk of alienating your existing fan base if your new content is radically different from what you used to produce.

There is a lot more to the story of the downfall of Spoony, but my hypothesis is that him ceasing the production of his original gaming review content is at least due to Spoony burning out on the concept after doing it for almost eight years. Thinking about it, this is not a controversial thing to do either – very few creative people I know would stand for doing the same thing for eight whole years without evolving or branching out in some way. Spoony’s mistake was that he managed to pigeon hole himself with his content and did not manage to reinvent himself successfully and as such is now stuck with having to make gaming live streams to what is left of his subscribers, who mostly comes to his streams to beg or yell at him to go back to making his old content, or face financial bankruptcy.

There are other artists, who successfully manages to reinvent themselves. As a huge Pink Floyd fan, I am amazed at how different and distinct the different eras of Floyd are and how they managed to grow and compound their success at every turn (Well, maybe not in the post-Waters era, but I digress). The same goes for the Youtube content creator Felix Kjellberg, better known as PewDiePie, who like Spoony started out making let’s play videos on Youtube. While he managed to grow his channel to be the biggest channel by far on Youtube on his gaming content alone, he has in his later years managed to successfully reinvent himself and he now produces mainly vlogs, that comments on current events, Youtube culture and memes and has grown his channel to a massive 63 million subscribers as per today.

Proud to be one of those 63 million, Pewds - picture from Youtube

There is of course a third way, which is to keep making the same content forever and thus never run the risk of alienating your fan base. Do you remember the Annoying Orange? I unfortunately do, and it amazes me that this channel, which is very much of the Ancient Internet, is still producing and uploading videos regularly to this day and even manages to rack up a decent amount of views too. This strategy has the obvious problem, that it in most cases mean that you at some point will have to compromise your artistic integrity for the sake of keeping the revenue coming and ending up with stale content, that might satisfy older fans but does nothing to attract new ones.

So annoying and so unsettling at the same time - picture from Youtube

As for the fans, the content that they discovered in their youth is quickly come to be viewed through nostalgia goggles and that can create a resistance towards the content you like and which reminds you of your youth starts to change.

However, the successful content creator manages to either create content that his maturing content can still relate to or totally reinvent himself and create a whole new fan base.