AI Summary: A new trend is emerging among content creators on platforms like YouTube and TikTok, where they are moving away from heavily edited videos to more raw, unedited content. This shift is driven by audience fatigue with overstimulating, retention-edited videos and a desire for more authentic, relatable content. Creators like Dan Hentschel and Sam Sulek have gained large followings by posting unedited videos, finding that this approach saves time, money, and resonates better with viewers. The trend is seen as a reaction to the oversaturation of highly produced content, with even top creators like MrBeast acknowledging the benefits of a more stripped-down approach. Industry experts and creators alike report that unedited content often outperforms edited videos in terms of views and engagement, as it creates a sense of intimacy and authenticity that audiences crave in the current social media landscape.
See also [[companionship content]]
- We are in a second renaissance where the creator economy is growing exponentially and people are turning to creators to learn skills necessary to thrive in a fast-changing digital environment.
- Specialists who focus on a single interest or skill are at a disadvantage compared to generalists who are diverse and interesting.
- The internet favors generalists because social media exposes creators to diverse audiences who are there to be entertained, not just to learn or buy.
- Failure stacking, or pursuing goals and gaining experience even through failures, makes generalists irreplaceable by allowing them to acquire a diverse set of skills.
- The most profitable niche for a creator is their unique combination of opinions, beliefs, knowledge, and life experience packaged into impactful content.
- To earn a living as a generalist, one must become an entrepreneur and build a general audience around helping them achieve a big goal.
- Creators should experiment with writing about all their interests and let the audience decide what resonates, framing everything through the lens of the big goal.
- To make interests compelling to others, creators must illustrate the "why" and importance of ideas, as people weren't born with interests but persuaded into them.
- Creators should establish authority in topics that resonate by creating digital assets like free products to avoid repeating themselves and give room to experiment with new ideas.
- Generalists should build a portfolio of income sources by launching free and paid products around their best ideas every 3-6 months until they have a satisfying brand and business.
Long-form "companionship content" will outlast short-form video formats like TikTok, as the latter is more mentally draining and has a lower ceiling for user engagement over time.
- In contrast, companionship content that feels more human and less algorithmically optimized will continue to thrive, as it better meets people's needs for social connection and low-effort entertainment.
- YouTube as the dominant platform among teens, and notes that successful TikTok creators often funnel their audiences to longer-form YouTube content.
- Platforms enabling deep, direct creator-fan relationships and higher creator payouts, like YouTube, are expected to be the long-term winners in the content landscape.