I have noticed a lot of channels I subscribe to don’t post nearly as often as they once had and I am not sure why. Some of them have quite a lot of subscribers and must do incredibly well, but they seem to have drifted away from regularly posting.
I had a channel (hit ~40k subs from ~15 videos), largely centered around hobby electronics, 3D printing, Raspberry Pi, etc.
I stopped publishing videos around 2020 because the economics just didn’t make sense. I didn’t want to release subpar videos and was always challenging myself to improve production quality. It was fun, until it wasn’t.
It took several days to shoot and edit a video. I’d publish it, it would do well, but YouTube paid such paltry revenue. I didn’t want to chase sponsorships because those don’t pay much either.
I decided to focus my creative efforts elsewhere. I know things are even worse for YouTube creators now, given the ad market collapse and higher competition in the attention economy.
I firmly believe that Google could reverse the trend if they spun up some pilot programs around assisting creators that match a certain algorithm to produce and scale video content—and pay them more so they can afford to take the time.
Tl;dr; money and competition. But mostly money.
