Around 2016, YouTube switched to a home page driven entirely by suggested videos. For the casual viewer, this was paradise. For the creator, it was chaos. Your subscriber count no longer mattered as much as your click-through rate (CTR) and average view duration.

The last two years (2022-2024) have seen the rise of generative AI in the creator economy. Deepfake technology allows a 16-year-old in Ohio to make a video of Barack Obama playing Fortnite with Snoop Dogg. Text-to-video models (Sora, Runway) mean that "stock footage" is now generated on the fly.