Recently the (YouTube) world was rocked by the announcement that PewDiePie would be deleting his account once he got 50million subscribers.
While some may not understand what this has to do with anything, it's actually quite a big loss for the viral video and gaming communities.
People are theorising over why PewDiePie is binning his sacred channel, with a number of Tweets, comments and statuses claiming it's all a PR stunt or a prank. However, the reason could be a lot more technical.
Other YouTubers have recently discovered strange things happening to their videos and have found that their once-popular accounts aren't getting the same attention as in the past.
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A friend of PewDiePie's and fellow YouTuber, h3h3, realised he was getting more and more comments and messages to tell him that his videos were no longer being pushed into his subscribers' feeds or onto the YT homepage.
This is pretty much down to a new algorithm that gives a bigger push to videos with more 'activity', rather than those that actually include high-quality content.
The clips with higher engagement will appear in your 'recommended videos', which is dominated by content that other people have interacted with - rather than material you actually want to watch.
h3h3 alludes to the fact that this happens because a lot of people, who tend to shout at the video in really high-energy ways without actually doing anything interesting, say things like, 'HIT THE LIKE BUTTON', 'LET'S GET 500,000 LIKES', 'COMMENT BELOW, THE 100,000,000 COMMENTER GETS A PRIZE'.
"It is happening if you watch my analytics. It is all going down," PewDiePie previously said. He's right, but it's through no fault of his own.
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The clearly staged pranks are received by more people for a number of reasons. 1) Many people are foolish enough to believe him, so they comment: 'No way bro *crying laughing emoji*'. 2) People spot they're fake, so they comment on the videos with things like: 'This is so fake. You can tell at blah blah blah'. 3) Both the previously mentioned types of people reply to each other's comments and argue/debate, bringing more engagement to the video.
YouTube then sees all of this activity and assumes that because so many people are interacting with it that it should be pushed to more people, regardless of the content. This is obviously hurting YouTubers who have spent years perfecting and curating their content to their subscribers.
PewDiePie, real name Felix Kjellberg, has already stated that he isn't 'quitting' making videos, but rather just getting rid of his 'dying' channel. He'll probably return in some capacity to play the game with YT's new algorithm.
The Swedish vlogger isn't far off the required 50,000,000 subscribers to delete his channel, so chances are he'll be saying goodbye pretty soon.
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Featured image credit: PewDiePie
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