The thing is that there are a ton of people who’ve built honest careers on Youtube, mostly by catering to an adult niche. There is a near zero chance that I will suddenly find out that Torque Test Channel have, like, dark problems with kids. These people don’t have scandals. Maybe somebody takes an iffy ad dollar that’s a conflict of interest or something. The end.
But those are things your dad watches, they get a solid 100k views per average per upload and we both know that number is nothing on YouTube.
No, if you want to see serious numbers on YouTube and keep your average views above 1 mil per upload, you need children. You need 12-year-old eyeballs, ones that aren’t supposed to be watching you because you’re for older kids, the forbidden fruit.
If you want tween eyeballs, you need a shrieking fucking weirdo. You need a grown man who will act like the sort of 12-year-old boy that your 12-year-old boy would act like if he had power and people couldn’t tell him to calm the fuck down. They’ll be glued to that fuckin guy. Views and views for days while they live their fantasy of a world where mom can’t tell them no, and they can have stunning emotional fits about video games until they exhaust themselves.
Nothing else will do, is the problem. He can’t really be faking it, either, that’s just annoying, no, there’s got to be something wrong with him that children love to watch.
And so, over and over and over again, it turns out that the exhausting, obnoxious man who you loved as a child is fucked up, for real, once the years wear on, and you finally become an adult yourself, but this kook has had far too long to stew in his weird power trip, probably isolated from adult company because fuck being that guy’s entourage. He’s got too much money, so he can make stuff happen. He’s got no oversight. Even Jimmy Seville had to hide it from the help most of the time. This guy’s in a house alone to do as he pleases.
It’s a bad recipe, and it bakes shitty cakes.
Every once in a while the cube of fate rolls funny, and you get Jerma, who should be one of these guys but instead his audience appears to be grown transwomen and their friends, all of them deranged, poisoned by years on 4Chan and Tumblr, with Jerma at their mercy, so whenever that situation goes sideways we can probably put Yackety Sax over the footage and actually enjoy it. That trainwreck should be a real treat.
I got to thinking about IRC some time ago, and how much creative time we spent solving the fundamental problem of how, exactly, to use the internet without needing some sort of middleman, like a crazy person hosting a server for no clear reason, so that we could all communicate together.
That and designing the thing so that even if the hardware in your closet got hammered with a bajillion visits it wouldn’t stutter because it was all too light weight for that. But also, fuck no I would rather throw myself down the stairs than arrange it so that I have to maintain it a lot. That type of thinking defined an era, and that’s why zombo.com still works.
I have to put more maintenance into my Gmail account than the zombo guy does into the entire website, is what I’m saying. Return to monke, is what I’m saying.