Why Creator Clones Fail [MKBHD]

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The Innovator's Dilemma according to MKBHD, applied to YouTube's attempt to clone TikTok
Audio source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jl2ciIU4Qm4 (30 mins in)

Blog version with better writeup: https://www.swyx.io/clones-fail

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Transcript:

Why Clones Fail
swyx: [00:00:00] Something I love collecting examples of is the Innovator's Dilemma, which was coined by Clayton Christensen in his book on the Innovator's Dilemma. He really demonstrates how successful outstanding companies can do everything right, and still lose their market leadership, or even fail as new unexpected competitors rise and take over the market. 
And part of this thesis is basically that the incumbents company cannot clone the upstart for whatever reason.
And it's really amazing when you see someone that's so giant, that's so well-known, that has such great distribution, that has so much resources, be constitutionally unable to clone the small startup. 
This is known as counter positioning, as promoted by Hamilton Helmer in his book on the seven powers. And you can hear it in this clip from the MKBHD podcast talking about the failure of YouTube Shorts.

Andrew Manganelli: [00:00:53] Shorts in general that are just a really great way of explaining how like YouTube launches, these new features, they fall flat. And then they're trying to find ways to get people to do them. And I think that all because of that, it boils down to like, why are these not working? People love YouTube, like, people made their whole lives on YouTube. I literally have a job because you have, but like, why are these main creators not doing these other things.

Marques Brownlee: [00:01:20] I think I can speak to that. I, so first of all, the, the creator funds though, he keeps seeing, it's like my favorite new trend. Yeah. 

Andrew Manganelli: [00:01:27] Tick-tock one this week for tick docs.

Marques Brownlee: [00:01:29] Exactly the same thing. Yeah. It's because the platforms realize they not just want, but need creators on their platforms and making stuff to make them work that realization. Great. 
Now YouTube shorts. And so the hesitation by a lot of YouTubers to dive into shorts is really interesting. I think a lot of the longer-term creators like me have a bit of an aversion to YouTube releasing new untested unproven features because they could possibly have adverse algorithmic effects, they could possibly get killed in six months and you will have just poured a bunch of resources and pivoted your channel down a path that ends up being a dead end road.
Yup. So the other end of that is. If the feature works, I think there are a lot of younger creators or more nimble creators who will just jump right in and do a bunch of shorts or do a bunch of those lasting YouTube stories. I think that's, might've been dead already, but I 

Andrew Manganelli: [00:02:30] don't see anyone posts stories, 

Marques Brownlee: [00:02:31] but they'll they'll once they mirrors.
The thing is they launch a feature like that and they have a whole plan behind it, backing it as if it's going to be the future of the platform. So when creators see that they'll go, oh, okay. I see that story is going to be a really big deal for YouTube, for the foreseeable future. Let me pivot hard and make sure that's a big part of my content strategy.
And then when it's dead in a year, you feel like you wasted a lot of time resources. You might've hired for it. Like that's a. That's a big loss. Like that's a big risk to take, but if it does explode and let's say shorts is, you know, this huge future category on YouTube, a lot of younger creators who got in early and focused really hard on that are going to be really happy about it.
So shorts is clearly a response to tick-tock. It's literally almost the same thing. Like you go into hit shorts on the YouTube app and it's this endless scrolling carousel of vertical videos. That's what you'd expect. The algorithm tries to learn you. But YouTube knows that it needs youTube shorts creators instead of just people uploading to Tik TOK, and then copying that file and also putting it on shorts.

Andrew Manganelli: [00:03:37] That's what they're doing. That's what they did on reels. Like that's most real is 

Marques Brownlee: [00:03:41] literally like watermarked, tick tock. Like literally 

Andrew Manganelli: [00:03:43] all of reels has the Tik TOK, like watermark and the name on it. And probably just using reels to find more people to go follow 

Marques Brownlee: [00:03:50] it and tick tock. And they, they literally show up on my explore page.
Like, what is that? The gram is suggesting to me on my explore page, have tick tock, tick tock logos on it. That's 

Andrew Manganelli: [00:03:59] really funny. And if anyone was going to do though a tick-tock competitor, it would be Instagram. It just makes the more sense. The demographic that is on Tik TOK is very, very active on Instagram.
And it's just that social media platform, that short form social media platform that it makes way more sense on. Yeah. And it's Tik TOK still blowing reels out of the water. 

Marques Brownlee: [00:04:18] Yeah. Yeah. So YouTube, I mean, This is a smart move from YouTube. No doubt. Like they are the video home on the internet. And if you on YouTube and you see Tech-Talk a, another version of videos blowing up, of course you need to make a competitor for it to offer people on alternative and possibly they'll come to YouTube later.
The question is how do you get those creators to come to YouTube? Okay, well, we have a creator fund. We're going to start making it easy to monetize. Tik TOK is. Also still not easy to monetize. And they're also doing a creator fun thing, which is smart. But I think generally at the end of the day, the creators looking to make a job out of it are thinking about ease of monetization first.
Discoverability or right behind that. And YouTube is trying to lock both those things up and they all, they obviously have discoverability, but the tick-tock algorithm is something special. It just, just surfaces things you want to see. It's really good. So they have that to compete again. 

Andrew Manganelli: [00:05:11] I do think though, there's the aspect that we touched on really at the beginning of that you touched on it really quickly.
It's just like you're talking about bringing new creators in. YouTube. Definitely also already houses some of the biggest creators in the world. And they definitely want those creators to use their new features because if those creators use their new features, that's still bringing more people in. And I think that's where you talk about the unknowingness of the algorithm really starts making those big creators weary of jumping into some of these new features.
We still don't use premieres. They've been around for a long time, because from what we found, have I explained this. I don't know if we have, we may have it just might as 

Marques Brownlee: [00:05:51] well do a refresher. Yeah. So premiere is what happens with it. Premier is if you think of like a movie or like say a TV show where it premieres on TV, everyone watches it at once.
YouTube sees that on TV and goes, you know what? We're going to be. The video home with internet will offer something like that. So you can make a whole YouTube video. Upload it and then set it to premiere. So everyone watches it at the same time live. They can't fast forward. They're all watching it with you and there's a live chat and it's really cool.
And they obviously thought a lot about it. And theory is amazing. It's in theory, a great idea. What I noticed because I've stepped back and watched a bunch of premiers happen and saw what was going on with them. The. Impressions seem to plummet because of the first few minutes of the video going live.
Because when you think about it, when a video shows up in your sub box, a bunch of people all click on it at once and they all watch it. And then they leave. When a video is premiering, a bunch of people all click on the premiere. And for those first 15 minutes, however long, the video is they all watch the premiere.
Then when it's over, they leave, then it shows up in the sub box and I have no idea how they counted. Those live views typically seems pretty low to me. So I haven't, we did a premiere with the, was it the blind spot test? And I observed the same thing where like the first hour, it was 10 out of 10, like half the views of normal video.
And then it eventually caught up. But I see that and I'm like, I'm not going to keep doing this. 

Andrew Manganelli: [00:07:16] Let me clarify. There you say 10 out of 10. If you don't know what we're talking about, that sounds amazing. We're saying, oh, the best hour or whatever are the best impressions for the last 10 videos. It was ranked 10 out of 10.
So yeah. The worst. It literally had the worst rating out of our last 10 videos 

Marques Brownlee: [00:07:32] with like half the views of number nine. So it was pretty bad. So yeah, I see that kind of thing. And I'm like, well, once they figure that out, I'll do premiers again, but it's not really ready for me to keep diving in and positioning videos through that.
Same thing happens with like stories they did for a while. And now it's, I, I'm pretty sure it's dead. 

Andrew Manganelli: [00:07:50] Yeah. I think it's still there, but no one uses it, but like, if we're talking about how. Something we like, understand what the algorithm, but don't totally this podcast right now is a great example because people might wonder why we made a podcast video channel and a podcast clips channel.
And if you look at a lot of other podcasts, they do the same. Joe Rogan, H three Lou later, they all have separate ones. And the theory behind it is that if you have long form content and you have shorter clips, the watched overall watch time on the channel is going to be all over the place.
Because if you have. 30 minutes of watch time on the long one and six minutes of watch time on the short one, it gets confused and has a hard time serving those videos. Yeah. So that's why we separate them. And because of that, unknowingness people are creating these different workarounds on YouTube.
And I think bringing that all back to now, shorts.   Imagine being a channel like us, that creates generally 10 to 15 minute videos. Now putting a bunch of 60 second clips on where the watch time is 60 seconds. How is that going to affect our 15 minute video?
 Not to mention that they're vertical, which we would never, ever, ever put on the channel.
 Right? 

Marques Brownlee: [00:08:58] Yeah, the answer probably is just. Separate shorts channel. I mean, we've seen that. Yeah. It's now you have a dedicated audience that is there for shorts and they will watch inconsistent watch time short videos. And if you do that on your separate shorts channel, yeah.

Andrew Manganelli: [00:09:14] I would consider that a fail for YouTube's marketing in the sense that they're hoping big creators bring this to their main audience for the minute you switch it to another audience, you're going to lose a giant portion of your already subscribers, because if they miss the announcement to like check out the shorts channel, They're never going to see it.
So now, like, as YouTube they've lost already, if that's yeah. What's happening. And 

Marques Brownlee: [00:09:37] so it seems like their fail safe to that is to try to dump as many people onto shorts as possible. Oh, I mean, yeah, but 

Andrew Manganelli: [00:09:45] that's a thing we. We were talking about shorts yesterday with Tim. Yeah. I tried to look at shorts on my desktop and I literally couldn't.

Marques Brownlee: [00:09:52] Oh, you won't find that on the desktop, but you will find that on your phone, which is where they're competing with tick-tock. I mean, yes, you can watch it on your desktop, on desktop it's there and you can find it, but it's the same way. Tik TOK. Tick-tock on desktop. That's a tongue twister exists, but you don't really care about it.
If they're competing with Tik TOK, which is really what shorts is and really what real is, is you can watch it on the desktop, but it's all about that. Endless scroll on the smartphone and they've built that in. And then they put the button right at the bottom of the app. Where it used to be the explore page.
I think it's next to it. So now their goal is to just dump as many people, organically into shorts as possible, same way, you know, Instagram did what they replaced the ad post button, put it up at the corner and put shop there, same behavior. Let's just dump people in and put it in the place where they're familiar and they're going to see it over and over.
And they're eventually going to click it. So Instagram, little weird moving around button placement like that, but that's basically what YouTube did get in there. Get in shorts, find stuff you're into, and then you'll be a shorts viewer. From here on out. I'm 

Andrew Manganelli: [00:10:51] sure YouTube can figure out a way to put that on desktop.
They're there. One of the social media apps that probably gets the closest to mobile equal mobile and desktop, you usage like Instagram obviously is so far mobile Tik TOK is even further mobile. I would argue Facebook now is mostly mobile, despite it originating on desktop, but like, We're talking about YouTube.
I think they have probably more mobile users, but I bet that's much 

Marques Brownlee: [00:11:16] closer push back just a little. Cause I think it is oddly very specific to what type of content it is. And I think because literally shorts is required to be vertical, like terrible. Yeah. So like, but that's because they want it to fit you as the same Tik TOK thing.
Like you can, you can do it horizontal Tik TOK, but it just looks ridiculous in the app. They want it to be the Tik TOK experience. And so they've. Built everything around it being just like tick tock, but on YouTube. And then they're trying to bring creators in with the creator fund and with 

Andrew Manganelli: [00:11:49] like, I think that's where I was trying to go with, like the fact that there's a higher average people that use YouTube on desktop, because it was originally built on desktop.
It became mobile. And even when you're using mobile, you're  almost turning to landscape, whereas. Tick-tock works well because it's only supposed to be on a phone. Reels worked okay because Instagram is still a vertical scrolling mobile app. YouTube is not quite that. It was developed into that.
It's becoming good at it, but it's still always has its heart and soul in the desktop version of it. And that's why this feature just feels a little. Off. 

Marques Brownlee: [00:12:23] I think  if they wanted to feel less off, they would have made it a separate app, like a YouTube shorts app. So then you go vertical with just that work bad.
Cause nobody's opening that app.

 swyx: [00:12:33] So that went long. I apologize, cause I couldn't really find it in me to cut it short to five minutes today. But there are three main points that I picked from this clip. And you can read more in the associated blog posts, but just to recap for you. 
One, you need big creators to adopt your new clone, but your algorithm punishes change. And that's something that creators really don't like. 
Two, you can't support it on all clients and you can't make a new client for it. So you're structurally behind. 
And third. Clones need original content, but clones are also expendable. So it's a race between you get your creators to invest in you versus how much you have to invest in it. 
And that's why creator clones fail.   


Why Creator Clones Fail [MKBHD]
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