Venture further than the music videos and talk show splooge that YouTube tries to peddle you on its homepage and you will find that it’s a hugely diverse community with a lot to offer. The biggest voice in that community is a Swedish guy who you might have heard of.
PewDiePie (or Felix Kjellberg if you’re his parents), with his 40 million+ subscribers has the biggest “personality” channel on YouTube by some distance. Thanks to his innumerable amount of Let’s Plays of horror games, he developed a strong fanbase before branching out into all kinds of different content. His channel is now a smorgasbord of everything; you name it, he’s done a video on it. Yes, that includes hentai. Whether you hate him or not, you have to appreciate the dedication he has to his craft – the man doesn’t rest during his quest for global domination. Even though I can easily waste a couple of hours in the labyrinthian nightmare of nonsense that is PewDiePie’s content, I understand many of the points his detractors make.
The level of clickbait on YouTube isn’t addressed as much as it should be. Online media publications seem to receive the brunt of the accusations -including ourselves- when sometimes it’s just content that the reader doesn’t agree with rather than it being anything cynically deceptive. “Clickbait” is becoming a catch-all term for “I don’t like this”.
However, clickbait on YouTube is absolutely rampant and out of control – when was the last time you clicked on a Vine compilation just because it had a butt in the thumbnail? A second ago? Me too. It certainly works, but that doesn’t mean it’s okay.
As anyone who’s subscribed to (or is constantly nagged by YouTube to watch) him will know, PewDiePie’s video titles are clickbait. All caps all the time, question marks to questions that are never answered coupled, and some intentionally misleading thumbnails. Pretty much clickbait 101.
He even admits as much in the video above in which he also derides other YouTubers for doing the same. His explanation leaves a lot to be desired, effectively saying “that’s just the way it is”.
Sorry, Pewds, that’s not good enough.
As the face of YouTube, whether he likes it or not, PewDiePie has responsibilities. There are so many channels out there that have emulated his style and on-screen personality to great effect, simply because they know it works. YouTube has a massive teenage demographic, most of whom lap up the kind of content he and similar content creators produce. As the “pied piper”, isn’t PewDiePie as culpable for clickbait as anyone?
Considering he’s one of the only YouTubers to achieve mainstream success with spots on television talk shows and magazine covers, any statement PewDiePie makes is going to find coverage. If there was anyone who could try to turn the tide away from clickbait-y, low-quality content on the world’s largest video platform, it would be PewDiePie. Saying “deal with it” and moving on to the next video simply doesn’t cut it. If PewDiePie really cared, he could do something about it.
What do you think? Leave a comment. Yeah, someone’s going to call me a clickbaiter, I know.Â
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