alt Hacker NewsYoutube channels are also getting hyper-monetized now. Private equity firms finally learned that some of these informational channels draw a huge crowd of loyal viewers with a very specific kind of technical interest and have built high levels of trustworthiness. Ideal targets for running ads. Now they buy all these channels and have their marketers optimize every corner for generating easy money.
There is a guy on YouTube who did very thorough and well-done presentations on airliner crashes and mishaps and one of the reasons they were so good was that he was a very experienced pilot himself. He was able to give deep insight into the technical details, the industry, and the challenges that pilots face. He always talked at length about those in the context of the incident he was covering, which was how his videos were so much more interesting compared to your typical "accident documentaries" thrown together by outside amateurs which are frankly the majority of videos in this space on YouTube.
But since the last year or so, I can't watch him anymore. He sold his channel (and his brand, literally himself) to some kind of YouTube content company and the videos he puts out now are just not watchable. From what I can tell, he mainly does only the presentation now, with only a minor amount of editorializing. Other people seem to do everything else. The visualizations are impressive but the video title/thumbnails are pure click-bait (to the point of being factually false), the videos are WAY longer than they need to be, and he'll repeat the SAME information multiple times just to stretch the time out to 45 minutes to an hour.
I like a good story, but it's really hard to pad out most disaster videos into that amount of time unless you have something more to offer than say, "well, the official crash investigation said this and that." His videos now feel a lot more like those old Discovery Channel documentaries that were basically surface-level filler content in between the ads.