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YouTube
October 21, 2024
5
min read
Aviva Matan

Who Killed the Female YouTube Star?

Why are there so few women creators at the top of YouTube?

That’s the question Shoshana Eilon, COO of ThoughtLeaders set out to answer. Over the past year, she led a dedicated team to explore the issue, and their findings have now been brought to life in a new podcast.

Who Killed the Female YouTube Star? is a four-part investigative series examining why the most dominant creators on YouTube are overwhelmingly male.

I sat down with Shoshana to dive deeper into the podcast and her research on gender disparity in the creator space.

Tell us a bit about yourself and your journey to the creator economy.

I worked for many years in the film industry, primarily in independent cinema and documentaries. I was mainly involved in distribution, which is essentially the process once a film has been finished of understanding how you actually get it in front of an audience. One thing that I began to find frustrating about the film industry was that the methods for finding an audience and promoting these films were very slow to embrace new technologies - for the most part, every new release followed the same playbook.  

When I made the move into the creator economy I was so excited by the way that it allowed new creators of all kinds to find enormous audiences and, importantly, new revenue streams to support their work.  I also love the way that the creator economy embraces leading-edge technology and is really pushing forward the boundaries of how we engage with and enjoy different forms of entertainment. 

"I hate the idea that younger viewers are being normalized to the glass ceiling on the platform, forced to accept a reality where the biggest stars on the world’s largest streaming platform are almost all men."

What prompted you to start this podcast?

I knew this was a topic that I wanted to explore a few years ago. I wrote a blog article for our website about the different naming conventions that are used for male and female creators. I was also interested in the way that female “influencers” were often disparaged as being superficial and frivolous, by the same people who admired male “creators” for the ways in which they studied the algorithm and strategically approached their audience growth. 

I started to look at the data to understand how the male/female divide presented itself, particularly on YouTube. Once I had dipped a toe into the research I realized that there was something pretty interesting here for me to explore more thoroughly and a podcast seemed like an ideal way to do that. 

What surprised you most when working on this topic?

I was very surprised to learn about how the YouTube algorithm promotes misogynist content on a regular basis. This was never really the focus of our podcast since we were looking at the different successes seen by male and female creators, but this issue came up so persistently in the episode where we explored trolling and the online abuse that female creators face. 

It became clear that an algorithm that was promoting this kind of highly problematic content was not designed with gender equality in mind (to say the least.) Therefore, the platform’s failure to address this alarming misogynist content was an important part of the story we were putting together. I knew that these kinds of videos existed on YouTube, but I had no idea the problem was so detrimental, and I never expected that we would end up exploring this in the podcast.

What are some stats that stuck out to you most?

I was surprised to learn that 70% of American teenagers visit YouTube on a daily basis. My assumption had been that the younger generation had moved on to newer platforms like TikTok, Twitch and Snapchat. However, YouTube clearly plays a central role in the daily lives of consumers across all generations, which in my eyes makes the current demographics of the top-performing channels an even more relevant problem for us to address asap. I hate the idea that younger viewers in particular are being normalized to the glass ceiling on the platform, and being forced to accept a reality where the biggest stars on the world’s biggest streaming platform are almost all men. 

"An algorithm that promotes misogynist content was not designed with gender equality in mind—YouTube's failure to address this is a major part of the story we uncovered."

Who are some of the “culprits” that you uncovered?

We looked at four main culprits. 

The first was the gender credibility gap, which essentially means that viewers might be more inclined to trust videos (particularly informative “how-to” videos) by male creators than by female creators.

Our second culprit was the monetization models that allow creators to make money on YouTube. 

We also looked at the problem of trolling and how that impacts the experience of female creators much more adversely than their male counterparts. 

Lastly, we focused on YouTube's own algorithm to see how that might be responsible for promoting certain kinds of creators over others.

What is the “Beastification of YouTube”? How might it be playing a role in the gender divide on the platform?

I think it was YouTubers Colin and Samir who first coined the term “the Beastification of YouTube". This refers to how the world’s most successful YouTuber, MrBeast, has an enormous impact on other creators, and how this was fundamentally shifting the nature of YouTube as a whole. We see so many MrBeast successful tactics being copied whole scale by other channels. He has essentially written the unofficial rulebook on how to rise to the top on YouTube, and it’s a strategy that clearly works… for a certain kind of creator. We didn’t actually have space to explore this in the podcast, but there has been a trend in the last couple of years for creators to feature challenges in their videos that involve MrBeast in some (often tangential) way. The Ryan Trahan Penny Series is an example - the whole premise was that he had to cross the country to deliver a penny to MrBeast, and the creator gained over 2 million subscribers in the process. This is just one of the ways in which other creators can rise to success by holding onto MrBeast’s coattails. However, the more we looked at this trend, the more we noticed that this playbook really only works for fellow male creators.

When we started writing and recording the podcast, it was before MrBeast was hit with the current wave of scandals that is dogging him and his team. Before this backlash, he was widely respected in the industry as someone who had managed to avoid any kind of serious accusations of any kind, that he was fundamentally a good guy who was mixing philanthropy and entertainment, and really cared about pushing the boundaries of what was possible in terms of success on YouTube. 

Now I think people are more skeptical regarding his relentless attitude to chasing that success and far more critical of some of the red flags that have emerged from his production practices. We’ve learned that his production company promotes a very “boys will be boys“ culture, which is pretty alienating for both female creators and viewers alike.

"Saying 'it’s just the patriarchy' lets YouTube off the hook too easily. If other platforms and traditional media are making progress, YouTube’s leaders need to address why their platform still has such a stark gender imbalance."

What would you say to people who say “Well, duh, the reason why so few women are at the top of YouTube is just the patriarchy or societal discrimination! It's not YouTube we need to fix, it's society!”

Of course, they’re right to a certain extent, and at the same time, they are letting YouTube off the hook too easily. Whenever we want to analyze and criticize the tech platforms that are now so central to our lives, it’s important to be level-headed about the ways in which none of these platforms can offer utopian solutions to the issues we see elsewhere in our society. What’s more important is if these tech platforms (not just YouTube) are exacerbating those problems or doing anything to prevent them from becoming amplified within the platform itself. 

I felt more confident pointing the finger squarely at YouTube when I looked at ways in which women were reaching positions of greater quality in other entertainment and cultural spaces. If you look at podcasts, books, movies et cetera - the world of traditional media - we don’t really see the same stark absence of women in the top-ranking charts, in fact, it does look like the situation has gotten better for women over the past few years, rather than worse. Even if we look at other tech platforms like Instagram and TikTok (and we explore these numbers in the podcast) we don’t see the same bleak gender imbalance that is so evident on YouTube. If YouTube is scoring more poorly on this front than both other platforms and the wider entertainment landscape, something is happening on the platform that its leaders and designers need to address asap. 

Does the problem solely rest on YouTube? Should the government also step in and do something? 

When we were looking at possible solutions to this problem and conclusions we could draw from our investigation, we were very aware not to put the onus back on YouTube’s consumers. We didn’t want any trite or easy answers like “oh, if you just subscribe to more female creators then the problem will sort itself out”. 

That felt to us a little bit like saying that more recycling will solve global warming. Of course, it’s something we would like people to be more aware of, and maybe make certain adjustments to their viewing habits, but to put the responsibility in their hands is to ignore the ways that YouTube itself is ultimately accountable for solving the more serious aspects of this problem. 

At the moment, it feels like YouTube is totally in denial about this gender gap on its own platform. I would love to see YouTube at least acknowledge this problem and understand their ideas for possible solutions, be it creator funds or algorithm adjustments or different ways of tackling the ongoing trolling issues. I would love YouTube’s new leadership to take the impetus to tackle this themselves, but if that doesn’t look likely, then some kind of government intervention could be the answer. For example, perhaps regulation could help motivate the major platforms to do more against anti-female harassment that is rampant on the internet.

After all, YouTube’s impact is so enormous that to allow it to remain largely unchecked or unregulated is definitely worrying and doesn’t give me much hope that the current status quo will be meaningfully tackled in any way. 

I really hope that this podcast plays some role in starting that conversation and making people more aware of a problem that has been overlooked for far too long. I also hope that it allows people operating outside the great economy to have some more understanding about what goes on behind the curtain. 

***

You can find out more about the podcast here and can listen to it here.

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