Any celebrity death will have people capitalizing on it, and Technoblade's was no different.
However, the relation between the channels doing the click baiting, and the target was slightly different. This time, DreamSMP1 clip channels played a significant role. Take Ender PEKKA, DreamSMP Official, Cyder, DreamSMP Miniclips, King Potato, Minecraft DONO. These channels have had successful DreamSMP clips, and featured bad taste Technoblade clips.
This is what happens when you let the monkeys run the circus. Don’t let your fans be the way people watch your content.2
1. Why do people view clips?
Clips are the best way for audiences to find specific moments within lengthy pieces of content.
Search engines, like YouTube, can easily find well-titled clips, meaning all people have to remember is a vague description of the moment, and search.
Take this interaction between Technoblade and DreamXD (the “canoncial Dream SMP admin”). If I want to watch this video, what are my options?
I could find the livestream. Good luck. VoDs aren’t titled, and the context is easy to forget. Individual moments in the streams aren’t highlighted (for instance, this was a small aside within a larger stream about a DreamSMP plot point). VoDs are disorganized for most channels. Either they stream on Twitch, on which VoDs aren’t searchable, and usually expire - or they stream on YouTube and hide the VoDs to avoid spamming their channel.
To watch it from the creator, my best hope is that they put it in a compilation. And that clip in the compilation is searchable, or I remember the specific compilation.
The actual option people are going to use are clip channels, with searchable titles and descriptions. Outside of the recommendation algorithm, search is the way people find videos. YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine in the world.
2. Demand, and cannibalizing yourself
Is there the demand to invest into this? Yes. The above clip is a single funny moment within a stream, but has garnered 4 million views. Many clip channels, with 100k+ subscribers exist.
Will I ruin my own demand? I doubt it. 30 second clips are not a substitute for 2 hour VoDs, and it isn’t possible to clip all of the content within a VoD.
The primary audience of clips will be people wanting to rewatch memorable moments. The secondary audience will be people that have never heard of you, coming across the moment due to recommendations - short-form content has been algorithmically friendly.
The risk would be intersecting with your own compilations, but clips lack any context. A significant portion of your compilation viewers aren’t watching the VoDs, and thus individual clips can’t be anything outside of providing a nugget of intriguie. Compilations allow you to build in that context, and thus provide the additional value.
You’re also double-dipping. Generating a VoD, a compilation and clips from one stream gives you three seperate revenue streams, on top of the initial stream. Including the stream itself, that’s four different ways people can find your content. Five, if you convert it to vertical content. Six, if you upload the vertical content onto TikTok (you could probably also upload it onto Instagram Reels).
As an unrelated aside, Technoblade’s family should explore this as a vertical to utilize Technoblade’s existing content and audience. My opinion is that it feels wrong to do anything else with the main Technoblade channel, but his clips channel, Technothepig has an audience and a purpose. His clips are also an example of success, with his lowest viewed clip having 1.1M views.
jschlatt demonstrates the extreme power of triple dipping. Schlatt’s second most viewed video, across all three channels, with 30M views, is a 26 second clip of him losing a chess game in three moves. His third most viewed video is the same clip… but in 16:9. The compilation it comes from has 3M views. He could have also streamed it!
Ludwig shows another disparity. His most viewed video has 7.5M views, but his most viewed short has 36M. Sadly for Schlatt, this is just Ludwig reacting to the live banning skit of his. Actually, Ludwig’s second most viewed video also has Schlatt. Maybe just be Schlatt for views.
3. Monkeys
Given that there is demand, leaving this up to your fans is problematic.
Relying on fans to produce high quality content that represents you well is a bad idea. Low quality rips from streams, with no understanding of video production. Thumbnails made with Paint. The monkeys that succeed will the ones that get lucky with the typewriter. Don’t expect Shakespeare.
I’d be more concerned about the types of fan that will run this channel. Obsessive? Clout chasers? In for the money? People inspired by your content will make their own content, much like you did when you were inspired. When you make a clip channel, you are inherently committed to not making your own content. The people left running these channels are the exact monkeys you don’t want running the circus.
“DreamSMP Official” is not an official channel of the DreamSMP. You wouldn’t know this, given the “Verified” YouTube tag and the name. They don’t disclose their lack of association, outside of loosely terming themselves as “just a person”. During normal times, they spam upload any content vaguely related to the DreamSMP. After Technoblade’s death, it became a 24/7 farm of anything related to the passing. In three days, they uploaded 25 clips about Techno. They claim all advertising revenue will be donated, with no proof. They go as far as to implore their fans not to skip ads, so that money can be donated. With no proof.
This isn’t an occasional event, this is a pattern of behaviour.
“Tommy’s reaction to Queen Elizabeth’s death”
“Is TubNet the biggest failure?” with the thumbnail saying “Huge Scam”.
You have no control over what this channel puts up. They can represent you however they want, and the representation they’ll pick will be the one that gets them the most views.
When you search DreamSMP, this channel is one of the first to come up. This is what people see. Your content enables this channel to survive3. Half a million subscribers. Monkeys, circus.
4. Options, and strategies
Getting rid of these channels is usually elementary. As they do little transformation to your content, the DMCA is on your side. So use it!
I’d leave fans that genuinely want to spread your content, not use it to chase clout. There’s little harm from the majority of these people. But egregious abusers? Explore your legal options.
Distributing your own clips could employ a number of strategies. A standard route is for you to just clip your content, and have a friendly agreement with streamers that you interact with frequently to be able to utilize their streams featuring you as a personality. Schlatt and Ludwig follow this approach.
A novel approach is for groups of content creators to collate clips onto a central, shared channels. The Sidemen group follow this approach. OfflineTV and Friends takes a similar approach, but instead collate these clips into compilations (which are incredibly detailed).
For whatever option you pick, the easiest approach is to hire and incentivize an editor with a profit sharing agreement. Profit sharing means they have a reason to upload lots of content, while hiring an editor allows you to not deal with it.
4.1. Exploit yourself
It can feel weird to exploit yourself, but the reality is that if you don’t, others will. Wilbur and Ph1lza did a stream talking about Techno. Wilbur didn’t have an official YouTube VoD channel at the time of uploading it, so fans took the initiative. Many of them chose to present it far from the real truth of the VoD.
“Wilbur and Philza Started Crying”
“Wilbur had to tell Tommy about Technoblade’s death” (a brief moment in a 1h30m VoD)
By uploading that VoD, and even clips from this VoD, you can control the presentation. You can ensure that it is as respectful as possible. And with the fact you’ll have the fanbase, you can make sure your presentation is the one that gets priority in the search results.
5. You won’t stop it all, but you should try
Channels that don’t use your content and exploit death will always be around. You can’t stop that.
Channels might not even utilize your content to exploit a death. The rampant “Technoblade not dead” content clips that are text-to-speech with a black background prove this point.
Neither can you upload every moment. Moments where the copyright isn’t exclusively yours also presents problems, such as panels at conventions. You don’t want to take a DMCA risk there, where an anonymous fan can. As conventions might delay their uploads, it presents opportunities for fans to sneak in.
But restricting the flow of content these people can use, reduces the capacity for them to build up audiences, subduing their impact.
The Dream SMP is a collaborative role-playing Minecraft server. Technoblade was one of the members of this server. ↩︎
There are, of course, exceptions, but as the rest of the piece argues, they’re likely to be few and far between. Canooon is, from what I can see, an example of one of the good eggs. ↩︎
Look - I’m not blaming content creators for this. But it is also empirically true that these clip channels rely on content they haven’t made, and that content creators (outside of platform guideline restrictions) are the only people that can stop them. ↩︎
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