YouTube’s Decline as the Black Hole of Gen Z Entertainment

The clock is ticking for the former king of social media

Where did the time go? For many, the struggle is not the countless episodes of their favorite new show but the short 30-second to 3-minute TikTok clips that dominate their time in between classes and weekends.

A quick scroll on TikTok becomes another scroll, another minute vaguely justified by the short format of TikTok. Soon enough, these minutes turn into hours on the platform. This obsession with TikTok, a Gen Z cultural phenomenon, is beginning to outcompete one of the oldest and most popular platforms: YouTube.

Nowadays, I find myself gravitating towards the highly addictive TikTok rather than YouTube. YouTube’s algorithm, repetitive “suggested feed,” and lack of unique new features fail to set it apart from other social media platforms.

And this isn’t just a personal issue–data shows that there is a shift in the platform Gen Z gravitates towards. While YouTube currently holds far more total users, 230.6 million to be exact, TikTok is gaining fast with 90.6 million. Despite this contrast in the number of users, YouTube’s growth is hitting a bottleneck among US teens with a 1.5% increase of teen users from 2020 while TikTok is showing a 13% increase. 

YouTube’s format is stale and boring. TikTok cycles viral videos in and out in three minutes or less, creating a platform where the topic of the day changes rapidly. It keeps up with the hamster wheel interests of the masses–when you’re gone one minute, you miss 10 new trends. 

In contrast, the same type of videos are on YouTube’s front page all the time. Scrolling through the trending videos right now, I immediately see gaming videos, reaction videos with clickbait titles and thumbnails, and music videos from established artists like Paramore.  

Likes, dislikes, shares, subscribers of a channel and views are all key to having a YouTube video on the trending page. As such, creators, channels and artists with prominent followings are far more likely to end up on the trending page compared to new creators and channels. This algorithm limits the type of content viewers see and affects Gen Z viewership as it focuses on pushing the most popular videos. 

In fact, 65% of Gen Z agree that personally relevant content is more entertaining than the content that is the most popular and has the most views. A little over half of Gen Z say that they prefer watching content that no one around them is interested in, suggesting that Gen Z wants a more personalized experience that doesn’t generalize their likes and interests but hones in on their preferred aesthetics, topics, and humor.  

TikTok’s main success comes from its personalized algorithm. Although both TikTok and YouTube create profiles for users tailored toward interests, TikTok’s algorithm makes note of specific cues–how long a user lingers on a piece of content, hesitation to scroll past a video, rewatching the same video multiple times–to modify what the user sees based on these cues. 

YouTube has acknowledged this gap between itself and TikTok by making a change to its platform. Specifically, YouTube has brought in YouTube Shorts that mimic TikTok’s short video format with their most recent update. A collaboration with K-Pop group BlackPink focusing on their new song “Pink Venom” has 92,000 videos. However, it’s painfully clear that the song has had much more success on TikTok with 1.6 million remixes and dance challenges. 

Simply copying TikTok is not a good direction for the platform to take. YouTube must stop trying to imitate TikTok’s success and instead introduce an algorithm that doesn’t just push the most popular videos but finds niches for users that focus their interests. 

For Gen Z, YouTube’s hub of educational content explaining topics like calculus and history is a saving grace for our grades, but also a missed opportunity on YouTube’s part. This is a key feature that sets it apart not only from TikTok but also from other social platforms. 

YouTube’s recommendation algorithm focuses on viewer satisfaction, which is measured through surveys and engagement signals such as likes and dislikes. However, once a user becomes bored with the content they were engaging with before, YouTube’s algorithm will struggle to keep a user keep clicking on videos. 

YouTube has much more content than TikTok and much more popular content creators. To keep its Gen Z users on the platform, YouTube must take advantage of its long-format content by  marketing its educational content and niche creators. It is vital to also reform its algorithm to find potential user interests beyond what users are searching for and watching.