The shift in YouTube’s image as an educational platform

Before diving into the effects of AI in discoverability, it is worth understanding the shift in how people interact with YouTube as a video platform.

YouTube used to be the main channel for education and entertainment used by millions of people, a fact solidified by the months (an in some countries years) under lockdown during the COVID pandemic. But to nobody’s surprise, the way people educate themselves have changed with AI and the rise of the Short form video.

I’ve come across plenty of videos by tech education creators on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZ4mrm6PuII, youtube.com/watch?v=WCGTQBCE3FA&t=8) who’ve become aware of the decrease in the attention they get from tutorial style videos. People are not coming on YouTube to learn anymore, they learn how to do things with LLMs and in most cases they don’t even want to learn anymore. They get LLMs to write their code, skipping some of the most tedious parts. Why learn how to use a Python library if you never end up using it yourself in code anyways.

Now, if you look at how the independent creators have shifted their channels, you’ll see that they’ve pivoted into the thought leadership side of things. Commenting on what happened, discussing how a new upgrade will change things, sharing their opinion on a discussion. Or they’ve fully embraced the “vibe coding” side of things and started covering tutorials over that instead.

Does this mean company accounts should follow suit?

This is where it gets interesting. One thing we need to remember is LLMs are not creative machines coming up with ideas or generating tutorials from scratch. They are built to manipulate information (basically, words) and spurt out the most probably string. Meaning, they need to be fed something.

This is a good opportunity for company accounts to create the most relevant tutorials in their domains and becoming a leader in their field. Especially in their finer niche.

You could even say, the strategy has not changed. You’re catering to your viewers still and you’re catering to the LLMs. You just need a finer balance of targeting both.

Luckily, it is not as hard as it sounds once you understand the building blocks.