How ‘Creating Content’ Killed My Creativity – Jim Caddick aka ‪@Caddicarus (Transcript)

And then at one point there were two videos a week going up and then three videos a week going up. And then my fiance would be working on extra videos for our Patreon subscribers who are donating money directly to support my channel. So four videos a week at one point.

The Fall: When the Channel Died

And all of that led to December 2019 where at 700,000 subscribers the channel was dead and I was looking for work. And that’s fine. That’s totally fine. I had come to terms that my spotlight was over, you know, nothing lasts forever. I’m not above regular nine to five work. It’s how I began and I’m sure a lot of people here began as well. It’s totally fine. No more making online things for me.

So how am I on a TEDx presentation talking about how I make things online?

The Comeback: Going Out With a Bang

Well, in 2020 I decided that if the channel was dead anyway, I was going to go out with a bang. But what does a bang mean for me? What it meant was I was going to take my main show that got me where I was, the Caddicarus show, and I was going to do it stripping back all the review elements and the analysis and the journalistic language. You know, my ego had grown and my opinion apparently meant a lot, I guess. And I was just trying to get rid of all of the pretentiousness, the pretense. Sorry.

I was going to do what I had wanted to do for years prior, but I was too scared to for fear of losing what I had built when my channel was already declining in the mid 2010s. I was going to do this video on all of my own terms. I had nothing left to lose. I was going to risk it all.

Long story short, that single video in 2020 was the best single video I had uploaded in terms of performance for years. And then, you know, final video curtain call. That’s cool. That’s good. Then the ad revenue check came in and I thought I could do that again.

Back to Basics: Rediscovering What Worked

So I did. And throughout all of 2020, I just kept doing what I wanted. But the schedule, the upload schedule was terrible. I was like, you know, three, four videos a week. I was doing one every month or two months. And I was killing all of my other shows that I had started at that point. I was using all of my, you know, professional career journalism stuff to make more analytical shows about modern movies and video games. That was all the extra stuff throughout the week while Sunday was the Caddicarus show. I got rid of all of that.

So the frequency was gone and the trending this was gone. But it was like the old days. It was like how I started the channel. And when I started the channel doing that, that’s how I grew in the first place to get to where I was as a career. And it was just happening again.

But when it was already my career, despite not following any of the rules and doing what I thought my subscribers would want to see me do, sponsors were paying out more. Merchandise offers were getting crazy. I was able to invest more money into bigger projects and dumber things to do in bigger videos.

And just to give an idea of how insane this is, in 2024, my fiancé was diagnosed with triple negative breast cancer, and she spent that entire year being treated for it, getting surgery for it, and smashing it, by the way. Yeah. Well done, honey, did good.

And despite that going on, I’m sure you can imagine the time and the mental drain, the stress that would take on not just an individual or a couple, but an entire family, especially when you’re trying to still create things and bring money in. You’ve got to support everybody at the end of the day.

With that being said, though, it still made no sense to me how during that year I still made 10 times more money than any single year from 2014 to 2022, despite uploading two videos per year. I uploaded two videos in total in 2024. How did I go from uploading three to four videos a week at one point and nearly losing everything, including my mind, to two a year and somehow doing 10 times better?

The Problem With “Content”

I don’t know. And I’m not going to pretend that I do know. I’m not a search engine optimization guy. I just make things. But if I had to point my finger at least on one culprit at the very least, it would be that word that makes me dry heave: content.

See, during the mid-2010s, I was hearing that word get used a lot more frequently in an industry mainstream sense. People were calling themselves content creators and videos that I was making started meaning content. And around that same time when my channel was dying, all of the higher ups around me and my agent and YouTube partner managers and all sorts of other people were telling me these kind of three new tenets that I had to try and follow to keep my channel flowing above water.

I had to upload frequently and consistently. I had to make those videos about trending topics so that people would search them and hopefully you’d pop up. And I had to make those videos as long as possible, which is way better for engagement, watch time, ad revenue, all that stuff.

The problem, though, is that because I was mixing those three new rules, guidelines, let’s say, with this new word, this new category of content, my brain was subconsciously linking it all together. And I started thinking, “Oh, so the problem is I wasn’t doing enough. I needed more. I needed to do more stuff.” And when it’s your career and you’re supporting a family and your channel is dying and you need food, you’re going to try anything to keep everything going.

The problem, though, at least for my view, is that the word content has a lot of negative implications to it, at least in my opinion. It implies a vast collection of meaningless stuff, just a collection of things, mass-produced, factory-shipped, out the door, yesterday’s news, quickly forgotten, quick, easy, effortless. And that’s really unfair because that’s not true. It’s not entirely true, anyway, for the majority of YouTube channels that upload frequently, especially.

But with me, I was mixing those implications with everything else that was going on, and I became content-brained in order to try and keep up with all the algorithmic changes and keep up with everybody’s dwindling attention spans with TikTokification when Vine died, if anyone remembers Vine.

The Algorithm Rat Race

The thing is that if you’re somebody that is making daily videos, daily uploads on YouTube, you will automatically, accidentally hit all of those three tenets I mentioned earlier. Let’s say that you’re a political video uploader, let’s just say. You can react to the latest trending news very easily. If you’re just recording yourself rambling and talking, that’s quick and easy. You can do that very frequently. And you can make those videos as long as you damn well want. You’re already doing it.

And if you mix that in with being naturally good at that, naturally driven, naturally funny, naturally charismatic, you can become huge in the YouTube algorithm from doing that. And I enjoy a lot of channels that operate like that. Video game Let’s Play channels operate in a very similar way. I’m subscribed to many of them and I really like that stuff.

But I don’t like making it. I suck at the YouTube algorithm rat race.

And yet while everything was dying for me, I felt pressured to have to be in it, which eventually just led to everything getting worse. And that’s kind of when I had this epiphany, let’s call it, in 2020 or after 2020, after this huge spike in growth I hadn’t seen in years.

Between Denial and Reality

Between 2015 and 2019, I was lying to myself. I was doing what I thought I needed to do while pretending, acting as though that was the end goal. Oh, I wanted to be a YouTuber. This is the dream. This is it. I was in denial convincing myself that was it. And the problem as well is that I was working myself to death for the privilege of that. Multiple mental breakdowns, terrible physical health, relationship problems. I wasn’t socializing. I wasn’t getting much fresh air. All at the end of the day for a dead channel in 2019 and a library of videos, a library of content that I never really even wanted to make in the first place.

My channel, I think, failed not because I wasn’t making enough content, but because I was making bad videos. Or if you want to be charitable, mediocre, let’s just say. And I was spamming them to my subscribers. And the problem with that is not only is that inauthentic and not who I really am. Like I said, I was doing videos I never really wanted to do, but I felt I had to to keep up. But also, it made the value of my channel zero, despite me following all those three rules.

I was doing everything right, but everything kept bleeding. And yeah, like I said, my channel value was zero because there’s only so much time in one week. And I wanted to do this solo because that’s what I want to do. Always worked solo, aside from a cameraman and a bit of assistance. But that main show that got me where I was, the Caddicarus show, even if it was going out every Sunday, was suffering because there is only so much time in a week for one person to do everything. And when everything suffers and everything is just meh, it doesn’t matter. And your subscriber count doesn’t mean anything at that point because if they’re seeing the videos in their feed, they’re not going to click if even the topic or the idea or the length just doesn’t look like their cup of tea.

The Moment Everything Changed

It’s really ironic when I look back that the second I stopped caring about all of this stuff and stopped obsessing over looking at the YouTube studio analytics when it would tell me at some point in 2017, in big red letters, that this video’s viewership is down 0.2%. And because it’s in red, that must mean I’m making things incorrectly. The second I stopped caring about that, I thrived in my own way, despite the algorithm changes that everybody was panicking about. Exactly like how it was for me in the very beginning.

If you create what you want to create from the outset with anything in life, it should hopefully lead to you being naturally better at doing it with refinement over time, of course, which should hopefully lead to more people watching what you want to do, which then will lead to more opportunities, sponsor payouts, value, as I was saying. It will hopefully lead to more success. Build it and they will come. And even then, success is not a guarantee whatsoever. So if you’re going to do anything creative at all, anywhere, you might as well enjoy it while you’re doing it for the ride.

Hobby Versus Career

If you’re someone that plays video games and you love the idea of playing a 200-hour action RPG, do you finish that game and think to yourself, “Oh yeah, that was a fun time?” Or do you think, “I’m stressed and I want to die and I haven’t made this into a career and where’s my money?” But it’s a hobby. And that’s how you should look at creating anything, because you enjoy doing it.

And this is why I don’t do daily TikTok videos or Instagram reels or anything like that, because I don’t want to. I’m going to do what I want in my way on my terms. And despite everyone around me telling me my potential for growth and potential for viewership and brand opportunities, especially on TikTok with my sense of humor, I don’t want to do it. So why should I? It doesn’t matter. I don’t want to do it. And if I don’t want to do it, it will be obvious. It will come out worse and then none of that will matter anyway.

I won’t grow because it will be obviously worse. The definition of the word content is now so vast and vague, it can mean anything from a meticulously scripted four hour video essay to AI slop generated by a robot every 20 minutes. And when you’re looking at YouTube’s press site in particular, you can go on it right now, it boasts in big letters that they get 20 million uploads on that website a day. What you need to ask yourself, if you want to go down YouTube specifically, what you need to ask yourself is, do you want to make something and hope that it works? Or do you want to just get into this to directly compete with 20 million uploads every day?

Content Is King

You’ll hear this phrase a lot, especially working in YouTube or Twitch or anything like that. “Content is king.” The problem is, at least my perspective, I’ve never heard another creator say that and this is just me. I’ve only ever heard businesses say that. I’ve only ever heard brands say that. And if you want to go into content creation to do that, you can, that’s fine, good for you, that’s great. But “content is king” to me just sounds like if brands and businesses are saying it, money. Money means more, more means content, content means money.

And I’m not against the identifier of content creator or content as a concept. I have it written on my name badges all the time. And if someone was to call me that, it’s an industry term, I’m hamming it up, obviously. But I am against normalizing such a soulless word to describe something inherently human, inherently creative, and making it an umbrella term that implies everything, especially on YouTube, is a one size fits all solution, which it isn’t.

It’s not realistic and it ignores luck as well. No one talks about luck in how to become a YouTuber, books or anything like that. It promotes an unhealthy lifestyle, an unhealthy body, unhealthy mind, and ultimately unhealthy creations. Personally, I wasn’t making content, I was making vom-tent.

Broadcast Yourself

Whatever you want to do in life, though, creatively, whether you want to call it content or art, it doesn’t matter. Ultimately, that’s my point. It doesn’t matter how quick you can get that stuff done or how viral or trendy it is. My point I want to make, what I want to promote is creativity above all and being authentic and true to yourself above all, which you can apply to all aspects of life. And if you manage to hit those YouTube hints, those three tenets, that’s a bonus. Great, keep it going. But it’s okay if you don’t fit the mold. It’s okay if you do fit the mold. I carved my own mold and I’m better for it.

You don’t have to feel like this way. If you make what you want to make and it works, then it might not work, sure, but either way, you’ll be happier, healthier, and make better videos. And just speaking for myself as someone that did lose everything, you’ve only really got you at the end of the day when you’ve lost a career or a family member or anything else like that. At the end of the day, if you want to creatively express yourself, all you have left is you.

So I guess all I can really say at the end of all of this is don’t broadcast content. Do what YouTube themselves said themselves in 2005 when their website launched. Broadcast yourself.

Now, if you don’t mind, I have been here long enough and I need to go home and make some more content.

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