Case in point though is Professor DM who admits to the clickbait. It seems to me now his clickbait videos are now the only ones getting traction and even that is vanishing on him. Luckily my feed is devoid of his clickbait videos.
He’s got some really great content but it’s buried under his clickbait. Also I don’t want to see anything of his clickbait videos.
A lot of D&D youtubers went down a clickbait route during the OGL-gate days and got addicted to those quick and easy views. Aside from being annoying, it also feels kind of short-sighted because that crap all ages like milk, whereas quality ttrpg-related content, particularly relatively rules-neutral stuff, is pretty evergreen.
But then again the other fundamental problem is that these games are good for engaging the brain, such that almost every person who has seriously devoted their time to one or more ttrpgs has at least ten really good videos of advice, warstories, comedy skits, etc. in them relating to the games they play (whether or not they have the wherewithall to make that raw material into good videos). And some people have 20, or 30, or 50. But those might well be "just getting the channel to start making money" output in a YouTube career, and these games also take a long time to play, and probably almost nobody has 300 good TTRPG videos in them (and the time to make them). So often I think a TTRPG YouTuber has recently reached the apex of their channel's success only to discover that they've used up most the interesting material and insights saved up from 5 or 10 or 25 years gaming, and how are they going to come by more fast enough to serve a weekly upload schedule that they've convinced themself they need? Liveplays might work if they and several people they know whom they can (through love or money) get to appear on camera for many hours are compelling people to watch play ttrpgs. But usually they don't really do big numbers even then. Otherwise the options are mostly to become repetitive in your content, to make needlessly exhaustive content ("a separate video for every 2024 5e subclass!", which, to be clear, is cool, it's just not likely to be a good channel's grade A material), to pad things out with low effort content (reacting to reddit posts or whatever), or to try to build mountains out of molehills with trashy clickbait. The last option seems to get the most clicks.
And so when we see a TTRPG YouTuber fall to the dark path, the path of click-bait, let us not dwell on the sad state they've fallen to to try to avoid going back to being regular working stiffs, but instead celebrate that they have evidently shared the sum toll of actually interesting and worthwhile things they have to say about their hobby, and given us the best they had to offer, and there should be no shame in that as long as they, at some point, made their ten or so really good videos.
