Rhett & Link on the Ear Biscuits podcast:
Rhett:
We, every day we think about Good Mythical Morning as this is still our bread and butter.
Yeah, we want to do other things, we are doing other things. But this is still our bread and butter. This is still something that people depend on in a lot of ways and enjoy.
It’s not just some fluffy product that we want people to just, you know… It’s meaningful in people’s lives. It’s meaningful in our lives.
But the thing that we’ve been talking about recently is as we find ourselves in this platform where consistency and predictability and homogeneity are rewarded, right?
The more you can kind of center on a strategy on a channel and be like, this is the very specific thing that you’re getting from this channel, and this is the very specific thing that you’re getting from this channel, we’ve had this sort of existential crisis that we’ve been dealing with, which is, well, we’re trying to do a variety show.
We’re trying to do a show that comes out every single day, and covers a lot of different ground, but we’re doing it in a place where specificity and focus has been rewarded more and more.
You know, people that try a bunch of different things, they’re not necessarily getting rewarded.
They try a bunch of… we were actually, we were watching some TikTok videos last night, as a matter of fact. I’m talking about this phenomenon on TikTok where you can look at somebody’s channel and be like, oh, this is this guy.
And he was trying, he’s doing like seven different characters. And all of a sudden, something clicked with one character, and then he fine-tunes that character. Now, every single video is that guy.
And my question was, are we moving into a place on the internet when it comes to internet content where everyone just zeroes in on the particular thing that is working.
And then it’s like, you’ve got this, forgive the analogy, you’ve got this cow that’s got udders. And then you’re like, ‘Oh, everything’s coming out of this teat. Let’s just focus on this teat.’
And this is what the Internet does. The Internet sends you to a particular teat. And you keep going back to that teat.
Link:
Sucks the life out of that teat. And you’re gonna suck that teat clean off.
Rhett:
And what we are committed to doing, both as a company, as a brand, with our whole suite of content and everything we’re doing, and including GMM is we want you to suck on every teat, you know?
We don’t want you to just suck, we don’t want to just give you, we don’t want to just keep putting one teat out there for you to suck on.
Link:
It sounds embarrassing, but I have to agree.
Rhett:
We’ve got lots of teats, and we want you to suck on all of them to equal degrees.
Link:
I think there’s a focus now…
Rhett:
When I think about the future, I’m just thinking about continuing to make sure the udder has got lots of teats, and it’s not just a one teat.
Link:
We have a loyal viewership of Mythical Beasts that are gonna watch no matter what.
And what we’re realizing is that this presents an opportunity for us and the team to say, ‘Okay, we are gonna determine to continue to experiment to assert that we are more than just people who shove food in our face.’
If you can survive the hilarity, what Rhett & Link are saying here is a deeply valuable observation for any successful YouTube creator.
Algorithms aren’t all bad — they make possible the success you’ve had so far on social.
But the algorithmic logic as currently applied on most platforms is still in its earliest stages. At the moment, everything’s optimized in a way that pigeonholes the best creators.
Social platforms of the future may eventually solve the delta between what a creator is currently rewarded for, and the variety that creator is capable of.
But, until then, limited to a platform you don’t control, you get what you get.
The ability to widen out the way you express yourself creatively — both for your benefit, and that of your audience — is in your hands only if you’re maintaining for your most loyal viewers and supporters someplace to experience you outside the reach of an algorithm.
— Tang
Rhett & Link’s owned platforms are Mythical, and Mythical Society.
