pic rel is the youtube channel of Joel Haver, who got popular on youtube making short films (~4-15min). He has over 2 million subscribers and has videos will millions of views. About a year ago he decided to switch over to making feature length films, which as he has said over the years is his real dream and passion.

As a result his channel has died. He went from getting 500k+ views per video to being lucky to break 100k, with his 5 most recent videos having an average of like 43k views. Those numbers are objectively good. Having 40k people watch a movie you made is great, until you think about it. He one one of the most popular short film channels on youtube and an extremely well liked creator and the absolute best he's done is 225k views on "Anyone else but me". But more disturbingly, that one one of his first feature length movies he released, as time went on and the novelty wore off view counts have plummeted. My hunch is that those initial views were driven by his mainstream audience, who all disappeared because no one actually cares to engage with things you make if they actually require any dedication to engage with, even if you're a very popular video creator. It means that if the art you're producing doesn't conform to the short-form, digestible, hellscape then you're fucked. No one will watch it, nobody cares. It's doubly worse for photography, which is a medium normal people don't even engage with unless it's porn. The era of niche personality cults after an artist has died is over, because it's now impossible for anyone to find your work online. It's buried by the algorithm. So unless you shoot film and keep your negatives, there is no hope you'll ever be discovered posthumously.

This is why I've decided to stop making art. Not because I won't get famous, but because art matters only in proportion to it's capacity to find it's audience with which it resonates. If your art is never seen by anyone except you, then it is reduced to meaninglessness.