Do the Math: Veganism on Youtube is SHRINKING, Smaller Audience, Less Interest… a Failing Movement?

let's start with some data on a chart
because it's the data that you all came here for nobody came to hear me philosophize hmm if you look at the two big lines on this chart a huge decline from vegan gains the orange line going down down down from over five million views per month and then there's a bright yellow line that's rising unnatural vegan the size of our audience the size of our views per month increasing when you look at those two and then you ask yourself which way is the trend going for veganism as a whole the total size of the audience for this genre of videos are we just gonna say that vegan gains the artistic direction he's taken something about the quality of his videos uniquely has been unsuccessful or could we look around and add up the numbers for a survey of major english-language youtubers and come to the conclusion that the total size of the audience is shrinking that the total level of public interest in this type of content actually has declined in the last two years so guys I made an earlier video that's in black and white just about 24 hours ago I think that's a much more politically provocative video I think it's much more interesting video than the video I'm about to present you pet although this video answers a different question um in the earlier video I spent quite some time talking about small and explicitly political YouTube channels the discuss veganism vegan activism getting organized and so on but that sometimes are reaching just a few hundred people per video and nevertheless at that small small scale I do think that the type of statistics we have here on YouTube are meaningful they're meaningful precisely for hypothesis generation so you're all throw I'll throw up example here so we'll go to four videos here on on screen these are four different people who presented lectures at the same event on the same topic it's there was some kind of conference and these people all came to talk about veganism and having a healthy diet and you know this kind of thing right and even though the numbers are small right away you notice oh one of these people is something different but one of these people is reaching an audience one of these people has 758 people looking around googling around trying to find this lecture has some people who interested in hearing what she has to say and the others frankly do not the others are reaching such small numbers that it could just be their friends and family or people who were in the audience who attended this event when they they get fleshly okay so now you have a now you have a hypothesis now you're interested okay there's something interesting there's something significant about one person giving this lecture by the same token I think it is really meaningful to look at a lot of the people who were presumed to be the major leaders in this movement just a couple of years ago and when you google around YouTube you find they're getting under a hundred viewers showing up to hear a lecture that they've given way back in the year 2015 there was a conference called the world vegan summit in 2016 they met again they had another another world vegan summer 2017 2018 who doesn't did not continue now how much can you read into the failure to develop that well it's significant if the problem is with a unique event like that if we're going to talk about numbers we're talking about a 1 or a 0 let's try to move past let's just try to move fast but ok there used to be this major international vegan summit okay uh-huh who presented lectures there well look it up list of speakers and right here on YouTube you can look up the speeches they give 2015 it's not such a change in history you can still see exactly what they said you can hear how the audience reacted even ok wow it's 2015 world begin summit 2016 world vegan summer Wow here's this whole list of famous luminaries some of them are university professors some of them are more like religious leaders here are all these people who are aspiring activists and community leaders they're people taking on a leadership role the heads of different kinds of foundations and institutes and charities to promote veganism some of them I guess own restaurants there's like they're all coming together and giving lectures and you know what if you google around and if you search here within YouTube most of those people today are not are not reaching an audience even the numbers on a small scale there's an important indication here that you shouldn't ignore now someone like Gary France aione mentioned and discussed more my earlier video on paper he seems like the most important person in the vegan movement today many many times I have made a video on my own YouTube channel at the same time that he made a video on the same topic and I reached a larger audience than he did like I reached 2,000 people and he reached fewer than 200 okay so there's a warning there I mean this is again this is the use of math for hypothesis generation we don't just use math to prove something true or false we use math to raise new questions in the social sciences when you notice a discrepancy in the numbers okay there's an interesting question to be asked here Gary Francey on a maybe we just assume he's a very influential person in veganism because he's published a lot of books he has wealth he has status he has a prestigious sounding job at a university but you know what when you're looking around it seems like in the year 2019 almost nobody is interested in hearing what he has to say so that's significant it's significant on that small scale and we're gonna look at this video is on a large scale when I'm looking at these two lines the orange line from vegan gains crashing down and the yellow line from NASA being going up okay what if the whole scene what if the aggregate of all these YouTube channels combined is coming downward just like that orange line from V contains okay it's also just worth mentioning here the reason why Erin Janis the pink line is so puny they're way down at the bottom of the chart has to do with the fact that we're calculating the number of views per month the total number of views on the YouTube channel for all videos in one month at these two different periods of time August 2016 and the most recent numbers of God in 2019 Erin Janus she makes a lot of noise in the movement because she had a couple of hit videos but those hit videos were several years ago and the amount she's uploaded since then has been very little so the actual size the audience she's reaching is much smaller than you might expect who has even heard of family fizz before so this is the whole button this is the one big exception to all the rules currently in 2019 family fizz is not just the most successful vegan YouTube channel they are one of the most successful YouTube channels in the history of the internet and they do talk about veganism they do promote veganism but it is not the main thing they do as you can guess from the name family fizz the vast majority of their content the vast majority of the interests in their channel from the audience has nothing to do with visa so I thought about excluding them from this list but I really I really have to include them they're unbelievably successful they're so successful that this chart doesn't make any sense because you have to change the whole sense of scale has it go up to 30 million to include family fizz on the same chart but the rest all the other channels you see listed here are going down down down you have a really strong indication here that the total size of the market the total level of interest in the vegan message has been decreasing in two and a half years so let's do the math here again for the same chart but excluding the family fizz and now we can see these are basically the most successful english-language channels you'll see on the charts to come we have more than this but fun for Louie freely durianrider and mommy tang all of them have dropped to below 1 million total views per month and as you can see some of them of the past were way up there above 12 million so this already is a very significant you know shrinkage in the size of the market as a whole and I as we go through more of these examples you can decide is it really the case that we just have had one untalented guitarist after another or is it the case that the audience has become fatigued with rock and roll's of genre that the message of veganism is no longer new and novel and exciting it's no it's the effect of watching slaughterhouse footage is no longer shocking and the audience has started to tire of this and move on okay so here's table 2.1 these people are in the millions but the smaller millions and one of the most dramatic changes the gold color line there is Nina Aranda I didn't realize you said successful they were oh yeah funny to think by the way if you compare the gold line to the blue line there was a time in 2016 when Nina and Randa were more popular than peda they were more popular than people with the Ethical Treatment of Animals but alas today that is no longer the truth even though peda has been declining and declining in popularity Nina and Randa have been declining even more rapidly a very very modest increase in the size of audience for cheap lazy vegan and Kayla shoemaker but you can see again most of the trend here is down down down ok here are a bunch of youtubers below 1 million Kat Von D Bambi Alec manemma frost Ellen Fisher so we have some growth here for both Ellen Fisher and Minami frost you can tell me if you think that reflects sincere interest in veganism always an issue who table for people far below 1 million it's a sim net nutrition one of my critics raised this as being supposedly a really really significant counterexample the numbers really do not count for much but yes obviously he's a very successful youtuber don't get me wrong so you can see that he's the bright yellow line Mike the vegan and orange has also been very successful but that success doesn't even compensate for the dramatic decline a number of yours supreme banana has let alone people who used to be major voice in the movement like freely declining from a high of over 12 million viewers Mattie limb burner another one of the big success stories I would assume the vast majority of her viewers are not vegan and are not watching the channel because their interest in veganism but nevertheless she deserves credit for promoting the vegan diet and preaching the vegan message and so to even as that other channel I mentioned family fizz in some ways they are a vegan Channel and in some ways they're not but hey mmm edgy veg naturally Stephanie Sara speaking kitchen a little little bit of success there for Sara's vegan kitchen but again these numbers compared will again earlier do not add up too much okay so let's let's put it all together here what do we got people what does it look like yeah it looks like the market our vegan youtube content has collapsed if we add up we take the sum of all of the vegan channels that we have surveyed here in this video we started at a total audience of 55 million plus and that has dropped from more than 55 million to approximately 19 million so what we're seeing here is the contraction or the collapse the size of the market as a whole and the counter example is this one bizarrely successful Channel and their success really has nothing to do with veganism but still congratulations to them and I'm happy that they are vegan and they mentioned that they're vegan wants them well family fizz alone has more viewers than all of the other YouTube channels combined at present in 2019 all the other vegan YouTube channels that you see listed on the right hand side of the screen there if you add up all the people who watch there videos in one month it does not equal that one highly successful channel so guys keep in mind an individual guitarist could have a hit song next year there could be a number one hit it's a musician playing the guitar and it's old fashioned rock and roll could happen however when you look at the statistics for rock and roll as a genre as a whole rock and roll as a whole is becoming less and less successful this happens different trends come and go in music different trends come and go in movies at one time everyone was making vampire movies even if there's a big hit movie next is a vampire movie you recognize that vampire movies are getting less and less popular so at one time jazz music was a mainstream pop culture phenomenon and then the whole genre the whole size the audience for jazz shrunk away however for those of us were sincerely interested in the future ecology of planet Earth the declining public interest in the vegan message is of quite a bit more urgency first of us to have some degree of sympathy or compassion for billions of animals living their whole lives on a concrete floor under a steel shed being forcibly inseminated suffering until the day they die living in captivity it's brutal it's awful the ecological consequences are terrible if people have lost interest in that message over the last two years it's much more significant than if the audience loses interest in jazz music or rock and roll just to switch to some other kind of easy