Good morning. It’s been about two weeks since Tariq, aka the “It’s Corn” kid, went viral, and he’s already: launched on Cameo, starred in a Chipotle commercial, become South Dakota’s “Corn-bassador,” and been the subject of an Atlantic thinkpiece. And that’s what it means to go viral in 2022.

–Hannah Doyle

Finding what works on YouTube can be a grind. You need to tick boxes for yourself, for your audience, and for the algorithm. So when you do—and the views go gangbusters—how do you know…when to stop?

Cody Ko demonstrated one way last week. He announced the end of his series reacting to The Cut’s The Button dating show—a reaction series so popular, it regularly outperformed The Button itself. 

Ko has published the series periodically for two years, pausing production only when The Button did. Recently, his reaction videos have made up six of his last 10 uploads. 

But not anymore: “It’s getting kind of old, for you and for me too. And now it’s, like, yeah, it’s the same sh*t every time, that’s what I'm feeling, so something’s gotta change,” Ko said in the final video.

Ko’s no stranger to ending popular series as he and Noel Miller stopped the beloved That’s Cringe series in 2019. 

“That’s Cringe did so well that staying too long in it would've started to work against us,” Miller told Colin and Samir last month. 

Big picture: Knowing when enough is enough is a universal creator challenge. Consider Rhett and Link’s decade-long talk show Good Mythical Morning. “Audience expectations keep you in a certain place, and experimentation outside of those expectations isn't rewarded with clicks,” Rhett recently told Colin and Samir. “Do you shoe a horse or do you beat a dead horse?” Link added.

Hard as it is, it’s best to say goodbye before your audience does. It keeps them on their toes and excited for what comes next. That’s not to say there’s no risk involved—but you have to weigh the options: try new things that might not do big numbers or fall into an uncreative downward spiral of sameness.

The creator-to-educator pipeline can be a significant revenue and growth hack for creators, which explains the surplus of companies helping creators host their own programs—Masterclass, Skillshare, Teachable, and Moment just to name a few.

YouTube is setting itself up as formidable competition. 

Next year, YouTube will let creators offer paid courses, including a way to offer “structured, in-depth learning experiences” ad-free. Users will also be able to offer quizzes on the Community tab.

But in the immediate term: Existing education-forward tweaks are small but significant. YouTube already lets creators add metadata that targets their content to specific grade levels and topics. It also launched an embedded video player for education apps and edutech companies that removes ads, external links, and recommendations.

This could change the game for niche creators like woodworkers, knitters, or painters who want to dip their toes into education without directing their hard-won YouTube community off-platform. But that also leaves creators at the mercy of YouTube’s algorithm for what has traditionally been an equity-building business opportunity, and it’s still unknown how much of creators’ education revenue YouTube is expected to keep as the price of doing business.

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Apart from outliers like Binging with Babish, most popular food YouTube channels aren’t creators. They’re brands—like Bon Appetit, Epicurious, and Tasty. 

Enter: De mi Rancho a Tu Cocina, a lo-fi Spanish language cooking channel starring an endearing grandmother/granddaughter duo. 

By the numbers:

Cooking is a highly-commercialized YouTube genre for covering something as personal as mealtime. By being themselves, De mi Rancho a Tu Cocina shows that leaning into your unique qualities is a strategy in itself.  

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