“Don’t Let the Byproducts of Your Thing Distract You From Your Thing.”

On February 17, 2023, a YouTuber who goes by SunnyV2 posted a video that later would become a tragic lesson for any content creator. Titled “The Brutal 92% Decline of Jelly”, it centered around another content creator who goes by Jelly and his downfall in viewership of 92% within only two years.

Was his content too competitive or boring? Or was his passion for making high-quality content fade over time due to his tremendous success?

Before I explain why we should care about this matter regarding a YouTuber probably none of us here knows about, let’s briefly look at how he became successful in the first place that eventually caused his downfall.

Around the time of his peak in viewership, Jelly had reached five million subscribers after only about two years since his first video on the platform, which is only so ironic that it would take him the same amount of time to be down where he is today.

The main reason for Jelly’s exponential growth was the Robust Trio, a group of close friends that Jelly used to frequently make videos with. The “team” included two other YouTubers, Kwebbelkop and Slogoman, who appeared in almost every video posted by Jelly.

Realizing that they could go viral simply by having a fun time together, they also moved to a new house where they lived together and made real-life videos.

The content was characterized by light humor and small fun activities, which helped Jelly pass 5 million subscribers only a year after hitting 1 million.

Fast forward a few months later in 2019, however, Kwebbelkop started to appear less in Jelly’s videos. This caused his fans to be suspicious over whether there was a conflict happening in the Robust Trio, but on November 20, 2020, Kwebbelkop appeared once again on his own channel with a video where he explained his disappearance from the group.

I moved away from my hometown in Amsterdam; I got into a relationship way too quickly with a girl who I thought was my dream girl, but we ended up not being compatible. And at the same time, my dad also passed away… I ended up getting a depression… I was still recording with Jelly and Slogoman, and I started to see that I was just having a really really hard time keeping up with these guys…and I noticed that I had to put Youtube to the side a little bit so I could fully focus on my own mental health.

Not so long after Kwebbelkop left, however, Crainer, who had the most subscribers out of the three, joined the Robust Trio. With Crainer’s presence in the group that continued to grow again, Jelly was able to reach his absolute peak of 500 million viewers per month in 2020.

But Crainer also started to appear in fewer and fewer videos during the same year that Jelly declined for a similar reason to Kwebbelkop.

The impact that the Robust Trio had on Jelly’s growth on YouTuber was undeniably tremendous, making him one of the fastest-growing YouTubers out there. However, it’s lacking to attribute all of his success to the Robust Trio, which, in a long run, could only help him so much to reinforce his passion for creating content.

Around the time where Jelly reached his peak, he was also at his prime in terms of passion for making videos. Therefore, when the Robust Trio broke up, it also marked the end of Jelly’s innovative and authentic nature in his content.

Given the decline of the three games he was making videos of at the time — Minecraft, Among Us, and GTA — it was also clear that he became more and more distracted by unnecessary things outside of YouTube.

During the time of his decline in 2022, Jelly bought an abandoned mansion, followed by a new Lamborgini and an expensive boat that he bought a year earlier. Apparently, there was nothing inherently wrong with him doing so as it was a personal choice, and he might be doing it to reward himself for his hard work or just demonstrate his success.

But too many doses made the poison as money become a source of distraction away from his core goal, and probably Jelly himself at that time understood that, when he stopped “committing to his channel, his audience will as well.”

I see so many business people get burned. And what they do, is they start making some money, and then their lifestyle just creeps, and it grows into this massive hungry beast that then consumes them. And what you’ve got to be very careful with, is you can’t let the byproducts of your thing distract you from your things.

The last sentence of the above quote by Sam Ovens perfectly manifests the lethal reason for the latter declines of most, if not all, content creators, regardless of what content they make.

They can spend months and even years of time and hard work to build their audience and achieve the success they define or feel comfortable with, and still, months later, they would struggle to replicate the same success made earlier.

And it is obvious that not just YouTubers but anyone can be a victim of their byproducts, including us Medium writers. Things such as earnings and even views can serve as a distraction that damages our ability to produce informative, engaging, and authentic content, and our passion for Medium can gradually fade away.

The rise of technology such as Ai has been having an influential impact on the writing industry both in a positive and negative way. Many Medium writers fail to be aware of the potential risks of Ai and choose to boldly claim their content originality.

And while views can go up as they can observe, their authentic voice as writers has simply been stripped away, which is underratedly detrimental to their later success on the platform.

Overall, with an unconscious mind focused on earnings instead of their audience, a writer may expect to see their ambition and goals that they have set for themselves, in the beginning, being depleted altogether.

Of course, since I am speaking of this on only one side, that doesn’t mean that I don’t acknowledge other inspiring writers who made a conscious choice to use AI and are completely aware of the potential byproducts.

But I want to make this a core lesson unlearned from my experience so that all Medium writers, new and experienced alike, can learn from:

Don’t let the byproducts of your thing distract you from your thing.

Be safe out there, and thanks for reading!