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- 🔴 Never submit to the algorithm
🔴 Never submit to the algorithm
ft. Jenna Stoeber, a video essayist, podcaster, and livestreamer with a master’s degree in video game cultures and horror media
Francis Zierer
January 31, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 14 minutes
In partnership with The Webby Awards. One week left to enter!
Today’s guest is Jenna Stoeber, a video essayist, podcaster, and streamer with a master’s degree in video game cultures and horror media. She’s been an independent creator for 2.5 years after spending 4.5 years as a video producer at Polygon, Vox’s video game vertical.
It’s been months since we had a guest so well-versed in the craft and theory of YouTube — personally, I learned much from this one.
In this issue:
🙅 Refusing to bend to the YouTube algorithm
😏 Tricking the algorithm for 113k+ views
📽️ An abbreviated guide to crafting video essays
— Francis Zierer, Editor
P.S. Our podcast with Jenna is a hit. Watch it on YouTube or listen on any pod platform.
Don’t let the algorithm let you down
“I would rather fail as a content creator producing work that I'm proud of and that I stand behind than submitting totally to the whims of the algorithm. Of course, I would rather succeed at what I'm doing, so if you like my work, please consider supporting me on the Patreon.”
As I write this, Jenna Stoeber is currently making $1,308 per month through her Patreon. It’s not her only revenue stream: others include paid Twitch subscriptions, YouTube ad revenue, podcast ads, and a contract role with a digital media company. It affords her a good life.
Jenna calls herself “a working-class content creator” and is, I believe, a creator-economy model citizen. She’s not reliant on any one income stream, she has an audience spread across multiple platforms, and she’s found ways to produce work on her own terms, unbeholden to any boss, human or algorithmic (which is, beneath a couple of layers, still a human boss).
Until the summer of 2022, Jenna was a video producer at Polygon, Vox’s video-game vertical. She spent most of five years at the publication, touching every part of the production process for their YouTube videos — pitching, researching, writing, shooting, editing, and hosting. I was moved by Jenna’s answer to the question of what she misses about being part of a team:
“The thing I miss most is bouncing ideas off. It's undeniably helpful to have another person to talk to be like, ‘Hey, how does this thumbnail look? How does this headline look? Is this an interesting hook? Does this joke work?’
When I was at Polygon, if I was writing a script, I would be like, okay, I've got to make my coworkers laugh. That is my goal. Yeah. And that made it a lot easier to write jokes into scripts than it is to be like, I've got to make an anonymous person behind a computer laugh.”
But she doesn’t miss the whole:
“The value I place on being able to control my work and control my life is more valuable to me than the salary I would make working for a place like Polygon or any of these other platforms.”
Don’t treat content creation like a virality slot machine
“The theory of content creation when I started freelancing was […] very much the mindset [of] make a hundred videos, one of them will go viral. And then you keep doing that until you have a sustainable career, right?
And I was just like, I'm not going to do that. I'll die. I will die if I do that.
It's also just fundamentally not the sort of thing I want to do. I want to sit down and research and think about my video essays and be thoughtful with the content I'm producing.”
The art-business spectrum or divide is everywhere in the creator economy. Jenna is a creative who understands the rules of algorithm arbitrage but takes a stance against it on principle because she prioritizes enjoying her work above all else. She refuses to pad these video essays into hour-long behemoths to tempt the algorithm and increase the surface area for ad breaks.
“Sometimes I will click on YouTube videos, and it'll an interesting head or thumb. Let's see what's in it. And they will start so far from the story they're actually telling because they have to pad out their video to be longer. And that annoys me, [not] those content creators, [but] the algorithm of YouTube, because the structure of YouTube is encouraging people to do that.
The structure of TikTok was privileging people who posted multiple videos a week. And so you have people changing the way they create their art and think about their labor because of how the algorithms on these platforms function. And that's going to be inevitable with any content creation.”
“Content creators don’t know how the algorithm functions”
“But it's also impossible to know why some things go viral. Except if you understand that the algorithm of YouTube privileges hour-long videos, you can force it to go viral by making an hour-long video.”
The above video brought Jenna 8.2k subscribers in just two weeks, by far her most concentrated subscriber gain to date — before publishing the video, she had around 16k subscribers. This was about 6 months after she left Polygon, which has 1.4 million subscribers. She was not making these kinds of videos for herself before leaving; she had to build an audience that would allow her to monetize them from scratch.
In this video, Jenna spends 9 minutes and 30 seconds talking about the YouTube algorithm, screens a graphic showing how many watch hours she needs to start monetizing her videos, then implores the viewer to let the video run in the background to help her hit that watch-hour goal.
Weekly subscribers gained graph from Social Blade — that spike on the far left is when Jenna posted her “9 minutes long” video.
And it worked. It’s a rare occurrence of Jenna playing the title-thumbnail game: the title says the video is 9 minutes long, but you can clearly see it’s 59 minutes and 32 seconds long. What Jenna delivers is an earnest exhortation for solidarity. The algorithm is the enemy! We are all content creators searching for revenue; for a good, living wage! How could you not let the video play in the background for an hour? There’s an interactive Robin Hood element to it all.
It’s hard to be an independent creator. It’s precarious. Why not get something back for your fellow creator?
Editor’s note: This week’s podcast with Jenna is such a rich, flowing conversation, covering far more than this essay. Give it a listen! I’d appreciate it if you subscribed on YouTube, too — we’re so, so close to that 1,000-subscriber milestone, it’d make my week if we could hit it.
The extended entry deadline for The 29th Annual Webby Awards is one week away — Friday, February 7th!
We’re pleased to partner with The Webby Awards this year because, for the first time, they’ve introduced a new suite of creator categories.
Creators like MrBeast, Recess Therapy, and Mark Rober have won before, but there have never been dedicated categories. These now include: Best Editing, Best Series, Best Narrative, Storytelling or Writing and honors across Art & Culture, Comedy, Gaming, Music, Social Impact, and more.
This is the for-real-this-time last chance to apply for this year’s awards. The deadline is February 7th!
Always a pleasure to host a guest who also makes videos and hosts a podcast — a real pro. This was a great conversation touching much more than could fit in this newsletter:
🎓️ How getting a master’s degree in media set Jenna up to be a creator
🫂 How Jenna’s audience has formed a self-sustaining community
🎙️ Jenna’s approach to producing high-quality podcasts
Listen on your preferred podcast platform or watch on YouTube.
How to make beloved video essays
I plan to produce video essays for Creator Spotlight later this year, so I asked Jenna for advice. It’s a new medium for me, and I want to deliver a high-quality product. Jenna makes it sound easy: it’s little different than writing a normal essay. The biggest difference is a need for storyboarding.
Also, to be clear, there are at least five different jobs in producing a video essay: pitching, researching, writing, shooting, editing, and hosting. Jenna does it all. Not everyone can!
First, you need a thesis
“I always start with a thesis. I know, everybody learned that in high school. It turns out it really is the best way to write an essay.
[…]
For the Nintendo swimsuit problem, my thesis at the start was: I'm going to investigate how Nintendo designed swimsuits. And then it turned into some other things when I had an answer to that question.
[…]
Normally, I will start with a really core, grabby concept, something that you can explain easily and straightforwardly in a short span of time. ‘Cause that's how you make videos for YouTube.
And then once I've hooked people with that, I will trick them into learning more about our culture with broader points at the end of the video when I wrap things up.”
I read an excellent essay this week in Celine Nguyen’s personal canon newsletter about how to structure the beginning of an essay, which is an excellent follow-up read if you’re serious about crafting better, hookier introductions to essays (video or otherwise).
Speak your script into perfection
I’ve made a habit of reading through every issue of this newsletter out loud to catch errors in my proofreading process. It’s doubly important for a video essay.
“Before you try to record, sit down and read your entire script out loud.
Highlight the parts you stumble over, the words you trip up on, the sentences that are too long.
[…]
It is a verbal product you are writing in a text format, and you have to do some work to translate it.
You have to work backward from what’s going to appear on-screen
“The other thing I would recommend for video essays is to think through what you want to have on-screen before you record.
Unless you have a teleprompter (which is pretty advanced, I don't have a teleprompter), then you're gonna have to be thoughtful about what stuff you are saying to the camera, barreling the camera [looking directly into the lens] versus what stuff is gonna be b-roll or movie clips or article clips.”
This is just another editing layer: write the essay, turn it into a proper script by doing out-loud readthroughs, then go back and storyboard. My approach here would be to record an entire script, put it in a video editing app, then go through and mark up the timeline with on-screen suggestions: we’ll put a graph next to my head here, let’s find footage of what I’m talking about there and I’ll just be voicing over it, etc.
Then you go back through the script and make notes about certain vocal inflections to affect, pauses, whether or not you need to be looking into the camera, etc.
If you want more YouTube tactics and strategy, check our interviews with YouTuber-musician Andrew Huang and behind-the-scenes YouTube producer Alex Emery.
Listen to the latest episode of Tasteland, the weekly podcast about media, tech, and business hosted by Spotlight editor Francis Zierer and Dirt Media CEO Daisy Alioto.
This week, we’re joined by Josh Zoerner, the man behind Night Gallery, known for bootleg T-shirts (he’s made tour merch for Elton John) and book projects.
We spoke about compiling beautiful YouTube comments, American high schools and generational baggage, what makes for good merch, and more.
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