What is this all about? - Identity conversion on Youtube

I didn't watch this episode all the way through, but I think I remember them talking with her about why she changed her channel's name...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vz1nfUy2pfQ&t=868s

I'm curious myself. In addition to those that you've mentioned, the Timeless Watch Channel is now Oisin O Malley  , not to mention the Andrew Morgan Watches channel that grew out of Watchfinder.

It‘s purely a monetization play. Channels with user names drive more traffic and feed the algorithm.  It’s just the way it goes since YT will prioritize user vids vs “brand” vids.

There was a livestream a couple months back where many discussed the topic. Nico was also recently on the WF podcast and discussed the importance names vs brands play to the algorithm.  

Plays out similar in the car space. Everyone is being pushed in that direction.

I have been curious about that as well, I'm suspecting there are YouTube TOS, or other legal considerations. 

Though, it could also be about building their personal "brand". Most YouTube channels have a finite lifespan before they die out, but if your name is out there, the next channel, or thing you do automatically has a fanbase. My favourite podcast (Modern Wisdom) changed it's YouTube channel name a little while back, and that was one of the reasons.  

As one of the folk in this thread I figured I'd weigh in with the idea of dispelling some myths - especially those around terms of service, monetization, algorithm, and someone even thought taxes.  Its actually much more mundane:

----------------------------

1. Channel name it makes zero difference from a tax/monetization POV - google has all our personal details and there's a whole drama in proving you're a real person before you get anywhere near monetization. Google deals with us as natural persons not channels. The channel name is irrelevant - its literally a user settable field on a page, you could change it every day if you wanted to and have no impact at all on your relationship with google, your google account, ad sence, memberships etc and/or the tax department. 

2. Channel name actually has little to no impact on search results and/or recommendations. These are driven by video title, description, keywords, and perhaps most importantly other people that watch our video and someone else's video.  I've tried searching for channels using their exact name and youtube search gives me videos with that name before channels every single time.  In my case including "Not So Obvious" in a video title or description is far, far more powerful than having it in my channel name.

So if that's why its NOT happening why are we doing it.  I'll talk mostly about myself but chatting with some other creators I've got some ideas I'll share.

1 99% of one-person band watch channels were started with no idea this would grow - every single YouTuber I talk with thought it would all fizzle out in a few weeks. As a result, we routinely have really bad channel names. Kids nicknames, shared insta accounts, things that seemed funny for a video or two. I'll be honest, the instant I saw a white girl with the channel name "gringa" I knew that wasn't going to last in 2022.  A lot of us have been saying for ages - god I wish I could change my channel name. (never realizing just how bloody easy it is - my 'rebrand' - took 10 minutes.) 

2. A lot of us cover a fair bit of ground so a catchy name is tricky. Jody at one more watch does one thing - he reviews affordable watches - that's it. For him his channel name works but for a lot of the rest of us its trickier. I talk about watches, and the industry, and philosophy and collecting mentality and design process and all sort of things, summing that up was a pain.  But my name captures all of it.

3. Branding.  Following on from the previous point for many of us our opinion is the product - ie we are the product - therefore having the channel name as our name just works nicely. you'll note that in pretty much any discussion around YouTubers people drop the channel name in 5 seconds and it quickly becomes jody said, jory ranted, fed did this.......you guys use our names not our channels, why shouldn't we? 

4. Confidence.  A lot of us joined youtube fearful of the result, the stories of the comments can be pretty bad.  Often we didn't want our friends and families to stumble on our secret youtube identity via an accidental search.  Some of us saw the giants like Casey Neistat and asked ourselves 'who are we to simply use our name?'.  You'll note the people making the shift have all got a little time up, have taken the odd hit and survived and realised we simply don't need to hide behind a channel name and if you are putting out content and people are watching be happy with that.

5. (note this is an edit - I forgot to include it earlier) Collabs and livestreams.  As collabs and livestreams are becoming more common I know I've noticed its just easier to move my actual name "pete mcconvill" around rather than "pete from not so obvious watches".

Note - none of this applies once there is more than a single identity attached to the channel 

So why all now? 

Well first of all, this has been a thing since youtube, the channels whose videos I watch every single time joe scott, sean tucker, ben horne, thomas heston, jason vong, julie nolke, ryan George etc have been doing this for ages.  So lets get over the idea this is somehow new.

But why all now? The contagion effect.

As I said earlier a lot of us have been unhappy with our channel names for ages, years even. But it seemed hard, surely there was a lot of administrivia, lost subs, going back over old videos etc?

But then someone did it (britt pierce was the first one I noticed) and I thought - 'christ stop navel gazing and just do it'.

The Adrian did it and I was really annoyed I was still prevaricating but also now worrying about being seen to be jumping on a trend and talking around and around it in my head.  

Then one morning I decided to rip the band aid off and 'right - Im doing it'. Then, when I opened up the channel settings and saw just how easy it was I just made the change.  It is literally about three quick field changes - its harder to edit a video you've already published than change the entire identity of a channel.  That would tell you how unimportant channel name is to youtube.

Frankly - changing the name of my channel and all the associated settings took less time than writing this post.

I respect what you are saying, but while it may not matter for small channels with little to no monetization, I would politely disagree with your first bullet for larger/growing channels based on what many leading “influencers” in the watch, auto, and entertainment community have gone on record with their audience (on video, podcasts, etc) and shared based on advice from leading social media managers in the million plus space, including Nico’s channel, which is about to be the first watch channel with a million subs. Simply listen to his conversation about the algorithm preferences with Andrew from WF.  

There is a specific formula the big agencies are recommending now for the algorithm; be it the youtube face, color of text, and yes; the personalization of the channel Including use of name and face. You don’t have to believe me or them, that’s fine, but I find it hard to believe some of the biggest personalities on the platform, not just watches, would lie about it.

It’s not a coincidence not long after the WF video and numerous live streams with top watch YouTubers discussing this specific topic that it started to happen.

Edit, not saying this applies to all situations, especially established successful channels. 

As one of the folk in this thread I figured I'd weigh in with the idea of dispelling some myths - especially those around terms of service, monetization, algorithm, and someone even thought taxes.  Its actually much more mundane:

----------------------------

1. Channel name it makes zero difference from a tax/monetization POV - google has all our personal details and there's a whole drama in proving you're a real person before you get anywhere near monetization. Google deals with us as natural persons not channels. The channel name is irrelevant - its literally a user settable field on a page, you could change it every day if you wanted to and have no impact at all on your relationship with google, your google account, ad sence, memberships etc and/or the tax department. 

2. Channel name actually has little to no impact on search results and/or recommendations. These are driven by video title, description, keywords, and perhaps most importantly other people that watch our video and someone else's video.  I've tried searching for channels using their exact name and youtube search gives me videos with that name before channels every single time.  In my case including "Not So Obvious" in a video title or description is far, far more powerful than having it in my channel name.

So if that's why its NOT happening why are we doing it.  I'll talk mostly about myself but chatting with some other creators I've got some ideas I'll share.

1 99% of one-person band watch channels were started with no idea this would grow - every single YouTuber I talk with thought it would all fizzle out in a few weeks. As a result, we routinely have really bad channel names. Kids nicknames, shared insta accounts, things that seemed funny for a video or two. I'll be honest, the instant I saw a white girl with the channel name "gringa" I knew that wasn't going to last in 2022.  A lot of us have been saying for ages - god I wish I could change my channel name. (never realizing just how bloody easy it is - my 'rebrand' - took 10 minutes.) 

2. A lot of us cover a fair bit of ground so a catchy name is tricky. Jody at one more watch does one thing - he reviews affordable watches - that's it. For him his channel name works but for a lot of the rest of us its trickier. I talk about watches, and the industry, and philosophy and collecting mentality and design process and all sort of things, summing that up was a pain.  But my name captures all of it.

3. Branding.  Following on from the previous point for many of us our opinion is the product - ie we are the product - therefore having the channel name as our name just works nicely. you'll note that in pretty much any discussion around YouTubers people drop the channel name in 5 seconds and it quickly becomes jody said, jory ranted, fed did this.......you guys use our names not our channels, why shouldn't we? 

4. Confidence.  A lot of us joined youtube fearful of the result, the stories of the comments can be pretty bad.  Often we didn't want our friends and families to stumble on our secret youtube identity via an accidental search.  Some of us saw the giants like Casey Neistat and asked ourselves 'who are we to simply use our name?'.  You'll note the people making the shift have all got a little time up, have taken the odd hit and survived and realised we simply don't need to hide behind a channel name and if you are putting out content and people are watching be happy with that.

5. (note this is an edit - I forgot to include it earlier) Collabs and livestreams.  As collabs and livestreams are becoming more common I know I've noticed its just easier to move my actual name "pete mcconvill" around rather than "pete from not so obvious watches".

Note - none of this applies once there is more than a single identity attached to the channel 

So why all now? 

Well first of all, this has been a thing since youtube, the channels whose videos I watch every single time joe scott, sean tucker, ben horne, thomas heston, jason vong, julie nolke, ryan George etc have been doing this for ages.  So lets get over the idea this is somehow new.

But why all now? The contagion effect.

As I said earlier a lot of us have been unhappy with our channel names for ages, years even. But it seemed hard, surely there was a lot of administrivia, lost subs, going back over old videos etc?

But then someone did it (britt pierce was the first one I noticed) and I thought - 'christ stop navel gazing and just do it'.

The Adrian did it and I was really annoyed I was still prevaricating but also now worrying about being seen to be jumping on a trend and talking around and around it in my head.  

Then one morning I decided to rip the band aid off and 'right - Im doing it'. Then, when I opened up the channel settings and saw just how easy it was I just made the change.  It is literally about three quick field changes - its harder to edit a video you've already published than change the entire identity of a channel.  That would tell you how unimportant channel name is to youtube.

Frankly - changing the name of my channel and all the associated settings took less time than writing this post.

In the youtube watchmakers community there's a "tradition" of not showing your face - just your hands. I personally found that very uninteresting because it was clear to me that a major part of the reason everyone was doing it was so it was easy to narrate with a voice over, hide all of their mistakes in editing, and not worry about lip sync. That's why I made my own watchmaking channel on which I do everything and narrate in realtime. Unfortunately I have no idea what I'm doing on the watchmaking side, but the videos are very real and as you can see I don't hide my mistakes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6OaAgcaWE7w

(I apologize for the spammy link - I can't figure out how to insert a YouTube link without WC making it into a full column-width image link.)

As one of the folk in this thread I figured I'd weigh in with the idea of dispelling some myths - especially those around terms of service, monetization, algorithm, and someone even thought taxes.  Its actually much more mundane:

----------------------------

1. Channel name it makes zero difference from a tax/monetization POV - google has all our personal details and there's a whole drama in proving you're a real person before you get anywhere near monetization. Google deals with us as natural persons not channels. The channel name is irrelevant - its literally a user settable field on a page, you could change it every day if you wanted to and have no impact at all on your relationship with google, your google account, ad sence, memberships etc and/or the tax department. 

2. Channel name actually has little to no impact on search results and/or recommendations. These are driven by video title, description, keywords, and perhaps most importantly other people that watch our video and someone else's video.  I've tried searching for channels using their exact name and youtube search gives me videos with that name before channels every single time.  In my case including "Not So Obvious" in a video title or description is far, far more powerful than having it in my channel name.

So if that's why its NOT happening why are we doing it.  I'll talk mostly about myself but chatting with some other creators I've got some ideas I'll share.

1 99% of one-person band watch channels were started with no idea this would grow - every single YouTuber I talk with thought it would all fizzle out in a few weeks. As a result, we routinely have really bad channel names. Kids nicknames, shared insta accounts, things that seemed funny for a video or two. I'll be honest, the instant I saw a white girl with the channel name "gringa" I knew that wasn't going to last in 2022.  A lot of us have been saying for ages - god I wish I could change my channel name. (never realizing just how bloody easy it is - my 'rebrand' - took 10 minutes.) 

2. A lot of us cover a fair bit of ground so a catchy name is tricky. Jody at one more watch does one thing - he reviews affordable watches - that's it. For him his channel name works but for a lot of the rest of us its trickier. I talk about watches, and the industry, and philosophy and collecting mentality and design process and all sort of things, summing that up was a pain.  But my name captures all of it.

3. Branding.  Following on from the previous point for many of us our opinion is the product - ie we are the product - therefore having the channel name as our name just works nicely. you'll note that in pretty much any discussion around YouTubers people drop the channel name in 5 seconds and it quickly becomes jody said, jory ranted, fed did this.......you guys use our names not our channels, why shouldn't we? 

4. Confidence.  A lot of us joined youtube fearful of the result, the stories of the comments can be pretty bad.  Often we didn't want our friends and families to stumble on our secret youtube identity via an accidental search.  Some of us saw the giants like Casey Neistat and asked ourselves 'who are we to simply use our name?'.  You'll note the people making the shift have all got a little time up, have taken the odd hit and survived and realised we simply don't need to hide behind a channel name and if you are putting out content and people are watching be happy with that.

5. (note this is an edit - I forgot to include it earlier) Collabs and livestreams.  As collabs and livestreams are becoming more common I know I've noticed its just easier to move my actual name "pete mcconvill" around rather than "pete from not so obvious watches".

Note - none of this applies once there is more than a single identity attached to the channel 

So why all now? 

Well first of all, this has been a thing since youtube, the channels whose videos I watch every single time joe scott, sean tucker, ben horne, thomas heston, jason vong, julie nolke, ryan George etc have been doing this for ages.  So lets get over the idea this is somehow new.

But why all now? The contagion effect.

As I said earlier a lot of us have been unhappy with our channel names for ages, years even. But it seemed hard, surely there was a lot of administrivia, lost subs, going back over old videos etc?

But then someone did it (britt pierce was the first one I noticed) and I thought - 'christ stop navel gazing and just do it'.

The Adrian did it and I was really annoyed I was still prevaricating but also now worrying about being seen to be jumping on a trend and talking around and around it in my head.  

Then one morning I decided to rip the band aid off and 'right - Im doing it'. Then, when I opened up the channel settings and saw just how easy it was I just made the change.  It is literally about three quick field changes - its harder to edit a video you've already published than change the entire identity of a channel.  That would tell you how unimportant channel name is to youtube.

Frankly - changing the name of my channel and all the associated settings took less time than writing this post.

As one of the folk in this thread I figured I'd weigh in with the idea of dispelling some myths - especially those around terms of service, monetization, algorithm, and someone even thought taxes.  Its actually much more mundane:

----------------------------

1. Channel name it makes zero difference from a tax/monetization POV - google has all our personal details and there's a whole drama in proving you're a real person before you get anywhere near monetization. Google deals with us as natural persons not channels. The channel name is irrelevant - its literally a user settable field on a page, you could change it every day if you wanted to and have no impact at all on your relationship with google, your google account, ad sence, memberships etc and/or the tax department. 

2. Channel name actually has little to no impact on search results and/or recommendations. These are driven by video title, description, keywords, and perhaps most importantly other people that watch our video and someone else's video.  I've tried searching for channels using their exact name and youtube search gives me videos with that name before channels every single time.  In my case including "Not So Obvious" in a video title or description is far, far more powerful than having it in my channel name.

So if that's why its NOT happening why are we doing it.  I'll talk mostly about myself but chatting with some other creators I've got some ideas I'll share.

1 99% of one-person band watch channels were started with no idea this would grow - every single YouTuber I talk with thought it would all fizzle out in a few weeks. As a result, we routinely have really bad channel names. Kids nicknames, shared insta accounts, things that seemed funny for a video or two. I'll be honest, the instant I saw a white girl with the channel name "gringa" I knew that wasn't going to last in 2022.  A lot of us have been saying for ages - god I wish I could change my channel name. (never realizing just how bloody easy it is - my 'rebrand' - took 10 minutes.) 

2. A lot of us cover a fair bit of ground so a catchy name is tricky. Jody at one more watch does one thing - he reviews affordable watches - that's it. For him his channel name works but for a lot of the rest of us its trickier. I talk about watches, and the industry, and philosophy and collecting mentality and design process and all sort of things, summing that up was a pain.  But my name captures all of it.

3. Branding.  Following on from the previous point for many of us our opinion is the product - ie we are the product - therefore having the channel name as our name just works nicely. you'll note that in pretty much any discussion around YouTubers people drop the channel name in 5 seconds and it quickly becomes jody said, jory ranted, fed did this.......you guys use our names not our channels, why shouldn't we? 

4. Confidence.  A lot of us joined youtube fearful of the result, the stories of the comments can be pretty bad.  Often we didn't want our friends and families to stumble on our secret youtube identity via an accidental search.  Some of us saw the giants like Casey Neistat and asked ourselves 'who are we to simply use our name?'.  You'll note the people making the shift have all got a little time up, have taken the odd hit and survived and realised we simply don't need to hide behind a channel name and if you are putting out content and people are watching be happy with that.

5. (note this is an edit - I forgot to include it earlier) Collabs and livestreams.  As collabs and livestreams are becoming more common I know I've noticed its just easier to move my actual name "pete mcconvill" around rather than "pete from not so obvious watches".

Note - none of this applies once there is more than a single identity attached to the channel 

So why all now? 

Well first of all, this has been a thing since youtube, the channels whose videos I watch every single time joe scott, sean tucker, ben horne, thomas heston, jason vong, julie nolke, ryan George etc have been doing this for ages.  So lets get over the idea this is somehow new.

But why all now? The contagion effect.

As I said earlier a lot of us have been unhappy with our channel names for ages, years even. But it seemed hard, surely there was a lot of administrivia, lost subs, going back over old videos etc?

But then someone did it (britt pierce was the first one I noticed) and I thought - 'christ stop navel gazing and just do it'.

The Adrian did it and I was really annoyed I was still prevaricating but also now worrying about being seen to be jumping on a trend and talking around and around it in my head.  

Then one morning I decided to rip the band aid off and 'right - Im doing it'. Then, when I opened up the channel settings and saw just how easy it was I just made the change.  It is literally about three quick field changes - its harder to edit a video you've already published than change the entire identity of a channel.  That would tell you how unimportant channel name is to youtube.

Frankly - changing the name of my channel and all the associated settings took less time than writing this post.

Honestly, I never liked the name @Watch.gringa.

As a Latino person, witnessing a white-privileged person using this term was a bit offensive, not only in terms of cultural appropriation but also using it in the context of flexing expensive luxury goods.