We also saw a lot of creators posting vlogs showing how to celebrate a birthday in quarantine. These videos often came from people who were celebrating milestone birthdays, ones they might have had a large party for prior to March. In their videos, they reframed what is typically a very communal experience — a sweet sixteen or twenty-first birthday — in the context of the home, offering inspiration to viewers doing the same.
As you mentioned earlier, CaTs can’t predict the future, but can you give us any sense of which current trends will have staying power?
Maddy: YouTube’s creators and artists are innovators and they’re incredibly adaptive. This was especially evident when the at-home mandates began — they quickly produced content that spoke to the moment in time, from creating workouts that required very little equipment to performing concerts from their living rooms. When creators and artists are able to return to some of their more regular production processes, I think we’ll see them merging the skills and ways of engaging with audiences they’ve picked up over the past few months with what they were already doing on a larger scale in settings outside of their homes.
And just like people organizing a birthday celebration at home or raising chickens in urban settings, we are, in a sense, all like creators: Learning to make the most of our homes and discovering new ways to make the most of our time indoors.
Maddy: I think that parallel makes a lot of sense. For me, YouTube has always served a very useful purpose, showing you how to do things you wouldn’t otherwise know, and at the same time, it’s also provided entertainment. We’ve seen both of those things maximized in uniquely relevant ways over the past few months.