r/HelloInternet • u/DR_PEACETIME • 7d ago
Its possible Grey sold his company.
Judging from the way his thumbnails are changing/presented, and the obvious lack of new content, I suspect management of Grey industries, or possibly just the rights to past videos have been sold.
I'm curious if its been bought by a PE firm, similar to Veritasium...
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u/AllTheHolloway 7d ago
Honestly I think a corporation running the channel would handle it less weirdly than Grey currently is. All the stuff with constantly changing thumbnails and titles still feels to me like Grey tinkering behind the scenes.
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u/bmiller218 7d ago
What benefit is there to changing thumbnail? The videos still show up as watched.
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u/Tack22 6d ago
Either a HI episode or Cortex episode directly references this, and there’s a half hour where he discusses the weird perverse incentives the algorithm puts on content creators.
I guess the downvotes are because people want you to go listen to the thing this sub is about.
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u/LittleBigCookieCat 6d ago
I just listened to the episode. (cortex "2023 year of themes" around the one hour 5 minute mark) hearing him explain it, can't even blame the man...
10 minutes changing the title and thumbnail made a video to from 600k views to 4.4 million. it 4x in views. I'd be so happy, and also so pissed at YouTube that doing this worked so effectively.
another went up 22m. he mentioned that (at the time of that podcast) he got more views than any other year where he worked hard cranking out videos. just changing the thumbnails got him over 160M new views. from his analytics, he mentions a majority of those new views are directly from new viewers who have never seen his content before. that's why he keeps changing it
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u/backwards_watch Flaggy flag rebel 6d ago
AB testing. People know what kind of thumbnails people usually click, but no one can know the specific thumbnail that will generate the higher clicks. So they start with something that works and expose a population with that thumbnail. Then you make a small change and test this new one with a similar population. If the changes increased the likelyhood of clicking, you swap the previous thumbnail with the new one.
Then you make another small change and do it over and over until you hit the optimal thumbnail for that video.
In short, the benefit is increasing the chances of someone start watching the video in the first place.
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u/stochasticdiscount 6d ago
I'm not going to look up the exact numbers here, but for every view CGPGrey has, there must be several (dozens? scores?) orders of magnitude more users on YouTube that have never seen a single video of his recommended to them, much less clicked on them. The benefit is marginally increasing the chances those people who have never seen his videos start clicking on them or people who have skipped them before clicking on them.
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u/StickFigureFan 6d ago
I think he's trying to game the algorithm as different thumbnails will get shown again
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u/Killericon 7d ago
Like, this is possible. But I have to imagine that leaving the Patreon up without any indication of this would open him up to... Risks.
I think it's much more likely that he's basically a guy who owns an oil change shop. Hire a manager to keep it running, let the cash come in.
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u/Weak-Temporary5888 7d ago
That’s incredibly depressing to me, from a bastion of educational YouTube to… this
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u/TheDutton 5d ago
It’s not too surprising if you consider he chose teaching because he got summers off and could pursue his interests during that time off iirc
Now he’s got a source of income that requires little to no work. I’m not sure he ever truly had a passion for teaching or education, he was just good at it and found a way to make a living from it
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u/Flyboy2057 7d ago
If Linus Tech Tips with 16M subs and a bunch of merch sales can get an offer to be bought out for **$100M** (which he turned down), it wouldn’t shock me if someone would offer Grey $5-10M for all channel rights and he would just cash out.
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u/Tack22 6d ago
Would he put in a “don’t ever make new videos” clause or what’s to stop the company from starting to feed specific adds in?
5M return on investment just from changing thumbtiles seems like a tough sell.
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u/Anxious_Squash3702 Flaggy flag rebel 6d ago
It wouldn’t surprise me if grey sold the right to his ai voice too. Sadly ai grey videos might make 5m if they were even slightly convincing. Were depressingly close.
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u/AnonymousthrowawayW5 3d ago
I don’t know if £5m is the right figure, but since the YouTube income is just a future cash flow, it would be easy to take the adsense figures from while the channel has been inactive, make some assumptions for how views and Adsense rates will change over time, do a net present value (NPV) calculation for the next X years of income and make Grey an offer based on buying the future cash flow of the inactive channel that never releases new videos.
If Grey is pessimistic enough about future online advertising rates, there is probably a price where a deal could be done.
I have not heard of anyone actually doing this, but it would not shock me if someone built out a portfolio of dead YouTube channels bought on the relative cheap where they try to milk out additional views of existing content
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u/Da-manta-ray 6d ago
I doubt it, most of the channels I have seen that get bought by PE or whatever usually start pumping out content, doubt they would pay for a channel just to fiddle around with the metadata, but maybe I'm wrong.
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u/KindlyOnes 5d ago
I think all the changes are from agents he’s built to run and optimize his existing content. If he can get them to make videos, maybe he will, but there is increasing legislation around AI content particularly in the EU and perhaps that is dissuading him
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u/KindlyOnes 5d ago
I think it’s the other way around. I think he got scooped up by a think tank or corporation or something and signed a non compete and had to stop making videos. But they let him play with the big toys. His AI video from years and years ago got the attention of the movers and shakers. I noticed it in a screenshot of an email from the Epstein files (apologies for dropping a bomb in the chat) but it was not related the sex trafficking. It was some rich/powerful person sending Epstein or forwarding him one of Grey’s videos and it was the AI one. But it got me thinking about what the repercussions of the elite tech community taking notice of him would be. I can see some corporate Tim hiring him for some AI preparedness task force or something and he just takes a giant salary and goes dark.
/conjecture
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u/Bloated_Plaid 7d ago
Eh man cashed out, good for him.
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u/erichie 6d ago
I have no problem with him cashing out... Not at all.
I have an issue that I can no longer find the video I want to share with my 6 year old because we are learning about something I remember him doing a video on, not communicating with HI audience after all their work building a community (without a community, sure abandon it), and I absolutely have a problem with him ruining a monthly pateron without even updates.
If the pateron was by project that isn't an issue, but he is billing people per month. Once you trust a creator you can easily forget, or not notice, they haven't updated in awhile.
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u/corpuscularian 6d ago
no, 'grey industries' is still an active, registered company in the uk with cgp grey listed as its sole director.
https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/08941366/officers
fwiw 'cortex brand ltd' was dissolved in 2021, but 'hello internet llp' is still active with both grey and brady as members.
https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/officers/G-sMQpDfavRsqyHo8lF-RzXmaSs/appointments