What The Heck Happened To Mountain Bike YouTube？

Old mountain bike YouTube is dead. Not dying. Dead. 2015 through 2020 was a golden age of mountain biking videos. They were shorter, more exciting, more real. There was a different cast of characters who entered the space for all the right reasons. And then, something changed. Slowly at first, and then fast. For a time, commenters and Redditors expressed nostalgia, frustration, and even anger. It was greed. It was laziness. But today, that change is way in the past. We've reached a new normal. And with hindsight, we can do a proper autopsy on the old mountain bike YouTube, and I'm the guy to do it because I was there. So I'll tell you what happened from my perspective and why some of this might actually be good. Many of you remember that golden age, which started around 2015, but before the golden age was medieval mountain bike YouTube, which refers to 2009 to 2014. I wasn't really there for that, but Jordan Boostmaster was. There were others, but that's the first one to pop into my mind. He had already garnered a following on Pinkbike, proving there was an appetite for bike content made by regular people. But if you remember the medieval period, it was a transition. DVDs and high-production videos featuring living gods gave way to mortals, like Jordan, who self-published their own content. And by 2015, that was all moving from forums, websites, and DVDs to YouTube. And quickly, people like me, Jordan, and Phil Metz, had all mastered the art of not making any money. I think Global Mountain Bike Network was the only one with a viable business model for YouTube videos, and they did it by being professional and using presenters who were actual pro riders. The bike industry wasn't yet ready to support random people with homegrown followings, but that was kind of a blessing in disguise. Around that time, the YouTube Partner Program became available to anyone with enough views. Suddenly, it didn't matter if you won races or rode for an actual bike company. All that mattered was that people watched you and YouTube would pay you directly. I had been posting videos for a year and had 10,000 subscribers before I even bothered trying applying for monetization. I made $360 that first month, solidifying my decision to keep putting off real work to shoot videos. That Partner Program fueled content that would have never existed otherwise, and it laid bare some astonishing facts that legacy bike media took years to accept. Fact number one, regular people will watch bike content. At the time, it was mostly experts posting videos. They were speaking like Albert Einstein when the people really wanted Bill Nye the Science Guy. Fact number two, when given the choice, the audience prefers nerds. The cool kids are too concerned with optics to give you anything real. They're injection molded copies of each other. The audience wants something real, and it turns out that most real mountain bikers are actually nerds. Astonishing fact number three, bikes are fun. The serious pretentious bike content of the time was totally incongruent with the reality on the ground where the main thing people took really seriously was having fun and enjoying bicycles. Fact number four, a $5,000 bike is not entry-level. That one should be self-explanatory. Now, if you think these facts are a joke or that I'm being sarcastic, time travel back to the beginning of 2015 and peruse YouTube, you will find the same pretentious gatekeeping mindset that gave bike shops a bad reputation. A huge audience of motivated, capable, fun-seeking mountain bikers was totally dormant, about to explode like an active volcano. And practically no one was as surprised as I was. In 2015, I posted a bunny hop tutorial wearing Teva sandals and no helmet. I was in town by some train tracks on an entry-level hardtail. I was a nerd with all the wrong gear, doing all the wrong things the wrong way. It was like shining a flashlight in the corner and illuminating a million silent people who for some reason wanted to watch that. Even the experts who succeeded were being nerds about it. Just look at Park Tool Company. What we're going to use is our cable tester and find out. Yep, it appears that this cable is bad. You would think they were taking it too far, but to this day, they have the most successful repair videos of anyone in the industry because they're nerds. And then there were skills with Phil. People were voting with their clicks. They wanted someone real who spoke their language and who genuinely cared. That tone had never been tried before in cycling, and it wasn't the only thing brewing. YouTube was the technology that made this possible, but another technology was changing the way we shared rides. Enter the chest-mounted gimbal, which took shaky GoPro footage and made it buttery smooth. At the time, this was the best action camera on the market. It was really good, the Hero 4 Black, but it had no stabilization. Not crappy stabilization or insufficient stabilization. No stabilization whatsoever. And this chest-mounted gimbal would just hold it still, but you had to carry around a lot of stuff. Those gimbals were expensive, heavy, and required constant battery changes and babysitting, but those willing to bear the cost were rewarded. Nate Hills was riding stuff most mountain bikers had never seen in real life. It was a novelty that had never been seen from that perspective. Then, Brian, BKXE, started his channel, vowing to visit a new destination every week. There was Trail Peaks, BCPOV, and a whole new cast of characters who were essentially unknown before they strapped gimbals to their chests. My friend Alex, the Singletrack Sampler, he was one of the first guys to blend that smooth point-of-view footage with legitimate vlogging. And he wasn't some polished athlete. He was homeless, living out of a Mazda hatchback. These point-of-view videos led to an explosion in mountain bike tourism, the likes of which we had never seen before. Municipalities took notice and realized people would visit if you built stuff. They invited people like me to showcase what they had on offer, thus fueling this new machine with, again, another source of revenue outside the actual bike industry. The momentum was completely insane, but two really big things were about to happen, things that would cause an absolute explosion, for better or worse. Thing number one, better stabilization. By 2018, the chest-mounted gimbal was pretty much on life support. You could take a Hero 7 and mount it to the chin or your full-face helmet, and it was totally watchable. Everyone was posting everything. Every trail, every bike park, every secret trail, ride-along videos had become fully democratized. What was once a handful of creators posting point-of-view videos became the predominant format in mountain bike YouTube. Thing number two, the industry caught on and started sponsoring video creators. Before that, you needed big views to do YouTube full-time, and suddenly, the bike industry was able to supplement your endeavors. That was cool. I remember how professional riders reacted to this, many of them barely earning enough to survive, and then suddenly, an idiot bleeding his brake levers with baby oil was taking a slice of the pie. But before long, they were joining YouTube, and today, you need a social media following to be a professional rider. Even the cool kids are on YouTube. But those two things, the democratization of POV videos and the bike industry coming on board, caused an explosion. That was mostly good, and many would argue it was the height of the Golden Age. We were all escalating everything. As I explained in my last video, I had built a mountain bike trail in my backyard and set up a workshop, and then I moved to a bigger house with a bigger workshop. Alexander went from being homeless in a Mazda to being homeless in a van. In fact, everyone was getting vans. Everyone was getting workshops, everyone was building trails, and everything was still new. We were still in uncharted waters, and it was still exciting. But we were about to experience yet another boost, a torrent of new content that would break the dam. Here's what happened. First, I'm going to say something that could get me into big trouble. I know because it's the same thing Pinkbike got in trouble for saying. I'm just going to word it differently. It has to do with those POV videos and how they got democratized. That was overall a good thing, but it had an unintended consequence. Back when chest-mounted gimbals made ride-along videos difficult to create, they also, in a way, controlled the quality of them. Creators were spending $1,000 on delicate gear, lugging it around and essentially ruining their rides to create videos, so they tended to make it worthwhile. They'd only shoot it at an epic location with good lighting and everything dialed. Once the moat dried up and the cost of a POV video came down, everything was fair game, and we began to see a little bit of bumbling. Yeah, Pinkbike's delivery was tone-deaf, but in hindsight, they were referring to something very real. Videos of 40-minute unedited rides through local XC trails soon outnumbered the high-effort POV videos, and before long, viewers began to pattern match. A POV thumbnail became visual shorthand for low-effort content. For every well-planned, tightly-edited POV video you posted, there were a hundred people bumbling around ordinary trails. This was a good thing in many ways, as researching trails became easier than ever, but users clicking suggested videos were learning not to click anything that looked like POV. And furthermore, with any amount of effort, 6 to 10 minutes is the sweet spot for a pure ride-along video, but that soon became unviable, as YouTube made watch time the core of their algorithm, and thus, POV videos grew longer, which caused boredom and motion sickness, further training the audience not to click. Even those of us posting traditional third-person content had to continue increasing video length. I started with 2 to 4-minute videos and eventually made them 8 to 10 minutes, and then 10 to 15, and now I'm regularly breaking 20 minutes. Many say this is a good thing, but it's also a large barrier to entry. To plan, shoot, and produce an engaging 20-minute video is a lot of work. People were starting to get burned out, and then more gasoline was thrown on the fire. Vertical short-form content, which started on Vine and moved on to TikTok, Instagram, and eventually YouTube Shorts, created a divide. All the sensational stuff, like crashes and cool sections of trail, went there, and it was essentially watched for free. No longer could you post a 20-minute vlog, where at 17 minutes and 30 seconds, someone almost falls off a cliff. Right, the thumbnail would be the guy almost falling off a cliff, and you would watch the whole thing just to get to that moment. That became a 90-second vertical video. If a thumbnail showed the guy crashing, and then the timestamp said 22 minutes, nobody was clicking. You could watch a hundred crashes in 22 minutes on Instagram. But despite all these changes and challenges, the money was flowing in, people were quitting their day jobs. We were all finding ways to adapt, and most mountain bike creators found it easier than ever to justify their work. And then the pandemic happened. As companies began allowing more and more people to work from home, a lot of them just pretended to work, and they made YouTube videos. We saw an explosion of new creators, but even more, part-time creators going full-time. With people getting paid to stay home, bikes were selling out like crazy, and the companies who kept up with inventory had more capital than ever. The pizza pie was growing, and more creators were getting slices. Videos were longer, budgets were higher, and the cool kids were back. Whether or not this was good, it bore little resemblance to old mountain bike YouTube. Old mountain bike YouTube, the golden age, was over. The creators who came up in the golden age were all still there. Sure, our content looked a little different, and we found ourselves in an increasingly competitive landscape, but we were all alive and well. Many creators who had been making videos in their spare time, fueled by passion, were years deep in doing it full-time. Some creators, including me, were just trying to keep their numbers up to fuel the machine. Some of us had hired camera operators and editors. And then, the rug was pulled out from under us. You know, the term bikepocalypse seems silly now. I mean, how long does an apocalypse actually last? It's still apparently in progress, but that bike boom fueled by the pandemic was suddenly over and budgets collapsed. I won't go into the details because so many other creators have covered this, but it was a real thing. It gives me no pleasure to announce today that I'm no longer working with Diamondback Bicycles. They're no longer sponsoring the channel. When I lost my bike sponsor, or I should say, when I finally lost my bike sponsor, I wasn't actually that surprised. I could see the writing on the wall. It was a setback for me, but I was lucky enough to not actually need them to continue running my business. For other creators, sponsors were what made full-time video creation possible. And as you know, creators began dropping like flies. But it was a lot of things. Increased competition, viewer fatigue, the democratization of every kind of bike content, the stratification of long-form and short-form video, and of course, the bloodbath that was and still is the bikepocalypse. It's over. It's never coming back. It was the circumstances that created the golden age of mountain bike YouTube, and now those circumstances are gone, and with them, the kind of content some of you are nostalgic for. Now back in 2020, when the golden age of mountain bike YouTube started to fizzle out, it kind of changed into a transitional period, and I think that transitional period is actually over, too. I'm not going to deny that that period included a bloodbath. I actually came pretty close to getting caught up in it, but the dust has settled. There's a calm. We've entered a new era of mountain bike YouTube. I don't know what to call it, but clearly the space has matured. Everything that was new in the golden age, we now take for granted, and we find ourselves in a world where e-mountain bikes outsell analog. We have artificial intelligence. Cell phone video is nearly indistinguishable from real cameras, and the business model for full-time creators is well-established. Those of you who watch the golden age creators as kids are now in your 20s. You're the future. You're the present. You need to operate within this new reality. I remember back in 2015, 2016, there were like two mountain bike podcasts, and now there are hundreds, and many of them are actually really good. And honesty is now a more valuable currency than ever. I found recently that screenshots perform better than highly edited thumbnails. High production thumbnails are now visual shorthand for AI. Even if you didn't create them with AI, high production signals low effort. You can't trick people into watching videos anymore. Clickbait gets buried. YouTube transcribes and analyzes your video. You just have to make a good video now that delivers exactly what you promised, or it becomes invisible. YouTube buries it. And while the golden age is long gone, many who came up during that time have adapted. Jordan Boostmaster is still as great as ever, and the single-track sampler is no longer homeless. He just redid his basement. And Lone Ranger is more relevant than he has ever been, despite posting a video that he was kind of quitting, but not. Sid and Mackie, too, they've always brought viewers along on their journeys and relied on storytelling, which is more important than ever. Many of my friends, like Eric Porter, have found new sponsors and continue to thrive. Being genuine is now more important than it ever was. Old Mountain Bike YouTube is dead, but many have emerged from the ashes and adapted. Everyone's burnt out on the Mr. Beast era sensationalism, and they want something real. And I don't know about you, but I'm happy to be making videos in this era. I'm really starting to get used to it. Look, the golden age ended for real reasons that we just discussed, but even if history panned out differently, nothing stays new forever. We all have recency bias, which is why so many people love old music. Everyone remembers the Beatles and Bob Dylan, but do you know what they don't remember? Exactly. You'll always remember the very best of an era, and you look back thinking everything we have now must be crap, but the truth is, you're just seeing all of it with no filter. When we look back at this era, we'll remember the very best of it. And if the current batch of mountain bike creators leverage honesty and transparency and all the physical tools we didn't have back in the golden age, they'll continue inspiring people to ride bikes. Thanks for riding with me today, and I'll see you next time.