Matt and Demolition Ranch has absolutely defined - not REdefined, but DEFINED - what is a YouTube gun channel. They grew from a “were a bunch of young dudes who like guns” into a refined process of content creation. Other channels floundered at the early phase, other channels have tried to specialize into niches, still others try to jump in at the endgame where Demo Ranch arrived, but it’s well demonstrated that no others have had the same consistent and persistent success. It’s not necessarily a turnkey, easily repeatable process (and there ARE profitable turnkey social media templates out there), but what they did was what it took to define a genre. They sold a sufficient volume of content which was sufficiently intriguing to their target demographic, and did it better than anyone else. However, they’ve reached that asymptotic reality of evolving interests of the viewers, there’s only so much more they can do, and there’s far, far less “more” left than there was a year ago. Covid spurred a LOT of new competition in the space, including a lot of folks who are not afraid to go DEEPLY into debt to create brands, and there’s a lot of chaos coming in social media industry - and they just don’t have the room to make those attention grabbing steps without undermining integrity even further. Fighting content creators with brand investors and broadly available storyboarding and performance analytics by AI, life just got more difficult at the top. Monetization - sustained monetization - is always going to go to folks willing to earn it, and while it’s becoming easier and easier to get monetized, it’s harder and harder to stay at the top of the game.
Retiring now - or soon - is the right move. Going out on top is the right move, as it prevents the vacuum effect of “this channel is now better than that channel,” which artificially spurs another channel higher in the algorithm, and artificially boosts revenue for someone else who didn’t necessarily deserve the leg up to the top of the podium (whichever channel gets the first 1% advantage gains 15% in a day). Instead, usurpers to the throne are left defeating the lead ceiling of “yeah, they’re great, but Demo Ranch was awesome,” and the next “top gun channel” has to earn every inch.
