>>110408729I get his situation. He wants to be creative, but Youtube wants him to be Creative™. Because all promotion is done with bots, if you want to get noticed, you have to be doing videos that are similar to something the bot is already promoting. The bot has to be able to look at your work and say, "Oh, this should be shown to these people".
That's why all the successful Storytime animators look exactly the same. There are people who have made more complex characters, and the "analysis" fag with his cutout avatar has been a thing for longer than Jaiden has been, but the bot is able to link one white blob to another white blob, so all the white blobs got famous BECAUSE they look the same.
So Max is doing things like movie reviews or bait and switch game reviews because he needs the bots to look at the videos and say, "Oh, this should be shown to nerds who like x, y, or z," but he doesn't really want to do derivative work so he quickly slides away from the subject of the review and gets into his own thing.
It is technically clickbaiting, but not in the cancerous sense that actually works. It's in the high effort sense that's borderline copyright infringement because parallel marketing isn't comentative on the initial product (that is, you can't legally use Powerpuff Girls to advertise your own brand if your brand isn't inextricable from a critique on Powerpuff Girls).