Why did AMVs (kinda) die?

[seasons]

Gigguk doesn't really know, and certainly doesn't care, about any of this stuff. And that video is continually cited as one of the most comprehensive accounts of the entire hobby. He's a terminally online moron, actually!

More AMVs are made today than ever before. Not sure where the perception comes from that they "died out." Maybe TikTok and YT shorts are eating into them, but they are eating into everything, not just AMVs.

[Mango]

Gotta say I did use to watch Gigguk religiously before that video. The content in the video was alright arguably for someone not in our space, but the title really upset me.

I don't expect him to know the ins and outs of our hobby, but coming from a contest coordinator, we get more submissions year after year. The AMVs impress me so much that every time that I fear that "this year's contest is the peak" the editors that swoop in next year prove me wrong. Especially since we opened a new category, AMV Shorts, we just keep seeing growth and astonishing level of care and effort put into folks' entries.

I just found it peculiar that he seemed to know so much, such as Skittles, Whisper of the Beast, AMV Got Talent, and he acknowledged he was impressed with each subsequent entry, he came up with a title such as that. [I especially found it weird he referenced editors who are active to this day, or even the day of when he posted and he would speak like AMVs were and are such a historic relic!]

"Hidden Art of AMVs" felt more apt and would be more respectful imo.

[Cirtcele]

This video from Gigguk hurt more than it helped in my opinion. Definitely a fair sentiment coming from people who enjoyed AMVs in the past or experienced the "mania" from some years ago but I think he's omitting the scene that developped during all these years and didn't take the time to learn more about the subject.

Thank you, I've been saying this. He even says in the video that he never really engaged with the community. He has a surface level knowledge, so it's inaccurate in some places, but still good to showcase some cool videos. It's a case of "He's a little confused, but he's got the spirit".

-

SQ hit the nail on the head about the evolving nature of the hobby. It moves platforms and changes forms and doesn't have a central hub to keep a finger on the pulse of the hobby, but they're still popular!

Here's a recent one with 78 million views that inspired a whole tiktok dance trend. I'll admit it's a bit of an outlier, but if you search Youtube for videos tagged "amv" that were uploaded in the past year, you can still scroll through pages of them that have millions of views - an impressive feat for a platform where they're battling against official music videos, hollywood trailers, tons of ads/brand-sponsored, and influencer content AND constantly fighting DMCA issues. And that's only for ones actually labeled as AMVs, not anime edits or edits.

There's always been a bit of a gatekeeping issue with new editors and new styles and I think that's a contributing factor, but in general I think the "AMVs are dead" perception stems from how most people only engage with AMVs for a few years. It's rare for someone to be a longtime AMV fan and even more rare to be a longtime AMV editor.

As people drift out of whatever subset of the community they were in, activity dries up. Some people move to different groups, different platforms. And if you're not interacting with AMVs/edits on whatever social/video site you like, algorithms stop feeding new recommended AMVs to you. If the editors you follow go inactive (as most do) and you're not looking for new ones, you don't see AMVs in your subscriber feed, either.

Anyway, my advice is to engage a little more with AMVs. Find videos that are to your taste, like, follow, leave a comment, etc and it'll help retrain your algorithm and put more on your radar.

Wow AMVs are actually still alive? I thought edits killed them but it's honestly great that their still going strong.

[seasons]

Wow AMVs are actually still alive? I thought edits killed them but it's honestly great that their still going strong.

Can you share an "edit" or two? I'm just curious.

This is not a trap.

[Rider4Z]

There’s a Gigguk video that talks about this actually, so you’re not the only one picking up on the cultural shift

I've actually never watched it. I found the title laughable.

[PerkyPastry]

Ok guess I fell for the Gigguk propaganda lol. Please accept this meme as my apology:



Thing is, before I ever found that video I DID experience the cultural shift in specifically AMV/fanvid Youtube over the last ~15 years, which had much to do with all the changes the site itself has undergone. Star ratings got removed making it a lot harder for the old algorithm to recommend the things you REALLY liked vs the things you just casually liked. They started cracking down HARD on copyright strikes mostly for music, which killed a lot of channels and disincentivized others from uploading anything with copyrighted music in it. They merged with google and modified/introduced SEO to filter the results with more traffic at the top making it harder to find newer and lesser known content. The recommendations on the right of the video you were watching changed so it stopped ONLY showing the most relevant similar videos and clogged it up with unrelated videos based on your watch history. They removed private messages making it much harder for editors to communicate directly, form friendships and organize group events. They introduced monetization which shifted the userbase culture to want to become a brand of celebrity that necessitates growing further removed from their audience, rather than a hobbyist using a site to share their work with their peers. And the monetization combined with the copyright rules meant that transformative works like AMVs got pushed even more to the background because they can't legally be advertised.


Maybe it's getting a little better now (less threat of your channel getting axed and hashtags are a great implementation for finding & sharing content to the people who want to see it), but over the years Youtube-- as THE most widely known and used internet video hosting site-- has just become a more hostile environment for editors & AMV fans to properly find and grow a community. And like SQ said, for people who primarily use mobile devices and never learned how to navigate older formatted internet sites like this one, the AMV community became even harder for new people to access. I thought it was pretty clear that OP was one of those people, so when I first scanned over the replies in this thread they initially came off to me a bit... I dunno dismissive? Like no one was acknowledging an elephant in the room that someone dared to ask about, even if they called it by the wrong name. But after reading them over again more carefully there have been a lot of good assessments here that address the core of the original question, and helped me with putting some pieces of the puzzle together as well.

[TritioAFB]

The hobby evolves as everything do it in the future. Probably all of us who are commenting here will not be involved anymore with AMVs in 10 years in the future, but we all know there will be New editors that will continue editing even when we decide to move on. As long as anime continue existing

[END films]

Watching the Gigguk video, his point (aside from the click bait-y title) ends up being that they have moved from some of the most popular anime fandom videos to a (still very much alive) small niche. And while yeah, shifting audience taste and patches of copyright issues (though today that one is less of an issue as most music companies that put their stuff on YT Music these days are fine to take the ad rev over taking down the video) have played a role, I feel the biggest reason for the shift was just the general "view count" to "watch time" shift of the YouTube algorithm that happened long ago. As that killed off most of the high effort low runtime content from the mainstream of the biggest video platform. Original animation moved to storytime, gaming moved from frag movies and meme edits to let's play/commentary, and anime moved from AMV's to discussion videos.

Maybe this trend back towards more short form being promoted with TikTok and YT Shorts will help some new AMV makers get traction with a general audience, but imo the default for those videos are so short form I feel making AMV's for those formats really neuters the story telling potential of AMV's, thus only really being great for the visual highlights side of AMV's.

[Diegao]

It’s been a long while since my last post here.

My opinion on this topic when I was still making AMVs was that the main problem of this kind of hobby/art is that you have to make something new out of something that was created and meant for something else. So the editors in the past years tried everything they could and we had a lot of examples like Whisper of the beast, Skittles, Pencilhead, F.Y.C. and so on.
So I believed that AMVs would have died sooner or later because after a while they just start to be boring and I believed that they were something that used to work only in the past. But I didn’t consider two facts.

The first one is that I was bored, and that doesn’t necessarily mean that everyone should’ve feel the same way. I moved on in my life and AMVs just didn’t bring me those emotions anymore and they’re not part of my routine as when I was a young kid. But there are new kids out there and there are a lot of people that still enjoy this hobby like before.

And the second thing is that I am Italian, and in Italy AMVs were never a “thing”, and even if we tried really hard in the past to have something like the contests and the events that are held in America or France, we never made it and because of that we never had the “exposition” of our works. I think real-life contests are the best way to create a community, because you have the possibility to meet new people and make real friends, and you’re more motivated to create because you know that your video will be displayed on big screen and a lot of people will see it live. That was something that I really missed back in the days.

So yeah, I think that in Italy - but I’m not 100% sure because I’m not involved anymore - AMVs are dead as a community-related thing, and maybe there are just some editors that make videos and participate in international contests.
But in the world, and especially in America, you are lucky enough to be alive and well. Maybe bigger and better as ever.

I’m gonna be honest: I’m not a fan of AMVs anymore, I thought that they’re just pointless now, but I stumbled upon Run Makoto Run and it blew my mind. Seeing the name of “qwaqa” again brought me back here and reminded me those days when this was something really important to me and made me happy.

Hope you’ll enjoy what you’re doing as long as possibile!

[Mol]

But in the world, and especially in America, you are lucky enough to be alive and well. Maybe bigger and better as ever.
I’m gonna be honest: I’m not a fan of AMVs anymore, I thought that they’re just pointless now, but I stumbled upon Run Makoto Run and it blew my mind. Seeing the name of “qwaqa” again brought me back here and reminded me those days when this was something really important to me and made me happy.

It's one of the problems to be honest. Back in 2000's when i got into hobby and some random vids it blew my mind you could put up anime with music . Expecting everything to be super creative, composed perfectly with bunch of masks is a bit too critic view. Can't expect that from every video.
I also can still enjoy some simple stuff. If everything would be "super special" then nothing really would be