Brianna Moore on Authenticity, Burnout & Why Your Niche Is You

Brianna Moore, who is also known as BranimationsYT, is not following the standard creator template. She does not do pre-recorded intros. Her videos have no retention-edited jump cuts every two seconds. She does not have a niche. She creates content talking about games, consciousness, literacy, artificial intelligence and anything else she has in her mind that day. She has one video that had over half a million views, and it is an hour long that was posted late after a drama cycle and was unscripted. That content was successful because it felt real.

In this episode, Brianna discusses what authenticity actually means as a content tactic, rather than the trendy definition. It is the unglamorous and sometimes painful process of saying what you actually mean and thinking on camera, dealing with burnout and growing an audience that likes you for being you rather than just what you do.

Being authentic is not about oversharing and the distinction is very significant

One of the most frequent pitfalls for content creators that Brianna encounters is being unable to see the distinction between being authentic and being overly honest.

“Being authentic to me is just telling your truth, and not flowering your language and not hedging yourself for anyone.”

— Brianna Moore

It is a more restricted definition than most would anticipate. It does not include sharing everything you are feeling on camera. It is clear to Brianna that you should not do so: do not share your feelings on camera that you have not gone through yet. Do not make it public if it could endanger you mentally or physically, and do not do so while it is still going on for you. This is where the line for oversharing begins. She has a video that will be coming out about how her friend passed away, but she is posting it because she has already learned something from that, and it is something she believes could help teach people. It is the past tense that is the operative word in that. She learned from it.

This is important because a lot of creators either have vulnerability that is fake or are so hesitant to share that they sound like they are speaking to a press release. Ideally, you want content that is authentic, but also not so fresh that it can’t offer value to someone else.

The “influencer voice” problem

Also, Brianna touched on the “influencer voice.” That slightly uptempo, almost over-enthusiastic intonation which seemed to take over YouTube somewhere between 2016 to 2018. While recording, Brianna noticed herself reverting to that tone, and just stopped in her tracks.

“I kind of imagine I’m talking to my friends. You shouldn’t have to put on a face because they vibe with you.”

— Brianna Moore

It all sort of worked when it was a novelty, of course. Your average person just didn’t know the difference. Now they do. The age of lifestyle aspirational content being a one-size-fits all approach is starting to fade for many parts of YouTube, and the creators who stayed true to themselves will remain.

The burnout that comes from chasing analytics

About seven or eight months before this conversation started, Brianna started making videos about YouTube censorship. And those videos performed well. And the trap snapped shut.

“As soon as I seen those videos do well, something in my brain was like, well, I gotta make more videos about this. And eventually it burnt out because I was making videos about so many heavy topics that it was just draining.”

— Brianna Moore

It’s a universal experience that creators go through the more they start getting traction. If a couple of their videos start performing well and the numbers start rising, they tend to follow the data and continue creating more like that. Except this “more” of the same is often a slightly more off-brand version of whatever was originally working, and the creator is chasing a number instead of making something they’re genuinely passionate about. The content creation well runs dry really fast that way.

Steady output beats analytics chasing

Brianna’s point about video momentum is worth dwelling on. Even if someone were to create ten good videos in a row, and then they burned out and stopped posting for two months, the algorithm will lose interest in their content. It’s the continuous and sustainable content creation that stems from someone’s genuine interests that will actually outperform chasing that number. It’s not particularly exciting insight, but it’s the one that keeps a channel going past year two.

It’s also worth noting that while Brianna feels like she’s not really a slave to the analytics, even when she tried to go back to creating what she wanted to she admitted that she was still still influenced by the CTR and view counts. And it’s that sort of honesty about the whole situation—even if she’s only partially able to escape the trap—that’s the thing about Brianna’s channel that feels most like it’s coming from a real person who’s experienced what her audience is experiencing too.

Why the Niche Advice Is Wrong (At Least for Some Creators)

If Brianna could throw out one piece of advice creators always hear, it’s “pick a niche.” She can’t. Her channel is about gaming, existential philosophy, social commentary, AI, literacy, neurodivergence, and personal stories. It has no neat box. And that’s okay, because the “niche” she talks about is really just you.

“People come — or should come — for you. As long as you’re doing what you’re interested in, the niche doesn’t really matter.”

— Brianna Moore

That’s what several major creators have confided to me: a really specific focus on topics can actually hurt channels in the early going by artificially constraining the content into things that feel forced or mechanical. If you’re really into three subjects, and you only let yourself mention one of them, that limitation seeps into the energy of the video.

The discoverability counter-argument

The main counter-argument here is discoverability: it’s easier for the algorithm to slot a video in a clearly defined niche, easier for new viewers to understand a channel in three seconds, and a lot simpler for a channel in the beginning than a channel with a few hundred thousand subscribers. Brianna agrees that it takes time for the algorithm to understand what a channel is about, and that the first five to ten videos serve that purpose, but to her it’s just something that wears off.

It’s possible for some people to be really multi-interested, and some of the most fascinating channels are people who genuinely like a wide variety of subjects. A niche may just be the thing that keeps a channel alive until that channel finds its niche.

On Editing: Less Is Often More Honest

Brianna edits her own videos, which she’s been doing since she started at 12 (she’s now 23). She tried a script before. She tried reactive content. She tried chasing trends. She’s found that filming yourself on camera and just talking is the best option.

She’s intentionally minimal about what she adds in editing. She does cut out long silence that’s there for no reason. She uses black screens with text for emphasis. But she doesn’t really do the super-fast jump cut style.

“I hate retention editing or the TikTok editing, I try to avoid that at all costs if I can.”

— Brianna Moore

Brianna’s point about Markiplier’s original Five Nights at Freddy’s videos being great in part because they didn’t include a lot of jump cuts seems like a pretty useful point in this context. It’s not just that “raw” editing works. It works because of specific choices: to let things play out, to not treat every 30 seconds of silence as a retention opportunity.

What editing can and can’t do

She also makes a few points about what editing can, and can’t, do:

• Over-editing is often the result of anxiety, of not trusting the ideas you’re trying to present enough. When you add that many cuts in, it comes across.
• Short stumbles and pauses are often more relatable than polished speech. A lot of what we do is to signal that there’s a human on the other side of this, not a performance.
• Editing can’t really make bad content into good content. Editing can only really make weak content stick around just long enough for the viewer to leave.

When forced to rank what matters most between ideas, personality, and editing, she says idea and personality are equal on top, and editing is far off in the back.

“If you have a good enough idea, then you don’t need edits to make it good. The personality, it’s kind of like the icing on the cake. You’re gonna eat the cake regardless of the icing, but the icing just helps.”

— Brianna Moore

Navigating the Right (and Sometimes Wrong) Audience

The video that propelled Brianna to fame came as a belated entry into the online discourse surrounding the controversial game developer Bad Parenting. At the time, her channel had fewer than 10,000 subscribers, yet the clip racked up more than 500,000 views. It succeeded, she believes, because she took a more forceful and unapologetic stance than most other channels covering the story.

However, that very success also landed her in front of viewers who were not her demographic. She often remarks that one of her channels’ comment sections appears to be split: on one side are the viewers who ‘get’ what she’s attempting to do, and on the other, those who do not understand her content. She has embraced this, and considers this part of the creator’s journey rather than a reason to feel discouraged. Her advice for fledgling content creators worried about reaching the wrong audience is simple: be confident in your creation and publish it. Allow the algorithm to take its time in determining which viewers belong to your content, and they will slowly begin to filter in over time. Brianna even says that hate comments still count towards engagement and signal to the algorithm that the content is interesting enough to provoke a reaction. It is a harsh truth of the internet, but it is how the algorithm works.

Maintaining audience matters more than growing it

One mistake she sees new creators make is fixating on building their audience, rather than retaining the viewers they already have:

“I see a lot of new creators get focused on getting more subscribers, so they focus on the new people that they’re getting and don’t focus on maintaining the audience that’s already been there.”

— Brianna Moore

Early in your career, the most important metric is not how large your audience is, but how deeply you are able to engage them.

On Short-form and Where the Attention Span is Actually Heading

Brianna feels the short-form format has had a detrimental effect on attention spans, and has opinions on the topic. She acknowledges this impact, and believes that the return of longer, less edited, storytelling content is inevitable, though it hasn’t yet become the norm. Her content that went viral on TikTok in December was posted as an immediate thought, without much editing beforehand. Conversely, the content she tried to force for Instagram Reels never gained any traction; she was chasing an idea of cozy gaming videos, attempting to create the same sort of Reels that she had seen go viral. Once she stopped trying to force that kind of content and started creating what she was actually thinking, it was suddenly successful on Instagram as well.

Regarding YouTube Shorts, she has noticed that people have been less receptive there than on TikTok, with the Shorts feel like a ‘brain rot’ format, which her videos would never be. Brianna believes attention spans have diminished due to the rise of short-form content, and has traced this decline further back into the origins of more rapid-fire editing styles. But, she believes, there is hope, and that the return of longer, more unpolished content, including pauses in stories that used to happen frequently before they stopped in teenage girls, is something that is bound to return, not because of the past, but because the alternative is unappealing to the modern viewer. She says that people who begin to post content like this now will be positioned for success once it becomes ‘viable’ in the eyes of the internet.

On the Mental Health Impacts of Online Content Creation

Brianna has been open about the difficulties of the process, even discussing her mental health openly after receiving hate comments about it in the past. She has released videos that were met with vitriol including one regarding the controversial figure Andrew Tate, which she eventually removed from her channel. She’s had content she felt was good that was not received well, and videos she was concerned with that were met with enthusiasm. None of these things are less impactful because they happened to a YouTuber, rather than a real human in her view.

What actually helps

What does help her manage it:

• A support system. This can be a friend, or family that helps keep her grounded, and allows her to talk through her experience after a particularly tough comment section.
• Separating herself personally from the content she produces: people didn’t like her video, rather than, ‘people don’t like her’.
• Becoming comfortable with oneself off-camera, because the more comfortable you are with the real you, the easier it is to produce videos of yourself as a real person.
• Accepting that part of building an audience on the internet is being targeted by a different group of people, but that does not mean that you must stop posting entirely.

The more vulnerable her videos are, the better the interaction they receive; even if these videos are not as popular as others, she values the way in which they are more personal and direct, which is better for her as a YouTuber. Online audience growth doesn’t require someone to be their fake self, in Brianna’s opinion. It is what she was afraid to show that helped her find the growth she was looking for: the unfiltered, neurodivergent, rambling, deep thinker who has a lot to say. It is this version of herself that connects with people; the fake, polished persona she attempted to be never did.