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Comment by tomhoward | Hacker News Reader

This seems to imply that success in this field is randomly assigned rather than being attained through persistence and attention to the audience. For anyone who presumes this to be true, it will be inevitable.

Anyone who produces content consistently for a long enough period of time, pays good attention to how their content is received, continues to adapt their content to what they find the audience wants, and is attentive in engaging with their audience's messages/comments/etc, will find success eventually.

The people who make it big do all those things.

Those who don't have generally gotten discouraged too early, before they've put enough effort and persistence into those key ingredients.

Sure, natural charisma helps, and can make it look like some creators just "got lucky" with huge growth from the start. But plenty of creators started out seeming awkward and unpolished early on, but over time were able to improve their delivery style and other aspects of their production, and hit it big eventually.

(Edited to clarify position.)

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> Anyone who produces content consistently for a long enough period of time, ... etc, will find success eventually.

What data do you have to back this up?

> The people who make it big do all those things.

That's a very different claim.

I really don't get what it is about my comment that's counter to general understanding of how people achieve positive outcomes. It's pretty well established that people who stick at a pursuit for long enough, learn as they go and respond to their audience will find success, if they don't quit first.

> What data do you have to back this up?

If your primary concern was precise data, you'd first be confronting my parent commenter, who claimed, without any evidence whatsoever: "For every ten people who did this [i.e., posted three quality videos a week, for 1-2 years], maybe one made it big". That's quite plainly an implausible statistic. I get that it's made for rhetorical effect, not precision, but surely that commenter carries the primary burden of evidence for some validity of their position.

My position is based on what is generally accepted by anyone with experience in entrepreneurial or creative endeavours.

> That's a very different claim.

How so?

> That's a very different claim.

> How so?

That explains your reaction: you don't seem to understand the difference between "all people who get big do x" and "all people who do x get big". There's plenty of evidence showing that doing what successful people do does not guarantee success.

To break down my comment:

Anyone who:

- produces content consistently for a long enough period of time,

- pays good attention to how their content is received,

- continues to adapt their content to what they find the audience wants,

- and is attentive in engaging with their audience's messages/comments/etc,

will find success eventually.

When all parts of this are met, there is no material difference between "all people who get big do x" and "all people who do x get big".

I understand that not all people will be able to do all of these things to a sufficient level, quickly enough to satisfy their desire for success, and those people will quit before they make it.

But I maintain that for media content creation (unlike, say professional sport), people who really want to find success in that field will be able to work out how to do it given enough persistence and discernment over enough time.

You are kind of ignoring the question - how do you know this? What it sounds like is you observed a statistically insignificant sample and have drawn conclusions from it.

I wasn't ignoring the question; I think I was mistaken about what people were disagreeing with.

I was making a point I thought was self-evident: that if you're already capable of creating "3 quality videos a week" (in the words of the original commenter I replied to), you'll be able to attract a growing audience for it if you persist with the content creation and audience engagement. I.e., good product + good marketing -> long-term success, which is how creative/entrepreneurial success always happens.

I later realised people seemed to think I was claiming that any person, even one starting with below-average video production abilities, could eventually become as big as PewDiePie if they just "try hard enough". That's not what I was claiming.

Consider this, there is a hypothetical "perfect youtuber lottery".

To enter it, you must meet or exceed all the requirements you laid out, you then get a ticket.

Tickets are drawn, some small handful are winners.

Everyone who won did all the perfect youtuber things, but beyond that the fact they were successful was entirely based on factors outside their control.

Is this a reasonable approximation of reality? Maybe, it would certainly fit the mold of what makes a successful person in most other highly skewed areas of life where some very small percentage involved are identifiable as really successful like musicians, actors, authors, artists etc.

The problem is that you don't even admit this as a possibility, just the standard refrain of work harder at it and those who fail clearly didn't work hard enough.

Unless you define those who are successful as the only people who "did it all right", which is definitely a circular argument...

Nobody is saying it doesn't take hard work, just don't expect hard work to be enough, and worse still, if any other areas where creative output is used as income are any indication, don't expect being very good, or even the best to be enough either (plenty of examples of musicians, authors and artists who changed history languishing in obscurity their whole lives)

Not once have I used the words “hard work”.

This whole discussion is in response to the claim that you can produce 3 pieces of _good content_ every week for 1-2 years and be good at promoting it, and that only 1/10 will succeed.

I’m really saying this defies the definition of good content.

I’m aware it can seem like a circular argument; I’m surprised people keep disputing what is a self-evident position.

I don’t suggest everyone can do it. I do think most can probably do it eventually if it’s their passion and they choose to make it their top priority, but I’m aware that’s a separate debate that I don’t especially care to thrash out, as it’s not central to my point.

The fact its a circular argument means that the premise is invalid as an inescapable consequence, its fundamentally a confusion of cause and effect.

Re-reading the thread after a night's rest, it seems everyone was getting a bit confused about the main point, myself included. When seen as a simple circular argument like that, you're right, it's pointless.

As I've said several times, the main point I was refuting is that an aspiring creator could create great content and promote it perfectly, consistently over several years, and still be at the mercy of a random chance of (according to the original commenter) 1/10 as to whether they succeed. I maintain that's just not how the world works.

But I understand the issue you and others take with this is that someone could _try_ to do all the right things consistently for many years, but never develop to the point where they can make a career of it. I don't dispute that. I do think the skills required are far more learnable than, say, NBA-level basketball. But just how many more people can do it, or what any given individual's chances are, well of course we don't know.

For any individual to make a judgement about whether it's worth giving it a try, it's like any other career decision, and making decisions about how to invest one's time is a fundamental life skill.

But I always think it's a shame when someone who could have succeeded at a creative or entrepreneurial pursuit decides not to even try because they believe the falsehood that success is random, regardless of your own qualities or efforts.

It's very similar to the very reasonable claim that if you put in seven _good_ practice sessions a week every week for five years and are good at deciding what to work on, you've got less than a 10% of getting into the NBA/Julliard/Hollywood A-list.

Claiming that this defies the definition of good practice is essentially narrowing the definition of "good" so far that your original claim is a tautology.

When we're talking about tournament games like those listed above, success isn't that simple. Not everyone is capable of winning every tournament. Some people can't win any highly-desired tournament.

Going full-time as a YouTuber may be easy enough of a tournament that many can do it, depending on native language, physical beauty, finances, etc. I really doubt most can, though. Your personal network is probably highly skewed towards those who can prevail in the YouTube tournament (and at many others, but perhaps not sports-related ones based on your earlier comment).

I can see from your profile that you run a program where people can learn programming languages and frameworks. So you clearly agree that some things can be learned by most people who put their mind to it. Doubtless, it takes a real desire to learn, and, sure, a degree of natural aptitude, but those who have those qualifiers will generally succeed at it.

I think we agree that this is fundamentally not the case with NBA, Julliard, Hollywood A-list, in which success is far more dependent on endowed traits.

My observation is simply that the skills needed to succeed as content creator are more learnable by more people than pro sport, pro music or Hollywood stardom.

The main qualifier for being a successful content creator is having something unique/interesting/valuable to say. And yes, confidence, presentation, production, audience engagement all matter. But all these can be developed or learned with enough dedication. And no, not 100% of the time. But it's true enough that it's worth a try if you're inspired.

Please remember, the claim I'm refuting is that you can do all of these things absolutely right, and still only have a 1/10 chance of success. That's clearly untrue. In the online media world, people with unique/interesting/valuable things to say break through eventually.

For what it's worth, my personal network doesn't conform to the stereotype you presume. Yes it includes highly successful people (including pro sportspeople). It includes people who have great natural ability but lack the confidence or desire to excel. And it includes people from extremely modest backgrounds, including refugees who came to Australia with nothing, but who are building businesses and profiles as creators, learning the required skills as they go, and making great progress.

> So you clearly agree that some things can be learned by most people who put their mind to it.

Absolutely! I think people can learn almost anything. Barring true disabilities, I believe anyone can learn to program, translate a foreign language, play a violin, play basketball, swim or most other things.

But I don't think most people have even a chance of becoming the best.

What you refer to as "endowed traits" affect everything from our life span to our appearance to our level of happiness, personality traits and ability to learn different skills. They affect every possible kind of skill we could choose to pursue and even what kinds of things we're inclined to pursue.

I also don't agree than the skills needed to succeed as an athlete or musician are "less learnable" than others. On the contrary, I think they're extremely well defined and that we have millennia of collective knowledge in how to train them, thus making them extremely learnable.

The perspective I was coming from is the difference between an economic tournament, where wage differences are based more upon the relative differences of individuals rather than upon their marginal productivity.

This is crucial because while almost anyone can learn to play the piano or to repair a house, very, very few people have even the possibility of being one of the top few people in the world at either. The difference is that people doing the latter are paid based on their marginal productivity and those doing the former are paid based on their approximate ranking among all other pianists in the world and in their city.

As a result, repairing houses is a modest career opportunity open to a large number of people with sufficient absolute skill regardless of their relative ranking in the world. Being a pianist, on the other hand, is a fantastic career for an extremely small number of people at the top and an unsustainable one for nearly everyone else. Some teach on the side and pursue their dreams for years.

The question is, "Is YouTube an economic game where rewards are based primarily on marginal productivity or are they based more on relative comparisons between participants?"

> But I don't think most people have even a chance of becoming the best.

Yep sure - it took me to step away from the discussion for a while to realise that's what people thought I was arguing. I wasn't.

My contention was that if you're already producing good quality content (as per the original commenter's comment), assuming it's interesting/unique/valuable, if you persist doing it regularly you'll be able to grow an audience, and probably get it big enough to make some sponsorship income or build your personal brand to further your career (promote your business etc). And most importantly, it won't be purely random "bad luck" that stands in your way.

People seemed to think I was claiming that any randomly selected person – even one starting out with well-below-average video production and presentation skills and little interesting to say – could become as big as PewDiePie if they just stick at it long enough. That's not what I meant.

I think we're in agreement :)

> My position is based on what is generally accepted by anyone with experience in entrepreneurial or creative endeavours.

It sounds a lot like what people in that position would correctly observe as being generally necessary for success being mistaken for being sufficient.

I think/hope I just addressed this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23467409

> What data do you have to back this up?

Exactly! That's what people fail to see: it doesn't matter how hard you worked and how good you are - if there's hundreds of people doing the same as you (and I assume for anything that can "explode" on YT and become something worth 200K a month, there always is), your chances are extremely small, even if you actually happen to be THE BEST (which you can never really know, of course), because someone with just a little less talent, or who put a little less effort, might just happen to know another famous youtuber, or come up with slightly better marketing, or by chance get famous on some important forum because a respected poster mentioned their channel, and really hundreds of other things that would keep you from becoming the one taking all the attraction. Once they make it big, they can invest on their channel (buy professional tools, pay professional artists for illustrations etc) and start producing stuff that leaves your stuff in the dust, quickly compensating for their initial "inferiority".

> if there's hundreds of people doing the same as you

If you're disagreeing with me because you're thinking I'm talking about the case of someone doing the same thing as hundreds of other people, then you're reacting to a straw man interpretation of what I said.

You can only succeed if you are doing something unique. That applies to media just as it does to entrepreneurship.

Chances are someone won't be the best.

>ecause someone with just a little less talent, or who put a little less effort, might just happen to know another famous youtuber, or come up with slightly better marketing, or by chance get famous on some important forum because a respected poster mentioned their channel, and really hundreds of other things that would keep you from becoming the one taking all the attraction.

All these things could happen to you also, even if you're not the best.

I also believe it's survivor bias. Eventually anyone doing all those things without success will drop out but you only see those that remain. There's certainly an element of both luck and talent to it, dedication alone won't cut it.

Yes of course, nobody disputes that. But please carefully re-read what the original commenter and I wrote.

Original comment:

> My friends who ”made” it posted three quality videos a week. For 1-2 years.

My comment:

> Anyone who produces content consistently for a long enough period of time, pays good attention to how their content is received, continues to adapt their content to what they find the audience wants, and is attentive in engaging with their audience's messages/comments/etc, will find success eventually.

Sure, plenty of people try to do these things, and soon get discouraged and quit.

But how many of them deeply devote themselves to learning all the necessary skills? To really learning about content creation, and video production, and audience engagement, and engagement analysis? And even to the personal development work required to overcome any confidence issues and performance skills that might limit their ability to speak well to camera?

Sure, you can say not everyone wants to do all that, or has the time to do all that.

But all I'm saying is that the people who succeed are the ones who find a way to learn the necessary skills and overcome the obstacles.

> But all I'm saying is that the people who succeed are the ones who find a way to learn the necessary skills and overcome the obstacles.

I don't think anyone here disagrees that most successful content producers do all of these things.

People are saying that the number of people who do all of these things is much higher than the number of successful content producers, and therefore doing all of these things does not guarantee success.

I am not sure whether you disagree with that assessment or if you think people are saying that consistent production / knowing your audience don't matter and it's all down to luck (which is not what people are saying).

Thought experiment: let's say we took a list of everyone who has uploaded at least 3 videos per week to youtube for at least 5 years, filtered those results down to only those producers who uploaded polished content, and further excluded anyone who didn't change their content based on the preferences of their audience.

I expect that 10% or less of these people would be successful, where by "successful" I mean they make more from their content than they would by working full time as an entry level employee at a fast food restaurant.

There are about 30 million channels on YouTube, and around 1 billion videos, so assuming the standard 80 / 20 distribution holds, we'd expect the top 6 million channels to have a combined 800M videos for an average of 133 videos per top-20% channel. Let's say that 5% of the top 20% of channels meet the "3x per week for 5 years" standard, and 10% of those meet all the other requirements.

That would leave us with 0.1% of channels meeting the requirement, or about 30,000 content creators who should be successful.

My impression is that you need at least a million or so subscribers to make a living on YouTube. Looking at the stats, there are 16k channels with a million or more subscribers.

The estimates are actually within an order of magnitude of each other, which I find very surprising. It is at least plausible that being in the top 1% in terms of amount of content created, and also the top 10% in terms of consistency and responsiveness to the desires of viewers, is largely sufficient for success.

Still, I think if we actually looked at the numbers, we'd find that at least half and probably more of the people who are doing "everything right" and have been for the last 5 years are not successful (which is a big update for me, actually. I would have said 99% before actually looking at the stats). Do you think the success rate would be higher than 50%?

I think I've addressed most of this in the comment I just posted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23446688

It seems people disagreeing with me are postulating the existence of a huge number of "zombie" content creators, creating good quality, polished content for 3x per week for (in your argument) 5 years but never seeing any success.

I very strongly doubt this zombie army exists. Over 5 years of doing it 3x per week, you either get good at doing it and finding an audience for it, or you quit and do something else. If you haven't found an audience after 5 years, effectively by definition it's not good content.

I don't see how your calculations provide any evidence of the zombie army making 3 good-quality videos every week for 5 years. They seem to rely on big, unfounded assumptions. (Maybe I'm missing something; I'm tired).

> I don't see how your calculations provide any evidence of the zombie army making 3 good-quality videos every week for 5 years. They seem to rely on big, unfounded assumptions. (Maybe I'm missing something; I'm tired).

They don't show strong evidence for the "zombie army", and in fact provide evidence of the possibility that the "zombie army" doesn't exist (side note: I love the name). Before pulling the numbers, I strongly expected them to show that the number of people consistently producing content was so enormously much larger than the number of people who have enough subscribers to make a living that obviously there was no way that all the good consistent content producers are making a living. But then I pulled the numbers and the numbers don't exclude that possibility. I posted the numbers I pulled because it would be dishonest to pull them and then only post them if they supported my intuitions.

I still do expect the existence of somewhat of a "zombie army" because I know a few people who consistently upload videos with shockingly high production value and only a few thousands or tens of thousands of views.

Not sure why you’re being downvoted. Agree with the message, but “consistently” means 5-10 years, not just a few months of concerted effort.

At certain timescales this idea becomes essentially unfalsifiable, meanwhile people flush 10 years of their life down the drain.

Nobody is advocating wasting 10 years doing something without any indication of progress towards success. Obviously people should be looking for signs of progress and/or success every step of the way. There are plenty of ways of doing this well before someone does or doesn’t “make it”.

This concern people keep expressing over wasting many years of life for zero benefit has little basis in reality, as long as people are able to gauge their progress and build optionality into their life.

It really depends. This guy posted 20,000 videos over eight years before people noticed.

https://theoutline.com/post/7709/meet-the-man-who-has-spent-...

It seems this person is not seeking to build a big audience at all. He just loves cats, and posts videos of them as part of his daily routine. If he was trying to build a big audience he'd operate very differently.

This is not a good example. He doesn't even put proper titles for his videos, how are people supposed to find them in an ocean of billions of videos? He seems to be doing it for his own satisfaction.

Nevermind that most of his videos are about a minute long and yt doesnt really like that.

Agreed, but I don't think you're necessarily in disagreement with your parent. Some people struggle to understand how to improve on their weaknesses and think they're paying attention to how their content is received, adapting to their audience, etc, but in reality they're missing the mark by a mile.

In this sense it's essentially entrepreneurship. The founders who are simply not doing a good job don't always realize it. Some people will continue their efforts for years without knowing it's their own inability holding them back.

The parent commenter wasn't clear about whether they meant success comes mostly down to random chance vs persistence and responsiveness to the audience.

I've expanded (and edited) my comment to try and clarify what I think is an important distinction.

But to be clear, I highly doubt it's true that for every creator who builds a big audience, there's another nine (or even one or two) who put in the same effort, persistence and attention to their audience, over at least 2 years, and get nowhere.

I can believe that many start out then get discouraged and give up early, because they don't know how to gauge their results and improve their product, but that's a different issue.

I agree largely, I'm just not sure that insufficient effort/persistence so heavily outweighs low quality content as a reason for failure over time. I'd imagine there are actually a large amount of "zombie" YouTubers that consistently put out videos that very few people (relatively) end up watching. A lot of startups end up in this "zombie" state rather than shutting down[0].

So I agree most probably just get discouraged and give up early. But I can easily see 9 long-time "zombie" YouTubers for every channel with a big audience.

[0]https://yclist.com/

I guess it's that kind of topic where once you discuss it enough you reach consensus on a position that is neither particularly controversial nor insightful :)

I gather the people who've found my earlier comments disagreeable are assuming I'm advocating that people blindly persist at something for countless years, even if they see no signs of success, which of course I'm not.

My point assumes that by doing something with sufficient dedication for a sufficient amount of time, you'll learn the necessary skills, including learning how to learn, and learning how to gauge success, and learning when it's best to quit and try something else.

I actually don't think it's likely there's huge numbers of "zombie" YouTubers, slogging away for years with no success. Sure, plenty of stuff gets posted that gets very few views, but not by people who are serious about making a career of it. Career-focused people either see signs of success or realise they need to find a new career path.

As for the YC list, I know a lot about that list as my company is on it, as are several others run by people I know. There aren't many actual zombie companies on that list. There are companies that didn't become unicorns, but did become solid small-medium businesses that employ a decent number of people and provide important services to their customers, and will likely eventually be acquired for a decent return to the founders and investors. And there are others that have been abandoned, but provided valuable lessons to their founders, which helped equip them for greater success in the next stages of their career.

My opinions expressed above are from having spent 10+ years running and observing others running startups, and by seeing what persistence and long-term success look like.

I've never seen persistence work out badly for people, as long as they are adequately able to gauge their success along the way.

I get saddened at the thought that people with the potential to do great things might be discouraged from giving something a go because somebody else tells them "you know, for every successful person you see, there are 10 people who failed", when the truth is not nearly that simple or dismal.

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