YouTube and Patreon Still Aren’t Paying the Rent for Most Creatives
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People should stop trying to view YouTube as a viable career. Most YouTube careers were made out of people doing it in their spare time and finding out people actually want to watch. That's the only way it works. Do your day job and work on your YouTube career in your spare time. Maybe one day you'll find success.
The way most entertainers get known is just through sheer luck or connections. This is nothing new. For decades actors, musicians and artists have put up with this. They will follow their dreams while keeping a regular job. Then one day they might get the breakthrough they need. It's never been easier to be a creator today, but the chances are still slim that you'll ever start making serious money out of it. The benefit is that you can easily find a niche to fill, and while you might not making a living wage, you will make some good side money drawing something like vegetables with boobs or something.
Mostly out of curiosity, I looked into what it looks like to go pro now. Basically you go into a machine as a young kid, and if you show promise, you get focus from the coaching staff at the academies. Everyone else is basically just a warm body whose parents are paying a ton of money for their teen to be a hitting partner for the academy's golden goose.
THEN if you make the show, you're fighting for rankings through some absolutely abysmal satellite tournaments that you're essentially losing money to go play in. Losing in the first round of a major makes you more money than winning one of these things.
The delta between the 20th ranked player in the world versus the top 150th insane, too, with one worth millions and one worth maybe a small six figure salary, with a notable portion of it going toward travel/training expenses.
He didn't have that next level of extreme athleticism- he could make every shot and was very proficient and earned a good living on tour, but if he hadn't come from good money he never would have been there in the first place, because he didn't have the native talent, never getting into the 60s in ATP rankings.
Doing great as a coach though.
Sadly (or is it?), it's like the real world. Marketing, image, having a product people want is still important.
That's not luck, that's paying attention to the market and adjusting accordingly.
The hardest part is putting in the work. Being your own motivator and then working away at something is very difficult in the long run.
I'd also like to add that $10k a year in numerous countries is decent income.
Many big tech companies arise from disintermediation plays--finding some market that has high overhead and figuring out a way to transact it more cheaply. This is great: it lowers barriers to entry and liberates a new surplus, but it's not clear who then captures this new surplus, the market participants or the marketplace?
I would posit that the lottery system is a mechanism to enable the excess surplus to be siphoned away from the market participants towards the marketplace. Humans are _terrible_ at estimating the expected value of low-probability high-impact events, and dangling a few rags-to-riches stories lets your participants imagine they're going to make it. In reality, it bifurcates the market and drops the median outcome (presumably, this surplus is captured by the transaction fees of the marketplace).
As an example where this could play out, I might look at restaurants--if delivery apps and shadow kitchens lower the clearing costs for me to find a dinner, does that then mean the "best" restaurant in town can now scale up, to the detriment of the second or third best? (On the other hand, the physical limitations make this story a harder sell than purely digital goods.)
That just isn't true at all, and hasn't been true for at least a decade. Professional YouTubers typically have a background in film, with training in acting, lighting, and editing.
Source: I worked for a variety of YouTube-related startups in Los Angeles. This sentiment is just completely inaccurate.
I can say with 100% confidence that none of them went to film school.
most tech channels had zero background with that. I mean linus tech tipps (one of the biggest), started to make youtube videos with limited resources and basically was asked by his old company to help out, without prior knowledge.
most gaming related channels were not done with prior backgrounds. also a lot of early youtubers had no prior background. I abo'd tons of german channels who make a living with it, which didn't do anything media related before youtube (some of course did to a certain (small) degree, like jp-performance)
youtube is just so big that there a tons of people with tons of background. of course the most successful people are those who know how to sell.
On the other hand, the article mentions people who work for companies like Buzzfeed and other agencies, creating extremely successful web content for them, having to work shifts at night on top of their media jobs. That sounds unacceptable to me: I am pretty sure the company employing them can afford them a living wage, and it looks a lot like exploitation.
people who work for companies like Buzzfeed and other
agencies, creating extremely successful web content for
them, having to work shifts at night on top of their
media jobs.
If a job doesn't pay enough (according to any metric) move on to a better paying job. If an industry or a field doesn't pay enough, move on to another field/industry.
At one point one must be honest enough to admit "this isn't working" or "this barely works, It's not wise to live like this".
[1] a similar scenario: van life. there was a fad where a lot of people were trying to get a lifestyle income by living in a van and blogging about that (instagram, youtube, twitter and stuff like that). needless to say, after a while a wave of videos about "the truth of vanlife" has come up. Once again, people don't realize that for one person managing to achieve a huge success, another thousand (or more) will fail, possibly with consequences.
If you paid people YouTube rates to maintain php garbage they would just say no which keeps the prices up at a decent level.
Well, no, I don't think so, because this isn't like the market for maintaining PHP garbage. :) Creative work -- at least in this context -- isn't fungible. One low-rent PHP contractor is probably interchangeable with another one, but Patreon creators are not: if you're giving Bob $5 a month, it's because you specifically like Bob's stuff. What a Patreon creator with 50 patrons makes has no material effect on what a Patreon creator with 50,000 patrons makes.
This is normal. Life doesn’t owe you success. You have the suffer and work hard if you want more than a day job. Or move to somewhere with low rents and eat rice and beans for a few months, that also works.
Success isn’t guaranteed and certainly society doesn’t owe you it.
I am also surprised that no one has seen the wisdom of my words yet :P
I'm likely missing nuances, but to me it seems that the key culprit is minimum wage laws in many US states having an exception for restaurant personnel. If a minimum wage was unconditional and high enough to live from, you wouldn't need tips to survive.
It gets even crazier when you go out with people and they look at you like you’re cheap for calculating tip on pre tax amounts. There’s a lot of pride in the US for tipping, as if it’s a status symbol.
About 10 years ago I was living in San Francisco on less than $25k/year. Half my money went to rent, the other half went to food and the occasional movie. I couldn’t cook much, as I didn’t have a kitchen. I was able to increase my income because I’m educated, know some of the right things, and I got lucky as hell. But I was surrounded by people living on less who were flat out stuck. They all asked me why I was living there, and the answer was because I had started a business while homeless and got lucky enough that it was taking off. But I was super lucky to have that opportunity at all.
No one in San Francisco is stuck. [1] By skipping a few of those movie tickets and buying months in advance you could get a plane ticket out of there. In plenty of places in the US there isn't even an airport, not to mention outside the US.
> I couldn’t cook much, as I didn’t have a kitchen.
You don't need a kitchen. You can just have an electric stove in your bedroom. [2]
You're right in saying that you were super lucky. Lucky to live in San Francisco.
--
[1] Except for the mentally ill and people with other similarly valid severe disabilities.
[2] https://static01.nyt.com/images/2019/07/19/us/0722-hkecon-pr...
I'm putting words in your mouth, I know, and I apologize. But it's the gentrification I am bringing up.
So many construction workers that repair roofs, install drywall, etc. in Silicon Valley live several hours away in Los Banos and have that crazy commute to get to where they can find employment.
Crazy world we live in.
My point is more so around realizing the wealth of opportunity. Yes not every DJ will make it in San Francisco, but as you allude to, in most places in the world zero DJs will make it.
I don't claim that life can't be challenging in/around San Francisco. I'm claiming that it's less challenging than in almost anywhere else in the world.
However, I think it's completely fine that you stayed in SF and made progress there.
As for your claim that you could earn some money in SF and not elsewhere - that's the core of my argument. My point being that San Francisco has more opportunity than pretty much anywhere else in the world. That you specifically could make money in SF, but not elsewhere.
No doubt that earning much less than plenty of other SF residents can have an emotional impact and make it look like your life isn't going so great. It's just that when you look at the US as a whole, or the world as a whole - then SF starts looking like a fountain of opportunity.
I think people hype them selves up about it when they see the top 0.5% on YouTube and think they can be the same. Nowhere have I seen YouTube lie or mislead about this.
The problem is there are simply too many content creators. We don’t need “generic lets play guy 373628”. There is more than enough content pumping in to the system right now.
"Too many content creators" isn't a problem. "Too much bad content" is.
Is it? How else do you grow "good content", short of curating it (with all of the topdown biases and blind spots that that approach implies?)
On top of that, who decided what "good content" is? I occasionally get recommendations from Weird YouTube, and sometimes they're absolutely delightful. This sounds a lot like "nobody needs more than three broadcast channels"
businesses that employ people for low wages should, in theory, be out competed by businesses that would be willing to pay a little bit more to get the talent.
So either the business model _requires_ the low wages for it to work, or the workers are not shopping around for a better workplace (or is sacrificing their wages in the hopes of moving up, or some such passion-related reason like game developers).
Perhaps they are not shopping around because of monopolistic/anti competitive actions from google search causing competing video services to be unviable.
I believe there is an ongoing legal case around this.
Edit: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wsj.com/amp/articles/google...
It is kind of funny getting the amp link in this discussion...
I'm surprised that so many people are happy to describe themselves as content creators. It's an admission that what you create is generic content for some platform to wrap in ads. It's a type of self-commoditization.
Imho: Influencer are cringeworthy, they deserve the title.
You'd expect the creator to have more respect for their output.
This is the entire founding belief of YC (and a huge swath of “VC culture” and Hacker News in general).
Look at how many “businesses” promoted here have no meaningful revenue and no real ideals for how to monetize.
They all know how to monetize, it just doesn't sound good to say it out loud: get a bunch of users by offering a free service on VC money, then sell your userbase to a big company.
Most indie game devs don't make enough from it to pay rent.
Most authors don't make enough to pay rent from writing.
Derek Muller has a couple of videos talking about the success of his Veritasium YouTube channel (and work, luck, and success generally):
Twitch and YouTube, I think, are interesting ones in the sense that their system costs are probably enormous, primarily due to the 99% of content "creators" on their system which are actually just people like me, uploading videos which five people watch. A tragedy of the commons sort of thing, whereby they still pay to serve my videos, and that all cuts into the pie which is probably better given to professional content creators.
But, I think that ultimately all of these platforms would be better ran and managed by the content creators themselves, or at least middlemen who have less of a multi-billion dollar profit incentive. There are a few interesting products heading this way;
* Tidal (in music) was a big one, but we'll see what happens now that Square has majority ownership.
* Itch.io [1] in gaming. They run what appears to be an extremely barebones operation focusing on delivering extreme value for creators and consumers alike.
* Floatplane [2] in video. A service started by the team behind Linus Tech Tips, several high-profile (generally tech-focused) content creators now host their content there.
We're also seeing this theme of "screw the middleman" among big media companies, opting to get rid of Netflix or Hulu in favor of their own in-house streaming platform, or Epic's fight against the App Store. It's literally the same impetus; these middlemen take way too much money and ultimately form lowest-common-denominator revenue models which don't benefit most content creators, from large to small.
I think this is a trend that will continue to gain traction; I am not bullish on big-tech mega-platforms over the long term. To a degree it sucks for consumers, but ultimately a system which demands content creators scrape by while making big tech rich isn't tenable, and consumers need to recognize that. Big Tech has had years to try and build something equitable; they haven't. Its their fault, not the fault of the content creators.
I tend to predict that Twitch is the next one which will see major disruption. The market even among big tech alternatives is basically zero, and Twitch has huge issues which reach beyond just monetization and into legal governance of streamer channels which is legitimately pissing off content creators and viewers alike. They're "stuck" with Twitch, but Twitch isn't actually that big; its just niche (hop on Chaturbate any evening, take one look at the average view-count for their streamers, and recalibrate your perception on Twitch's slice of the entire online streaming pie).
[1] https://itch.io/
That being said, I think a more scalable and better solution is more-so the "lean middleman" model (ie Itch-like). The problem with YouTube and Twitch isn't the core of their position in this system; the problem is that they're too big. They have thousands of employees, they're hosted on big cloud providers, and they're accountable to profit-seeking mega-corps; all of these things drive the revenue that creators see down, and the argument that they're fundamentally necessary in a system like this is tenuous.
Content moderation is definitely the hardest problem to solve at their scale, and its a strong argument for why they have to be so big. I think this is something that needs to be solved in two ways: first, by lowering the number of rules which need to be enforced (ie nudity? maybe that's ok, as long as the channel is properly age-gated and the age of the streamer is confirmed), and second, by increasing the bar to even getting a platform in the first place (ie it should take a week or so, manual approval of recognition of the rules, and some fee that the content producer actually has to pay which supports the platform and increases investment).
Big Tech is insanely conservative when it comes to any changes that would either hurt their sign-up metrics or hurt their ability to sell advertisements. This is where new platforms need to focus, because Big Tech fundamentally and intrinsically cannot compete against you there. What options open up when you throw out the idea that you need to sell advertisements, and you throw out the idea that "growth at any cost" is the goal (big tech loves that for the growth part; no one pays attention to the "any cost" part).
That's true for anything, even for non-creative work. If you create an app, and nobody buys it (or uses it with ads), you also don't get money.
It doesn’t require elaborate demos or expensive equipment or deep domain knowledge.
It’s youthful exuberance, some theatrics and the right personality.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/user/eaterbc [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ML4tw_UzqZE&list=PLZioPDnFPN...
But he also sells kits and I suspect that's been very useful to his paying for his ISP. I know I bought his 6502 kit. ;-)
I think the smart "content creators" figure out a way to sell plans, etc. in order to take in a little on the side. (Patreon, in my mind, is the worst way to do that.)
The problem is, more and more people are turning to this as a viable source of income. In the piece, I reference the tragic death of Mocha, who turned to Bilibili to stream when he had nowhere to work (https://www.inkstonenews.com/society/aching-hopelessness-nob...).
There's some more evidence—say, people trying to calculate how much TikTok engagement they'll need to stream to get Christmas gifts (https://twitter.com/robyncaplan/status/1328432778942312449). That, plus the survey that more children want to become a vlogger when they grow up (https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/07/american-kids-would-...), is why I wrote the piece.
Of course, dream jobs change as people grow up and figure out feasibility, so I'm not too concerned about that. Plus, I have no intention to squish anyone's dreams, but I was hoping for this piece to do two things:
1. Paint a clearer picture of the economics of platforms, and that—for most people—it's generally a terrible way to make money. 2. Encourage media, platforms, and other creators to share more data and facts, instead of another, "This high schooler made $1 million in 5 weeks on Snapchat." https://people.com/human-interest/snapchat-high-school-senio...
This is an old story. People will know the odds of starting a band and becoming a rock star, and still do it. So I just want to make sure people go all-in on it with deliberation, and that the most marginalized people don't turn to it when they most need it.
Williamdclt put it well: "Well, it's not that simple is it. For decades actors, musicians and artists have been complaining that they have to live in misery to pursue their art and fighting for better conditions, it's not like they've always been OK with the status quo."
If platforms do have an opportunity to better distribute the income for creative work, I think it's worth collective action from creators to put pressure on them to do it. If that means changing the algorithm to spotlight more people's videos, which means the popular videos effectively cross-subsidize them (like a record label would back in the day), I would think it's worth trying.
I did not expect so many comments on this entry, so I'll do my best to contribute—but yours was at the top so I figured I'd start here! Thanks again.
Well, it's not that simple is it. For decades actors, musicians and artists have been complaining that they have to live in misery to pursue their art and fighting for better conditions, it's not like they've always been OK with the status quo.
It's a more general question: should art be subject to the market laws, or should society subsidize art production? In the first case (the liberal POV I suppose) it's up to the artist to find ways to make money out of their art, or keep it as a hobby, or give up on it. On the second case (a more socialist POV), we need to challenge how artists are getting a revenue in our society because it's clearly not working.
Is it not? How much time or will do people currently have to consume art? The internet has dropped the barrier to getting an audience to near zero. Yet the vast, vast majority of people still want to consume mainstream, curated art. Even though it’s completely free, people don’t sit and browse websites for niche artists. Or, if they do, they certainly aren’t going to pay for it and would prefer the format of TikTok/Instagram.
I'm not being flippant. This is a serious question that needs to be addressed in any would-be public art program. Sooner or later you run into limits.
I'm pretty sure even most socialists would agree with this - even those who want to abolish money. If your art isn't valuable to society, you'll get treated like someone who digs holes and then fills them all day.
Now, art which is widely appreciated but still has trouble getting funded might be another matter (because they're e.g. directed at a demographic that doesn't have much money), but most of the people who can't live off their art definitely don't fall into this category - they simply aren't popular.
Publically funded broadcasting for example has been phenomenally successful.
The created art is simply how the vast, vast majority of people in a city will interact with a local community of artists and thus how their quality of life is increased by their existence. A group of e.g. untalented musicians will simply have a terrible quality of live/cost ratio. We don't fund parks simply because they're a quality of life investment - but because they're a _good_ investment.
This can be exploited. Imagine if I wrote a program that simply outputs a string of 1000 random notes and durations and published this as a song every day, with a random UUID for the title. This is technically art, but is it the same as your favorite musician?
Now if someone is buying each of those songs for a million dollars each, that's between the artist and person making the purchase.
Should society subsidize that though? How do you draw the line?
I'm not suggesting that artists should be paid unconditionally per piece, obviously that'd be ridiculous. I'm not suggesting _anything_. I'm just saying that maybe (maybe not) society as a whole finds enough value in art that it wants to make sure that artists can survive. Maybe "the market" is the whole answer, maybe we want the market to have no part in artists' income, maybe it's just one part of the answer (lots of countries like Italy and France heavily subsidize culture & art).
> How do you draw the line?
By drawing a line? We manage to draw lines on unemployment pensions, retirement pensions, research subsidies, children benefits, universal healthcare... It's nothing magical, we draw lines by writing laws that seem to account for different cases, and we know it's not perfect and that there's loopholes in laws, that some people get too much and some others too little, but we iterate and adapt.
But in summary, I don't know! I'm not a politician, an economist, an artist or even a particularly keen art consumer. I just don't believe "the market" is the One True Answer.
Thought you were going somewhere completely different based off of the first sentence. Yes artists have been exploited for decades, but they aren't being exploited by their audiences aka their market. Fans of music, video, performance, etc. are willing to pay quite fair prices (even exorbitant ones) to consume or own the media that they love. The lion's share of that money never reaches the artist that produced it. Vast empires of wealth have been built on the backs of superstar artists and the problem as always is rent seeking which is the enemy of socialists and capitalists alike. We absolutely should not subsidize art production, I can guarantee you that money would also be siphoned off under the current status quo. We're already very close to a solution to this problem with the massive drop in cost of producing any kind of art that is amenable to digital production and distribution. It just needs to continue to tip in the direction of artists being their own producers or being able to hire the people who do the actual work directly rather than going through an established company built on exploitative practices. The next piece of the puzzle is going to be a better system for paying to consume the produced art without relying on the toxic ad ecosystem. We need to starve the greedy giants of the last century out of existence, their only benefit was in connecting people to art when that used to be difficult. Connecting is easy now, paying someone for their work should be too.
And something being in a way for decades does not mean that it is right, it is rational and it should be kept as it is. If we did that, we wouldnt have been able to become a modern civilization.
It's not even about how good they are - some people produce amazing stuff but it's not something that enough other people want to own (or listen to, or watch, or whatever).
The lucky few whose creative spark happens to coincide with market demand get to do that all day long. For the rest of us, it's a day job to pay the rent (which might mean creating something that the market wants instead of what scratches our creative itch) or a life of poverty and creative freedom.
This is not something that a change in the platforms is going to "fix".
This isn't even the problem. It's that to be successful you need to be more than good at your job you need to be great at doing a few other jobs as well. Namely running a business and marketing. And lucky in catching the break the propels you upwards.
This requirement for discoverability, marketability and virality also changes the media significantly. YouTube is rife with ten minute videos, clickbait titles and overenthusiastic yelling. This is entirely on the platforms, their bid for retention to keep people watching one more video and how discovery and recommendations work.
If you look at the wider industry of say TV and film you get a much wider array of successful content, supporting more people with more stability.
I do think there is a version of YouTube that could result in "better" content whilst employing more people.
This sounds like a great description of art as a profession for roughly the past five to seven centuries. It sounds like really very little has changed, except perhaps more people having a chance to compete.
Could a central coordinator devote greater resources to a more diverse set of content? It is, as you say, absolutely possible. Though there are perhaps a few questions to be asked about why such a central coordinating force would make better choices, and if the artists would rather give up their choices to work on what the coordinator has blessed would agree this is better.
What happens if you're an artist that the BBC isn't interested in supporting? What happens when the BBC runs out of budget for the year?
Or you pitch your idea elsewhere because people have realized that the strong model of the BBC that allows it to take creative risks can work elsewhere.
I understand if you consider such questions condescending and presumptuous, though.
But this is a problem for all fields. If devs want to work independently, need to be good at business and marketing as well.
TV has barely any variety of content, compared to youtube. And youtube as an advertising platform is already bigger than TV.
Patreon? The only thing is that it still requires a 3rd party discovery tool with a huge reach where Youtube comes in again.
I’m more interested in how the discovery platform itself could be reshaped which is the key to truly supporting a wide variety of successful content.
The idea that to be a successful creator you just need to be good at whatever creative activity it is, is pernicious and wrong.
To be a successful creator you need to be either incredibly lucky, or actually a successful business founder whose business model happens to include creating stuff.
Isn't that a sad loss ? so many people trying to get a hold of a vapor cake to grab attention.
Makes working at a plant like a step up ..
Ben Eater and 3Blue1Brown are I think good examples of this. I doubt "the market" was demanding videos about higher level math with superb visualizations, or especially implementing a 6502 on breadboards, but these guys both made it happen. I doubt they're raking in the megabux, but they seem to be doing pretty well.
This is very true. When I go to anime conventions, I see MANY people with incredible talents. And sometimes I do want to buy a poster or something. But, there's only so much wall on my small apartment to hang posters...
Yeah, I love playing and making games, nobody wants to play them, and nobody wants to watch me do it, because I'm not good enough at it. That's why I have a day job.
There's also a limited need for entertainers/creatives (they are needed, but not comparatively very many).. One person can entertain millions.
There is room on a top-10 list for 10 of them. Number 9 will do OK but is starting to move down the Praeto curve. The competition to entertain others on the internet is fierce; it is difficult for me to see how even someone of that level of talent and calibre could survive except for the fact that most of their competition simply gives up before they start because it looks like a lousy career.
This isn't some kind of rational market forces issue. Artists and intellectuals have real power. But starving them of cash, branding them "entertainers", and converting their jobs into a gig economy scramble guarantees they'll be too distracted to realise it.
Not unlike other jobs.
I'm no fan of the 'gig economy' - but haven't most musicians and writers and singers and sportspeople been getting a shitty deal since time immemorial?
Just in the 1980s that meant putting years of unpaid practice into your craft then not being able to get a book deal / signed with a record label / a gallery to sell your paintings / a try out with the big team.
I feel bad for someone who's struggling to make a living playing guitar on Twitch - but the fact it's hard to make money playing guitar isn't Twitch's fault.
Everybody needs a bank, and there are very few banks, with very few people who really earn a lot. Gambling is gambling.. most lose there. And the rest mentioned are a result of governents/police/court system not working.
It's easy to say Bobby the youtuber deserves more money... actually paying him from your pocket is a totally different thing.
All in all, entertainment budget is a good amount actually.
For the sake of the argument, it’s easier to set the time frame 30 years back, and talk about CDs and books we were buying. Record companies made decent money, publishers as well. People massively payed for physical distribution, there was only crappy workarounds.
But most of that money didn’t go to artists, most of them were still working side jobs, while middlemen thrived. How different is it now ? I actually think it’s slightly better these days, but the biggest slice of the pie still go to middlemen who protect their position to keep the markets captive.
I'm curious to know what counts as a monopoly if not that.
The network effect has been good to google.
You wrote:
> Or as if monopolizing a distribution channel allows you to charge rents way in excess of your costs.
Defining “distribution channel” as a single company’s website rather than the internet would make “distribution channel” meaningless in the context of this discussion.
It’s trivial to distribute a video with anyone all over the world in this day and age. It’s not trivial to make money from it.
Google might have a monopoly on the mechanism that can be used to make money from videos, but that’s a different discussion than having a monopoly on distributing video.
Vimeo is the second biggest video sharing platform. They have 200 million eyeballs they can push to your content as opposed to 2.3 billion and no ad network.
I don't think it's an enormous stretch to say that youtube own this market.
>that’s a different discussion than having a monopoly on distributing video.
I neither stated nor implied that they did.
Whether or not it harms society is something I have not concluded. I am aware there are negatives for medium size content creators who lack negotiating power, but also huge upsides to individual content creators who almost always cause YouTube to lose money. And I’m not sure what any alternative is, other than a taxpayer funded version of a YouTube, but that also opens a can of worms.
> I neither stated nor implied that they did.
Sorry, I interpreted “monopolizing a distribution channel” in the context of YouTube compensating content creators to mean YouTube monopolizing distribution of videos by content creators.
Not seeing the upside nor the evidence of YouTube losing significant amounts of money.
>And I’m not sure what any alternative is
Applying antitrust laws.
We can thank the explosion of Internet startups and innovation to their judicious application to Microsoft in the late 90s (it tied their hands significantly).
Individual content creators get access to the entire world without worrying about any technical issues, and getting access to advertisers (however small it may be).
>the evidence of YouTube losing significant amounts of money.
I don't know the specifics, but I do know that hosting video is in the wheelhouse of many well endowed companies like Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, etc. They all (presumably) have the capability to build a Youtube competitor over the last 15 years, but the fact that they have not indicates that it is not worth it.
Which leads me to think that this business model of Youtube's where anyone can upload anything they want at any time regardless of how garbage it is and it has to be able to be served to the whole world relatively immediately, is only viable with an enormous ad company (Google) backing it.
But as a stand alone service, it would never be a viable business. The proof is that a non Youtube has never existed before and it still doesn't exist. Nobody is stopping someone from putting up data centers everywhere and offering this service that Youtube does, and not even the companies that can afford it are bothering to touch it.
The Microsoft internet browser situation is not comparable, in my opinion.
Pornhub isn't anymore since they removed all the unverified accounts' videos.
Realistically, people run channels this is about would not do it in spare-time. Making gameplay video that people actually want to watch is not nearly same as playing game for fun. You have to be entertaining for others. It is same difference as between being comedian for money versus being funny with friends.
It's a bit the same with other creative work, like music and art, there is a demand for it, but the amount of commercial demand is next to nothing compared to the amound of creative work being done regardless of pay.
The number of guitars being played would be more or less the same even if nobody made money playing them.
The number of paintings being painted would be more or less the same even if nobody ever sold one.
There is some quality to be gained from going professional and devoting your entire time to do something, and part of that is probably a contributing factor why people can earn a living doing it.
This is not true. The number of people who play music or instruments depends on economy of music. When you could live from it, people did it more often and longer.
> The number of paintings being painted would be more or less the same even if nobody ever sold one.
This is 100% not true.
I like food youtubers - Binging with Babish was formerly a video fx artist, Adam Ragusea was formerly a journalism professor and musician and Alex (French Guy Cooking) was an electrical engineer, filmmaker, and marketing manager. These people are basically one-man production armies, the food part is basically secondary. They have a killer mix of good-ideas and charisma, production quality (cinematography and sound design), marketing and community savviness, and ridiculous hard work.
But what I find with all these creative professions is an undertone of... desperation. A lot of people seem desperate to be famous. It’s kind of sad.
Thing is the majority of wannabe Twitch streamers (and this includes YouTube) just aren’t entertaining.
I think they see the top 0.1% and say “I could do that”. What they Do note may be easy but getting there wasn’t. People don’t seem to see the years of building an audience and luck among the way.
Too many people now just see solar signs. 10 years ago (at least on Twitch) it wasn’t a profession. People did it as a hobby.
I imagine this is similar to other fields like acting. So few people are professional actors. The vast majority are working casual jobs for years hoping to get their break and most won’t ever get that break.
At least With field like dancing there’s a barrier to entry. Dancers train for years.
A lot of YouTube creators don’t have any skills. They just want to be famous based in their looks and their lifestyle. That’s the worst kind of fame seeker (IMHO).
"Playing Fridays at the local pub still not paying rent for most guitar players"
Etc.
Entertainment of all varieties is all "winner take all" occupation - the best make big money, and everybody else makes do with table scraps.
YouTube isn’t struggling with how to make these incomes more even any more than record labels are trying to make every artist have a nice, steady income. It’s a hits driven business.
In seriousness, you gotta build or make what people want. The vast majority of YouTubers, like open source devs, are making things that mostly they themselves care about. Of the remainder, most are making things some people appreciate, and might even pay attention to for a while, but when push comes to shove wouldn't pay for.
A few things are just genuinely so good that people will pay.
Heck, repos that are widely used rarely get actual money. Making money shouldn't be conflated with fulfilling a demand. Plenty of things fulfill a demand or create value but fail to monetize.
If paying becomes truly optional (no social pressure or pay wall), most people would rather not pay.
At least politicians know the answer.
The US needs to reform its housing policies and find a better solution for providing healthcare for all citizens. If it were easier to find a small place to rent for less than $500 per month in the US, if it were easier to live without a car and if the average American weren't being bled for healthcare coverage, then you could live on $10k or so a year without it being a hardship. (Assuming single childless person, basically.)
Some people already pull off stuff like that, but it needs to be more widespread. We need to make "the basics" somehow more accessible for more people.
The problem isn't "Only a relatively small percentage of people make good money this way and those folks tend to get rich." The problem is that a high percentage of Americans are finding no means to really make ends meet due to a variety of factors that interplay in an ugly way.
It's reasonable to say "It's not really the fault of this one thing." But something needs to give.
There is all kinds of data showing it is cheaper literally give people housing than to let them be homeless. I'm not even asking the US to outright give poor folks housing. Just make it possible to find housing that doesn't cost an arm and a leg and where you can make your life work without a car.
I don't think I'm asking all that much, to be honest. This shouldn't be that hard. It's not like we need to invent these concepts from scratch. There are lots of examples to draw from for how to make such policies (plus healthcare) work better than what we've got.
1. https://people.wou.edu/~shawd/mediocristan--extremistan.html
One youtuber can entertain millions of people while one dentist can only work on a few people per day. You may be the 100,000th best dentist but that doesn’t matter because everyone above you is already booked out.
You know what you get on Youtube, you don’t have a contract saying how much you’ll be making from creating content for them. Maybe I lack empathy here, but it seems most people saw this as an easy money maker, but were wrong.
Most of these people are thinking about content creation as the goal and making money and an unfortunate side requirement.
If you put it that way, then I don't feel any remorse at all for people who are complaining that content creation can't pay the bills. It's not any different than any other hobby.
The thing is, we don’t need to encourage people to become content creators because we already have more than enough content being created and any more would mostly be a waste.
The good thing about capitalist markets is they are able to prioritise things that are in need reasonably well. Once that need is met, prices move to stabilise that balance.
I’m all for the ubi to replace welfare but I don’t think it will do wonders for creative people who will never turn it in to a higher paying job.
When I was finishing high school, I had to choose between music or comp-sci for university. Went with comp-sci because I didn't think as a trumpet player I would be able to do much, besides being one of the 5 (citation needed) teachers in my city, or being VERY lucky and survive playing gigs, mostly which would be playing music I didn't like.
It worked well for me, as I ended up having a couple bands, and also did some freelance gigs. Because it was my hobby - I didn't care for money, as I got a job - I could go full Marie Kondo and only play what gave me joy.
You can make that argument about YouTube (and complain about Patreon's cut) but on Patreon consumers choose who they want to give money to. Are Patreon expected to take off an extra X% and subsidise the less popular creators?
I think people should consider political initiative to have something like Youtube, but in public domain (with the same status as public broadcaster). Basically, the service would run on ads, but would be non-profit in the sense that the ads profits would be mostly returned to the creators on that platform, transparently and fairly.
The "problem" is that most creators have miniscule audiences. The "transparent and fairly" returned ad profits for someone with ten viewers is never going to be very large. The power law in entertainment has always been large; the big artists make tens of millions and everyone else scrapes by. The internet has not changed that dynamic.
Exactly. I had 3 different channels, in different points in my life, but the fact that I could, for free, upload a video and have it hosted and then (possibly) watched worldwide on almost any device, it's bonkers. If I had to create an app or pay for storage/upload/etc, it would be impossible.
A lot of coders tend to think of videos as being these big, unwieldy things since we used to download them when computers and the internet were a lot weaker. An hour of 480p video is about a gig, 1080p is only about 3 gigs
That's considering:
- Transcoding for all types of devices
- Having apps that work on all those devices
- Being one app that people already use/already have an account to it to reduce friction
- Being in an environment where people already are, and where they can discover your content without you telling them about it
Sounds kind of ok-ish to me. But for MANY people (most, I would say), $20 bucks is multiple meals, and is a significant spending considering for quite a while, nobody is going to see the content.
If I pay $0 to upload and nobody sees it, I don't lose much.
On the plus side, though, if your videos start pulling in ad money, you keep all of it. And you don't have to worry about getting locked out of your Google account because of some overzealous bot misinterpreting a tiny scrap of background music or conversation about chess piece colors
It's also about closing one of the few paths that the poor can use to stop being poor.
Maybe it would drive income equality and better remuneration for those roles. Maybe we'd simply lose a lot of productivity. Who knows?
UBI would provide peanuts for everyone and devalue the content even more. Everybody and the fleas on the backs of their dogs will be streaming and influencing.
So who decides which artists are about "culture and quality of life" and should be paid to do whatever they like doing? You? Some committee? The population?
Because right now it's the population. You might not agree with the choices they make, but that's a different issue.
The only way to make it more meritocratic is to completely remove algorithms. But that could make it even harder for smaller channels to grow.
> In the last there were big logistical challenges and costs to making a movie. In YT there are no real costs.
Exactly, anyone who has a good idea and a smartphone can record and upload to Youtube. Can it be simpler than that? Of course, in some places people don't have internet/smartphones, but that's not something that it's up for Youtube to fix
Still going strong. Still supported by taxes. Still subject to political interference.
> transparently and fairly
Do you give the rewards out based on views/listens? Because if so then you haven't fixed the system. Because the audience doesn't like everyone's work the same. 10% of the creators will get 90% of the revenue.
Do you give out the rewards based on effort? If I spend 10 days making a tune that no-one wants to listen to, should I get the same reward as someone who creates a tune that everyone loves? Is that fair?
Is there some middle ground, where say 50% of the revenue is allocated on audience size and 50% on effort? If I spend all my time making bad music then I should get my rent paid, right? That's fair, right?
What system should we use that would be fair and still allow unpopular creators to get paid enough to pay their rent?
The basic premise that by making it non-profit, it would garner a higher returns for the content creators is false. The problem really is that there's not enough revenue generated, to pay people producing the content.
Even youtube is run at a loss (only offset by the valuable data they collect for google i suppose). I think people who want to create content, but cannot find the right market to sell that content (aka, cannot reach viral levels) may want to consider doing it only for their own desires, rather than to aim for commercial success.
> Even youtube is run at a loss (only offset by the valuable data they collect for google i suppose).
YouTube generates $15B in revenue. [1] I'm sure in the early years when they first acquired YouTube, they ran it at a loss. However, as far as I am aware, Google has never stated whether or not YouTube is profitable. Given the amount of revenue YouTube generates in the present day, I would say it's unlikely they are running YouTube at a loss.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/3/21121207/youtube-google-al...
They have never done so, and odds are that it looks really bad from a financial reporting perspective, even tho the user data it can collect is very valuable (but it cannot count as revenue, since there's no marketable value for such data atm).
> Alphabet isn’t providing profitability numbers, limiting its operating income (or loss) reporting to Google and “Other Bets,”
...so it's all mostly posturing at this point. The only thing we really know is that YouTube generates billions in revenue on a quarterly basis.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/03/google-still-isnt-telling-us...
More importantly, even if it were profitable now, it took literally hundreds of billions of investment to get there, and huge subsidy by Google's server infrastructure. Where is this public YouTube going to get an amount of money literally bigger than Nasa's funding from?
It's delusional of the author to think that is a goal what YouTube is aiming for.
I'm sur a lot of people are pushed out of character just to be able to pay the rent, hampering both the creativity and he goodwill in the society.
We could have much better creative scene if the incomes were not funnelled to landlords. Creative people are motivated by the drive to create, unfortunately they have to restrict themselves when "large sum to be payed to a property owner or suffer life changing consequences" clause is imposed.
That's why it's often the case where the creative move to a really cheap neighbourhood and years later you have a generation of impactful artists and a neighbourhood that is trendy.
It’s almost like having desirable housing is something that a lot of people are willing to spend money on.
That's what you are saying.
If that's now frowned upon, I must have missed a memo.
It is up to the person to decide which works for them and in the means that works for them. You can go to many cities where it makes outright more sense to just rent (and maybe more prudent to do so while you don't have a steady stream of income from streaming yet).
Its instant double salary in real terms most of the times.
It's very different from being wealthy, it doesn't come with the "elite" stuff but its more like "premium economy" that creates adults of same productivity class with drastically different consumption style and degree freedom.
That investment account will throw off enough returns to pay the rent and then some in most markets, so they're still paying rent to a landlord; they just have a lot more spending money than someone starting from scratch.
I don't think this argument holds much water because these online careers can be done from ANYWHERE and definitely do not require you to live in LA, NYC, SF, or even moderate cost of living areas like Atlanta, Nashville, Phoenix.
Rent is going to cost SOMETHING everywhere until you own your own property (which isn't free either and requires maintenance and comes with taxes).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_distribution
People dont care about such rationalizations. If things go way down south in a society, extremism and chaos takes over, and all those people who were rationalizing such systemic inequality end up finding themselves in hot water. From the decline of Roman Republic and then fall of the empire to French Revolution, from religious/nationalist extremism taking over countries and persecuting such opulent classes to whatever societal collapse you pick from history.
In contrast to the people in earlier millennia, we now are able to identify problems. And we can fix them. That is what we should be doing - not rationalizing the systemic fault by inventing justifications that advertise the existing systemic fault as 'natural'.
The problem is not capitalism, it’s that most of the entertainers are not popular enough to make any money from their viewers, and many still wouldn’t be able to survive if they received 100% of the money YouTube gets. Then where would the money come from? If not their viewers, and not advertising, then who? The government?
It’s not a US or capitalist problem, it’s a simple cash flow problem. Can you imagine the Soviet Union or China funding them? Even the 10,000th van lifer?
How often words are used in a language, wealth distribution, social network followers, you name it.
It seems natural for a 'gold rush' to come to an end.
I don't agree with platforms taking an excessive cut of the value of content that's produced.
I also don't consider the value of the content to be dollars. If we have sufficient UBI, then the value in any content produced is that people watched it with interest and learned or was entertained by it. That's the metric we should optimize for, in the long run.
They're both not wrong. But the catch is, when the machine is taking over the "real jobs", the "new jobs" created are more and more let people to entertain each other. Unlike the old-time circuses that have to travel along the continent village-to-village, these entertainers can easily scale to massive audiences with the Internet, leading to information monopolies and the winner-takes-all situation.
It would only get worse over time. The current model of capitalism would not work at all for a highly-advanced society where most "real jobs" have been automated, and most people have to join the entertainment industry.
(It's actually just how average artists struggle now and in the past, but because they're minorities so people don't care enough. IMHO in a highly-advanced society most people would be more or less like artists.)
Here is a good explanation of a similar situation by Jordan Peterson (2min): https://youtu.be/BZMBdRfbk6A?t=322
TL;DW Pareto Distribution.
Why is Youtube allowed to have a business model where they can arbitrarily decide not to pay you for content generation?
Can you imagine a world in which Uber could just decide not to pay you for deliveries until you meet a certain threshold? And then after they've been paying you for a while, they arbitrarily decide to stop paying you for deliveries.