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Comment by phphphphp | Hacker News Reader

I don’t think it’s the YouTube economy so much as it is the creative economy. If you produce creative content, you are at the mercy of the whims of your audience. Even in profitable or well-funded businesses, there’s a constant existential threat associated with the whims of the audience changing.

The problem is especially visible on YouTube because so many creators are small, and so have a connection with their audience but don’t have the resources to absorb the costs and risks of trying to keep up with a constantly changing audience, but it’s not a problem specific to or even especially pronounced on YouTube.

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Yup. Generally speaking, people value content like this as pretty much having, well, no value at all. They don't want to pay for it, and they'll go out of there way to make sure they pay as little as possible for it.

In fact, I would even go further and suggest that many people feel that all jobs, except for whatever job/industry they are in, as having little to no value and should be done for nothing.

> Yup. Generally speaking, people value content like this as pretty much having, well, no value at all. They don't want to pay for it, and they'll go out of there way to make sure they pay as little as possible for it.

A lot of the blame goes to the content creators, though.

They were the ones who set the expectations for "free content" by giving their creation away for "free". And in that context, making $5k a month is pretty good. If I have a garage sale, put $0 price tags on everything, and end up with $5k afterwards, then that's amazing.

> In fact, I would even go further and suggest that many people feel that all jobs, except for whatever job/industry they are in, as having little to no value and should be done for nothing.

That seems a little far fetched.

I suspect that my (passive) valuation of entertainment, given the culture that I grew up in, partly stems from growing up with ad subsidized radio. It feels like music is almost a public service, but for buying a receiver, not choosing the playlist, and switching stations when the ads come on. I suspect the availability of a public library inclulcated similar expectations in me. Eventually, I paid for movies and songs. But, youtube and other internet content hosts fit most in that mode whereby I can eat from the buffet to my limit, provided I bat away the promotional posters as I sit down.

This rings true even for clearly necessary fields - I've had clients balk at pricing for a complete revamp of their network. Do you think I googled 'How to setup Company Network Safely' and went to work? Years of knowledge etc; that a lot of these guys don't care to understand

Most people chose to be ignorant in this manner. They'd rather spend as little as possible and denounce your skill rather than understand why xyz costs as much as it does.

Right -- YouTube is essentially the only platform that you can get "all three": distribution, discoverability & revenue.

People can make creative content and get the first 2 on TikTok but all things equal the payout would be way, way less. They can make money on Patreon and distribute their content through it but there isn't enough discoverability there for them to grow.

There's a reason why everyone who blows up on any other platform expands to YouTube asap.

Good point. Being a creator is a tough path, but it's probably way safer and easier than trying to make it in Hollywood.

> If you produce creative content, you are at the mercy of the whims of your audience.

More like if you produce creative content, you're at the mercy of your distributor. Google is making significantly more money off of the channel than the content producers are, I wouldn't be surprised if the difference were an order of magnitude.

How so? Google gives 55% of the ad revenue to the creator and pays for all the hosting and administrative costs itself. And none of the Patreon revenue goes to Google.

In the article it said that the creator makes around 60% of their income from AdSense, 40% from Patreon (which Google sees nothing from).

A quick search says that Google pays the publisher/creator 68% on the AdSense revenue.

So how does Google make an order of magnitude more of this channel than the content producer?

Creators who could take CC payments via their own merchant account would pay about 3-4%.

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