If the UN report on the attention economy is saying 0.5% of content produced is consumed and dropping, then how are people getting views? It doesnt make any sense. Unless the game is rigged.
People have limited attention to give anything but unlimited capacity to receive attention. The platforms are taking full advantage of that fact to keep this ponzi scheme running.
By the 2000s, so much information was being generated worldwide that only a small fraction (0.5% in 2015) of the digital data generated was being analyzed at all.
https://www.un.org/sites/un2.un.org/files/attention_economy_...
Where "analyzed" probably means something other than "got any views". In any case, the claim is unsourced, so I wouldn't put much stock in it.
The way I see it, people's ability to give attention is limited, but the ability to do something worth paying attention to is even scarcer, so even the most trivial feat (like writing a comment on HN) is likely to garner at least a few views.
Becoming famous is much harder than getting any views at all, because now you need to do something so attention-grabbing that some of your few initial viewers will tell others about it and your audience size snowballs from there.
Internet Archive's first capture is April 2023.
The most recent references within the report are for 2021.
if you have a good mic and camera, show your face, speak clearly, consistently upload, and - most importantly - you broadly make one-off videos about common denominator subtopics - never going too deep or numbering your videos - then I wouldn't bet against you. there really aren't that many successful science Youtubers