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Comment by karaterobot | Hacker News Reader

> However, the allure of being a "YouTuber," which had been steadily gaining traction in recent years, saw a decline, slipping from ninth place in last year’s survey to the 14th spot.

That's very nice, I hope it stays so as they age.

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It’s no different from kids in the 80s and 90s wanting to be rock stars or basketball players. Kids often have impractical career ideas based on what they see in pop culture until they are old enough to know themselves and the world more.

YouTuber is just “movie star” or fame adjusted for era. I bet interest in that has been roughly constant over time.

Video is probably the future of all media. People under 30 don’t read all that much, for better or worse.

Being good on camera is probably going to be a general useful life skill, in the way reading and writing are/were.

Frightening. I hope auto transcription improves

A fair number of people I grew up with wanted to be some sort of celebrity. Either an athlete or some sort of performance art.

"YouTuber" is just another specific type of celebrity to them.

And they’re not wrong. One thing that’s cool is there is more variety there, like celebrity playing video games, celebrity doing science, celebrity making cool stories using video game tools, etc.

I have the opposite problem... As a solo bootstrapped founder, I feel like it would be extremely useful to create a few videos to promote the product, however getting in front of a camera feels like a nightmare.

Google "ideas for making faceless videos". It's common among people who have a "face for audio" (like me).

“YouTuber” is another way of saying “small business owner” and regardless of your perspective on the platforms in general, they have cause an explosion of independent businesses

Not really, since most people who want to be a YouTuber probably don't want to be the owner/operator of a laundromat. The desire to be a YouTuber is probably wrapped up in the desire to 1) be famous-ish, or at least well known within a community, and 2) To make money doing the things you already like to do - ie a person who likes to play video games might want to be a video game youtuber.

Yes, and if they incorporate, which many do once they become even just medium-sized, they are a small business owner.

Before that, they're self-employed.

The whole point is that people have biases against video content creation as a business when it's done by individuals, but not by Hollywood or news media.

I'm not exactly sure that we should be encouraging the opening of these types of "small businesses".

Why not? These businesses have made multi millionaires out of regular people. Linus of LTT was offered $100 million for his company. How many ~10 year old companies get valued like that? Started by some regular relatable person with a regular background?

Young adults have seen how corporations treat regular people. They’re not very eager to sign up for the pain train that millennials went through. YouTube is a real career path with significantly bigger upside than almost any opportunity young adults have today

A few become millionaires. Most hustle for pennies. Some just enjoy the process.

Let me know when you find that magical no-risk millionaire-maker job

If [0] is to be believed then a YT career requires beating at least 96.4% of the other channels. To be a millionaire you'll need to do even better. It's probably easier to try for a career in data science, law, or medicine.

[0] https://alanspicer.com/what-percentage-of-youtubers-make-mon...

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