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Comment by humanrebar | Hacker News Reader

> I'm not sure what the takeaway is. Maybe the importance of owning your distribution channels?

Supply of all types of media content is way up. There are only so many hours in the day, so demand is comparatively inelastic. This means per-unit cost has to go way down.

This is the general trend for pretty much all media, including things normally categorized as something else, like news and stage productions.

On the plus side, distribution is basically free and gatekeepers are losing their monopolies and monopsonies, so creators and consumers of niche products can connect better than ever.

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This. In addition to distribution being free, content creation has become far more accessible. Supply is way up.

Connecting with more people is only as good as your ability to monetize those connections, though.

Unless you're a twelve-year-old showing off your Minecraft mods or your new styling tips. Then you're getting non-monetary value (friends, fun, reputation) from creating content, and you're unintentionally competing for the attention of kids and tweens that used to buy comic books and Backstreet Boys albums.

You said 'creators and consumers of niche products' which implies commercial intent to me, and we are having this discussion in the context of music publishing. You're not wrong, but I think this is a loss of focus.

Hardly. Commercial content has been challenged and displaced by non-commercial, purely cultural content like never before. Young people would rather see a goofy image macro that their friend made than some lame sitcom by old white guys in Hollywood. For the first time ever, this non-commercial content lives side by side with commercial content on massively popular portal sites like Faceebook, reddit, and YouTube.

That's not the point. This is a thread about a particular set of contract provisions YouTube is apparently offering to publishers, not a general shift in consumption patterns.

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