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> My opinion on the intent of the post was to highlight the reality of an "internet famous" person. There is this notion floating around that if you get enough

> My opinion on the intent of the post was to highlight the reality of an "internet famous" person. There is this notion floating around that if you get enough subscribers / fans you can make enough money to quit your job and sign autographs. While many people have gone on to do this, this is not the norm whatsoever. It takes hard work, a head for marketing, production experience, photography, videography...or just a really good idea and/or personality. Perhaps I'm underestimating the naivete of the average person, but I didn't realize that people thought this was a thing. Hell, the concept that Internet fame isn't necessarily lucrative is so well-understood that even freaking South Park got around to satirizing it almost 8 YEARS ago (and South Park doesn't have a tendency to satirize super-niche concepts). Even if I'm wrong about that and it is somehow novel and interesting to write a long article about how subscriber counts don't turn into dollars, I still find the article's premise and insistent emphasis that the economics of these distribution channels are somehow sad to be completely wrongheaded.

forrestthewoods 11y ago
Most subscribers think the person they ar subscribing too has a lot of money. most consumers in this world have absolutely no idea about anything related to money. No dea how much things cost to make. No idea how little revenue thy generate. Anything that educates even a few consumers is a good thing.
- anon4 11y ago
  AFAIK the market forces at play in a capitalist economy mean that in the end things cost as much as you think they cost.
  - sanoli 11y ago
    He wrote "how much they cost to make". They're different things.
  - pjc50 11y ago
    Not in advertising-supported or sponsored informational products.
TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
It's totally a thing, especially among teens/twenties. Sometimes it even works, kind of. I know someone's teen daughter who makes non-trivial cash reposting art on her Instagram account. Warhol said everyone would be famous for fifteen minutes. He never said anything about being able to pay the bills from it. > I still find the article's premise and insistent emphasis that the economics of these distribution channels are somehow sad to be completely wrongheaded. I don't. A huge chunk of social traffic and the ad spend it feeds to YouTube/FB/etc only exists because (mostly) younger and (often) more creatively inclined users have been sold on the idea of making money from a "personal brand." AdBusters was satirising this fifteen years ago, and now it's turned into reality. The reality is that you always make more money from being the farmer than from being the livestock. Perhaps the farms have an interest in not making that too obvious. It's not the hopefuls who are wrongheaded - it's the tropes of the bullshit "social" economy they're growing up in.
- kbutler 11y ago
  > someone's teen daughter who makes non-trivial cash reposting art on her Instagram account. But the jump from "non-trivial cash" for a teen to "living wage for an adult or family" is substantial. If lots of people are willing and able to do what you do for nearly free, you shouldn't expect to make much from doing it.
- wutbrodo 11y ago
  > I don't. A huge chunk of social traffic and the ad spend it feeds to YouTube/FB/etc only exists because (mostly) younger and (often) more creatively inclined users have been sold on the idea of making money from a "personal brand." So if I'm understanding correctly, your claim is not that these channels don't trivially provide a fulltime job, but that they're somehow heavily marketed as doing so to kids? I suppose I can buy that. On the other hand, kids are precisely the ones who don't need a full-time job. A kid with an extremely successful YouTube channel has an awesome hobby, not a full time job. This is further reflected by the fact that almost every single person who had money issues in the article is in their mid 20s at least (The 18 year old who quit IG modelling did so because it was fake, which is pretty much the opposite problem of "this is not lucrative enough"). I don't think it's too much to expect from people in their mid 20s to be realistic about how much money they can make adding another photographer to the Instagram hordes. Hell I've been traveling for a while and have been posting random pictures, and I've had several people tell me that I'm one of their favorite feeds. I am decidedly not particularly good at photography, and somehow my random "hey look at my pics" is providing an amount of utility to some users that's roughly the same as the "professional" IGers they follow that have branding deals and stuff. Any market where supply can be increased at all by an untalented guy deciding he should post photos of his trip on a whim is not going to be one where suppliers can trivially demand large amounts of money, and for good reason. > The reality is that you always make more money from being the farmer than from being the livestock. Perhaps the farms have an interest in not making that too obvious. Perhaps, but this is one of the cases (as opposed to the usual analogy to owning capital vs productive labor) where the relationship is substantially less exploitative. The job of the farmer is substantially more unique and useful than any given "livestock" (though a lot of this is due to network effects, which always suck a bit).
dragonwriter 11y ago
> Perhaps I'm underestimating the naivete of the average person, but I didn't realize that people thought this was a thing. Its a thing for much the same reason as pursuing sports for a reasonable possibility of raking in ludicrously large paychecks is: the successes are inherently highly visible in the media, the failures inherently almost completely invisible. > Hell, the concept that Internet fame isn't necessarily lucrative is so well-understood that even freaking South Park got around to satirizing it almost 8 YEARS ago 8 years ago, there were a lot fewer highly-visible internet celebrities; many of the currently well-established social media services didn't exist or were fairly new; Facebook was only 3 years old.

forrestthewoods 11y ago

Most subscribers think the person they ar subscribing too has a lot of money. most consumers in this world have absolutely no idea about anything related to money. No dea how much things cost to make. No idea how little revenue thy generate. Anything that educates even a few consumers is a good thing.

anon4 11y ago
AFAIK the market forces at play in a capitalist economy mean that in the end things cost as much as you think they cost.
- sanoli 11y ago
  He wrote "how much they cost to make". They're different things.
- pjc50 11y ago
  Not in advertising-supported or sponsored informational products.

TheOtherHobbes 11y ago

It's totally a thing, especially among teens/twenties. Sometimes it even works, kind of. I know someone's teen daughter who makes non-trivial cash reposting art on her Instagram account. Warhol said everyone would be famous for fifteen minutes. He never said anything about being able to pay the bills from it. > I still find the article's premise and insistent emphasis that the economics of these distribution channels are somehow sad to be completely wrongheaded. I don't. A huge chunk of social traffic and the ad spend it feeds to YouTube/FB/etc only exists because (mostly) younger and (often) more creatively inclined users have been sold on the idea of making money from a "personal brand." AdBusters was satirising this fifteen years ago, and now it's turned into reality. The reality is that you always make more money from being the farmer than from being the livestock. Perhaps the farms have an interest in not making that too obvious. It's not the hopefuls who are wrongheaded - it's the tropes of the bullshit "social" economy they're growing up in.

kbutler 11y ago
> someone's teen daughter who makes non-trivial cash reposting art on her Instagram account. But the jump from "non-trivial cash" for a teen to "living wage for an adult or family" is substantial. If lots of people are willing and able to do what you do for nearly free, you shouldn't expect to make much from doing it.
wutbrodo 11y ago
> I don't. A huge chunk of social traffic and the ad spend it feeds to YouTube/FB/etc only exists because (mostly) younger and (often) more creatively inclined users have been sold on the idea of making money from a "personal brand." So if I'm understanding correctly, your claim is not that these channels don't trivially provide a fulltime job, but that they're somehow heavily marketed as doing so to kids? I suppose I can buy that. On the other hand, kids are precisely the ones who don't need a full-time job. A kid with an extremely successful YouTube channel has an awesome hobby, not a full time job. This is further reflected by the fact that almost every single person who had money issues in the article is in their mid 20s at least (The 18 year old who quit IG modelling did so because it was fake, which is pretty much the opposite problem of "this is not lucrative enough"). I don't think it's too much to expect from people in their mid 20s to be realistic about how much money they can make adding another photographer to the Instagram hordes. Hell I've been traveling for a while and have been posting random pictures, and I've had several people tell me that I'm one of their favorite feeds. I am decidedly not particularly good at photography, and somehow my random "hey look at my pics" is providing an amount of utility to some users that's roughly the same as the "professional" IGers they follow that have branding deals and stuff. Any market where supply can be increased at all by an untalented guy deciding he should post photos of his trip on a whim is not going to be one where suppliers can trivially demand large amounts of money, and for good reason. > The reality is that you always make more money from being the farmer than from being the livestock. Perhaps the farms have an interest in not making that too obvious. Perhaps, but this is one of the cases (as opposed to the usual analogy to owning capital vs productive labor) where the relationship is substantially less exploitative. The job of the farmer is substantially more unique and useful than any given "livestock" (though a lot of this is due to network effects, which always suck a bit).

dragonwriter 11y ago

> Perhaps I'm underestimating the naivete of the average person, but I didn't realize that people thought this was a thing. Its a thing for much the same reason as pursuing sports for a reasonable possibility of raking in ludicrously large paychecks is: the successes are inherently highly visible in the media, the failures inherently almost completely invisible. > Hell, the concept that Internet fame isn't necessarily lucrative is so well-understood that even freaking South Park got around to satirizing it almost 8 YEARS ago 8 years ago, there were a lot fewer highly-visible internet celebrities; many of the currently well-established social media services didn't exist or were fairly new; Facebook was only 3 years old.