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> but is it consistently 40+ hours a week? The problem with creative work is that the fruits of your labour are nonlinear. A single dumb video made in the spir

> but is it consistently 40+ hours a week? The problem with creative work is that the fruits of your labour are nonlinear. A single dumb video made in the spirit of the moment might get a million views, while one that you toiled over for days receives only a fraction of that. Of course doing nothing gets you nothing, but using hours-worked as a yardstick probably won't work.

CM30 9y ago
This too. Content creation is a volatile thing, and it's pretty damn difficult to tell whether your audience (or the internet in general) will really appreciate your work. You can try and migitate this uncertainly. By looking at trends, seeing what videos are popular, making content about whatever the new big thing is at the moment and by putting a lot of effort into your writing or production values. But at the end of the day, it's at least much luck as skill and time that determines your success. I've seen people who are terrible video creators get hundreds of thousands or millions of subscribers simply by being in the right place at the right time. For instance, the Irate Gamer got big not because he was a particularly talented individual, but because he was a family friendly Angry Video Game Nerd alternative in a time when the nerd was getting super popular and YouTube wanted to present others like him. Others got popular because a big news site posted about their work, or a creator with millions of fans like PewDiePie mentioned them on social media or their channel ended up in a related channels box on a large channel or because a bunch of people on Reddit came across them and thought their work was good. And it can easily go wrong for successful or skilled people too. Doug Walker thought Demo Reel was going to be the next big thing, but it failed miserably to the point he had to bring back the Nostalgia Critic to keep his business going. I know a pro game designer with decades of experience in the industry who made a series about his speciality on YouTube... and squeaks by with about 300 subscribers. There have been more amazing looking websites and apps than I can name which tanked hard while their worse looking, worse functioning competitors took off. Content creation (and perhaps creation in general) is a volatile, very hard to predict thing that has made fools out of experts and millionaires out of fools at an almost equal rate.
narrator 9y ago
Labor is a unit of cost, but not necessarily of value.

CM30 9y ago

This too. Content creation is a volatile thing, and it's pretty damn difficult to tell whether your audience (or the internet in general) will really appreciate your work. You can try and migitate this uncertainly. By looking at trends, seeing what videos are popular, making content about whatever the new big thing is at the moment and by putting a lot of effort into your writing or production values. But at the end of the day, it's at least much luck as skill and time that determines your success. I've seen people who are terrible video creators get hundreds of thousands or millions of subscribers simply by being in the right place at the right time. For instance, the Irate Gamer got big not because he was a particularly talented individual, but because he was a family friendly Angry Video Game Nerd alternative in a time when the nerd was getting super popular and YouTube wanted to present others like him. Others got popular because a big news site posted about their work, or a creator with millions of fans like PewDiePie mentioned them on social media or their channel ended up in a related channels box on a large channel or because a bunch of people on Reddit came across them and thought their work was good. And it can easily go wrong for successful or skilled people too. Doug Walker thought Demo Reel was going to be the next big thing, but it failed miserably to the point he had to bring back the Nostalgia Critic to keep his business going. I know a pro game designer with decades of experience in the industry who made a series about his speciality on YouTube... and squeaks by with about 300 subscribers. There have been more amazing looking websites and apps than I can name which tanked hard while their worse looking, worse functioning competitors took off. Content creation (and perhaps creation in general) is a volatile, very hard to predict thing that has made fools out of experts and millionaires out of fools at an almost equal rate.

narrator 9y ago

Labor is a unit of cost, but not necessarily of value.