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Private, centralized 3rd party marketplaces are responsible for some of the biggest commercial successes of the web boom(#1 and 2.0). But, they haven't "done
by netcan 8y ago
Private, centralized 3rd party marketplaces are responsible for some of the biggest commercial successes of the web boom(#1 and 2.0).
But, they haven't "done good" by vendors, by and large. A YouTuber with viewerships as high as mainstream TV shows can barely afford "2 guys and a mic." App store purchases is a fairly meager market, and not a place to build a serious business unless you have other "monetisation" plans.
Steam is somewhat of an exception but still, being beholden to a discovery algorithm like that is disheartening.
Recommendation engines are such an important part of any market these days. Besides recomending stuff, it's an incentive structure for the market.. a la google-> seo spammers, fb-> kgb spammers, etc.
- baby 8y agohave you seen how much youtubers earn?
- Dayshine 8y agoPicking a random example: https://socialblade.com/youtube/channel/UCbx1TZgxfIauUZyPuBzEwZg https://socialblade.com/youtube/channel/UCbx1TZgxfIauUZyPuBz... 100k daily views, £17 - £250 estimated daily earnings. Game of thrones has an estimated 10 million viewers per episode. So, scaling up youtube earnings: £1,700 - £25,000 per episode. The actual per episode budget was around £4 million per episode. See the gap here?
- baby 8y agohttps://influencermarketinghub.com/how-much-does-pewdiepie-make/ https://influencermarketinghub.com/how-much-does-pewdiepie-m...
- sbarre 8y agoYou're using the example of the top earner to make your case about everyone? Do all film actors make $60M/year just because Dwayne Johnson does?
- GhostVII 8y agoWell to be fair the parent was using one of the most popular TV shows to make their case, so using the top YouTuber as a response seems reasonable.
- ArchTypical 8y agoThere are multiple youtubers who have gone into depth about the details of how twitch people get paid. From top end to bottom, it's fairly consistent (except for a little subscription margin step at a certain point). Youtube/Google is even less involved in day-to-day, so there's no reason to believe that the scale isn't similarly linear.
- Applejinx 8y agoMy God, no. It's not anything like linear. It's more like exponential: the top earners are totally off the charts, and everybody else is largely jockeying for position. I hesitate to even call it a scale. These things all follow viral dynamics: if you haven't blown up with billions of views, you're very possibly spending more than you get back.
- ArchTypical 8y agoPareto explains the curve, but the monetary rewards are linear to where you are on that curve. Perhaps a small example will clarify. Pareto Curve (more or less) of Y values on index X: [1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,2,2,2,2,3,10,50,500,7000,9000000] Index 30 is "off the chart" Now revenue: $$*index The correlation is linear (basically). The top youtuber who is a kid who reviews toys, makes the majority of his 22mil from ads, same as you or I would with <100 views per video.
- GhostVII 8y agoI don't think that is a fair comparison, because people pay money to watch Game of Thrones, while YouTube is completely free. If it cost $14.99 a month to watch a small set of YouTube channels, their viewership would be far lower (and revenue per viewer would be much higher).
- munk-a 8y ago> If it cost $14.99 a month to watch a small set of YouTube channels Actually this exists, it's called Youtube premium and there are some channels that offer some content exclusive to the platform (as far as I'm aware) I have no idea how it's doing but I also don't have any interest in trying it out, I'd much rather support specific content streams via patreon or other offerings.
- josefresco 8y agoI pay for YouTube Premium.
- na85 8y agoAre there ads?
- ramses0 8y agoNo.
- josefresco 8y agoNot on YouTube (general) but I also pay for YouTube TV and there are loads of ads on their "on demand" content.
- ramses0 8y agoVote with your wallet. I'm about to ditch Pandora b/c they keep advertising pandora super-premium, when I'm already paying for pandora premium. What should that particular anti-pattern be called?
- criddell 8y agoHow did you generate the random example? If you do it again, I'd be shocked if you got a 100k/day example. I would guess there's a very, very long tail of channels that have a very small number of videos and essentially no views.
- Dayshine 8y agoThat channel is ranked around 20,000... It's in the long tail. I picked an example of someone who does it full time.
- ssalazar 8y agoEarnings is far from a linear function of viewer count.
- merb 8y agowell I always tought that most youtubers actually make money via "hidden" ads and not via views. most of these 100k daily views channels make way more than 17€ - 250€ juat because they have sponsors and what not. basically it's the same than on free tv. people with the most sponsors and ad network will basically make the most money. (i.e. on german television (sky paid tv) there are ads on the end of game of thrones which makes them probably more money than their subscriber count)
- criddell 8y agoThe discovery algorithm serves the consumer first and foremost. When users start complaining about not being shown interesting stuff, then Valve will jump into action. In this case, how do we know that the algorithm change isn't correcting a problem? I'm sorry for the game developer in the article, but every time his game was being promoted, somebody else's wasn't. How do we know he wasn't being over-promoted with the old algorithm? Without seeing everything that Valve sees, can we really know?
- sbarre 8y agoThe point here is not about this particular developer, but at about recommendation engines in general and the challenges they pose. I'm not arguing against algorithms here, there are just too many games on Steam to show everyone a raw list of products and let them fend for themselves.. You need some kind of automated curation. But as a seller of products, you have to put all your faith in the marketplace's ability to put your products in front of the right people as much as possible, and it can be frustrating when you suddenly start seeing data that shows this is happening less, and you don't know why.
- netcan 8y agoExactly what I meant. They're not meceydoing a bad job, but just having that central decider (human or botmaster) is disheartening.. when things don't go your way. ..it's a gatekeeper, and we have a complicated relationship with those guys.
- sbarre 8y agoFor sure, I agree and I know exactly where you're coming from.. A decade ago or so I was tasked with writing a recommendation engine for a "creators community" company I worked at, and the feedback we got after launching that feature was pretty much constant for as long as I was still working there. Everyone wanted to know exactly how it worked (so they could min/max for the logic) and no one was happy with the results.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
- badloginagain 8y ago> YouTuber with viewerships as high as mainstream TV shows can barely afford "2 guys and a mic." This actually isn't a revenue thing, its a platform expectation thing. There's a really good video essay (on YouTube, naturally) explaining the 'Manufactured Authenticity' for popular YouTube channels: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FJEtCvb2Kw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FJEtCvb2Kw
- LeifCarrotson 8y agoIt depends on how you define "done well by vendors". They aren't causing a few vendors to find success on the scale of a mainstream TV show, but they have allowed a great many vendors to "succeed" weakly. 2 guys and a mic, without Youtube, would just be a self-funded hobby to show your friends and family, maybe enter some indie film shows, maybe help get a job in advertising or local TV with your portfolio. With Youtube, they might get a million subscribers and make on the order of $10,000 per year from what would otherwise be just a hobby! And there are on the order of 10,000 such channels with 1 million subscribers. Now, you can say what you like about how Youtube treats the other 97% of channels with far less viewership - but there's a lot fewer than 10,000 channels on mainstream TV. It's the same in game development, mobile app stores, music, sports, and a lot of other fields. The marketplace is open to a lot of people who really want in to get their chance at the top. It's hard to earn a living wage from doing the work when you're competing with people who are willing to earn less than a living wage.
- TheGRS 8y agoThe issue here is that you make (just continuing your hypothetical here) $10k per year for 2 guys doing 7 days per week to maintain their viewership. Not enough to sustain their business, so their content starts moving toward least common denominator stuff.
- tokyodude 8y agoI'm not seeing how this is not just reality. It's like trying to make a living as a rock band, a book author. There's too many games. The iOS app store claims 2 million apps. It's been around 10 years. Opened July, 10, 2008. 2 million apps / 10 years = 547 new apps every day for the last 10 years. And of course the number of apps coming out today is far greater than it was 10 years ago so it's actually more like 1000 apps a day right now. Steam has the same issue. Steam was around 8k new games in 2017. That's 21 new games per day, 153 a week, 666 a month. No one has time for that many games. What would Steam do to suddenly get all those games to make a salaries for every indie that put stuff up? There's really nothing they can do. There's just too many games. At most Steam could go back to restricting the market. That wouldn't raise anyone's odds, it would just make invisible all the people that tried and failed to get on the market.
- LoSboccacc 8y agoThe recommendation engine are there for the buyers, not to replace sellers' marketing. That's as reliable as a source of viewers as scratch lottery cards.
- notatoad 8y ago>A YouTuber with viewerships as high as mainstream TV shows can barely afford "2 guys and a mic." Do you have a source for that? because it seems to me like there's a lot of youtubers out there making pretty good money.
- ghaff 8y agoHere's one example. [1] It claims 1.4 million monthly viewers translates to about $17K per year. Yes, a few people have made relatively big money ($millions) but that's for billions of views. A popular TV show averages in the neighborhood of 15 million viewers these days. ADDED: So the parent comment seems pretty close. Maybe $150K/year gross revenue for viewership in neighborhood of the most popular network programming. That's in the ballpark of barely supporting two guys and their gear. [1] https://www.inc.com/minda-zetlin/even-youtube-stars-with-14-million-monthly-viewers-earn-less-than-17000-a-year-research-shows.html https://www.inc.com/minda-zetlin/even-youtube-stars-with-14-...
- skksjsnaahs 8y agoAren’t TV ratings based on how many people watched each episode, during its initial airing? And the same episode is sold in multiple venues, like DVDs and paid streaming. To apples-to-apples compare traditional TV production budgets to the YouTube stat of revenue per views per month for a whole channel, you might need need to multiply by 10 or 100. YouTube’s cut is reportedly 45% - I am skeptical that the traditional media industry gives such a revenue share to its creators.
- ghaff 8y agoWith traditional network TV, the vast bulk of the money is in how many people watch the show when it first airs. Syndication revenue, DVDs, etc. are relatively trivial. Obviously the whole model is shifting to a more fragmented and on-demand market with fewer, but often more valuable, eyeballs per show. Seinfeld peaked at over 30 million average views for first-run episodes. Game of Thrones is about 10 million for a comparison on cable today. I agree that apples-to-apples is hard but the bottom line is that very few people make a real living from YouTube views.
- notafraudster 8y ago> A YouTuber with viewerships as high as mainstream TV shows can barely afford "2 guys and a mic." But this stands to reason. Mainstream TV show viewing figures refer to the number of adults 18-49 in the United States watching the show live(-ish now that L+SD and C+7 rates are used to sell ads) including at least putatively watching the various 3 minute blocks of commercials in the middle. YouTube viewing figures show the number of worldwide plays by all people in or out of the demo, most not in the United States and in less valuable markets, many adblocking, those who don't adblock often skip ads, and the ads are either inline or pre-roll. And the content is shorter, so it's sort of unclear how an 11 minute video should compare to a 42 minute television series.
- bytematic 8y agoAdblock works for most of the network tv websites too! Surprisingly...
- notafraudster 8y agoOne reason networks have been very ineffective at including online streaming views in their ad sales packages.
- nitwit005 8y agoLet's say, hypothetically, that I create a website that rivals YouTube where people do achieve fairly consistent success, and can live off of the income from their videos. What do we expect to happen? Hundreds of thousands of people will try to get in on it, causing both the income of existing creators to drop, and the average income to plummet. Any market where there is a huge supply of people who want to produce the good is going to have this problem.