5 ms·

> Anyone who produces content consistently for a long enough period of time, ... etc, will find success eventually. What data do you have to back this up? > T

> Anyone who produces content consistently for a long enough period of time, ... etc, will find success eventually. What data do you have to back this up? > The people who make it big do all those things. That's a very different claim.

tomhoward 6y ago
I really don't get what it is about my comment that's counter to general understanding of how people achieve positive outcomes. It's pretty well established that people who stick at a pursuit for long enough, learn as they go and respond to their audience will find success, if they don't quit first. > What data do you have to back this up? If your primary concern was precise data, you'd first be confronting my parent commenter, who claimed, without any evidence whatsoever: "For every ten people who did this [i.e., posted three quality videos a week, for 1-2 years], maybe one made it big". That's quite plainly an implausible statistic. I get that it's made for rhetorical effect, not precision, but surely that commenter carries the primary burden of evidence for some validity of their position. My position is based on what is generally accepted by anyone with experience in entrepreneurial or creative endeavours. > That's a very different claim. How so?
- brabel 6y ago
  > That's a very different claim. > How so? That explains your reaction: you don't seem to understand the difference between "all people who get big do x" and "all people who do x get big". There's plenty of evidence showing that doing what successful people do does not guarantee success.
  - tomhoward 6y ago
    To break down my comment: Anyone who: - produces content consistently for a long enough period of time, - pays good attention to how their content is received, - continues to adapt their content to what they find the audience wants, - and is attentive in engaging with their audience's messages/comments/etc, will find success eventually. When all parts of this are met, there is no material difference between "all people who get big do x" and "all people who do x get big". I understand that not all people will be able to do all of these things to a sufficient level, quickly enough to satisfy their desire for success, and those people will quit before they make it. But I maintain that for media content creation (unlike, say professional sport), people who really want to find success in that field will be able to work out how to do it given enough persistence and discernment over enough time.
    - xnyan 6y ago
      You are kind of ignoring the question - how do you know this? What it sounds like is you observed a statistically insignificant sample and have drawn conclusions from it.
      - tomhoward 6y ago
        I wasn't ignoring the question; I think I was mistaken about what people were disagreeing with. I was making a point I thought was self-evident: that if you're already capable of creating "3 quality videos a week" (in the words of the original commenter I replied to), you'll be able to attract a growing audience for it if you persist with the content creation and audience engagement. I.e., good product + good marketing -> long-term success, which is how creative/entrepreneurial success always happens. I later realised people seemed to think I was claiming that any person, even one starting with below-average video production abilities, could eventually become as big as PewDiePie if they just "try hard enough". That's not what I was claiming.
    - throwaway2048 6y ago
      Consider this, there is a hypothetical "perfect youtuber lottery". To enter it, you must meet or exceed all the requirements you laid out, you then get a ticket. Tickets are drawn, some small handful are winners. Everyone who won did all the perfect youtuber things, but beyond that the fact they were successful was entirely based on factors outside their control. Is this a reasonable approximation of reality? Maybe, it would certainly fit the mold of what makes a successful person in most other highly skewed areas of life where some very small percentage involved are identifiable as really successful like musicians, actors, authors, artists etc. The problem is that you don't even admit this as a possibility, just the standard refrain of work harder at it and those who fail clearly didn't work hard enough. Unless you define those who are successful as the only people who "did it all right", which is definitely a circular argument... Nobody is saying it doesn't take hard work, just don't expect hard work to be enough, and worse still, if any other areas where creative output is used as income are any indication, don't expect being very good, or even the best to be enough either (plenty of examples of musicians, authors and artists who changed history languishing in obscurity their whole lives)
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > My position is based on what is generally accepted by anyone with experience in entrepreneurial or creative endeavours. It sounds a lot like what people in that position would correctly observe as being generally necessary for success being mistaken for being sufficient.
  - tomhoward 6y ago
    I think/hope I just addressed this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23467409 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23467409
brabel 6y ago
> What data do you have to back this up? Exactly! That's what people fail to see: it doesn't matter how hard you worked and how good you are - if there's hundreds of people doing the same as you (and I assume for anything that can "explode" on YT and become something worth 200K a month, there always is), your chances are extremely small, even if you actually happen to be THE BEST (which you can never really know, of course), because someone with just a little less talent, or who put a little less effort, might just happen to know another famous youtuber, or come up with slightly better marketing, or by chance get famous on some important forum because a respected poster mentioned their channel, and really hundreds of other things that would keep you from becoming the one taking all the attraction. Once they make it big, they can invest on their channel (buy professional tools, pay professional artists for illustrations etc) and start producing stuff that leaves your stuff in the dust, quickly compensating for their initial "inferiority".
- tomhoward 6y ago
  > if there's hundreds of people doing the same as you If you're disagreeing with me because you're thinking I'm talking about the case of someone doing the same thing as hundreds of other people, then you're reacting to a straw man interpretation of what I said. You can only succeed if you are doing something unique. That applies to media just as it does to entrepreneurship.
- nickfromseattle 6y ago
  Chances are someone won't be the best. >ecause someone with just a little less talent, or who put a little less effort, might just happen to know another famous youtuber, or come up with slightly better marketing, or by chance get famous on some important forum because a respected poster mentioned their channel, and really hundreds of other things that would keep you from becoming the one taking all the attraction. All these things could happen to you also, even if you're not the best.
dx034 6y ago
I also believe it's survivor bias. Eventually anyone doing all those things without success will drop out but you only see those that remain. There's certainly an element of both luck and talent to it, dedication alone won't cut it.
- tomhoward 6y ago
  Yes of course, nobody disputes that. But please carefully re-read what the original commenter and I wrote. Original comment: > My friends who ”made” it posted three quality videos a week. For 1-2 years. My comment: > Anyone who produces content consistently for a long enough period of time, pays good attention to how their content is received, continues to adapt their content to what they find the audience wants, and is attentive in engaging with their audience's messages/comments/etc, will find success eventually. Sure, plenty of people try to do these things, and soon get discouraged and quit. But how many of them deeply devote themselves to learning all the necessary skills? To really learning about content creation, and video production, and audience engagement, and engagement analysis? And even to the personal development work required to overcome any confidence issues and performance skills that might limit their ability to speak well to camera? Sure, you can say not everyone wants to do all that, or has the time to do all that. But all I'm saying is that the people who succeed are the ones who find a way to learn the necessary skills and overcome the obstacles.
  - JoshuaDavid 6y ago
    > But all I'm saying is that the people who succeed are the ones who find a way to learn the necessary skills and overcome the obstacles. I don't think anyone here disagrees that most successful content producers do all of these things. People are saying that the number of people who do all of these things is much higher than the number of successful content producers, and therefore doing all of these things does not guarantee success. I am not sure whether you disagree with that assessment or if you think people are saying that consistent production / knowing your audience don't matter and it's all down to luck (which is not what people are saying). Thought experiment: let's say we took a list of everyone who has uploaded at least 3 videos per week to youtube for at least 5 years, filtered those results down to only those producers who uploaded polished content, and further excluded anyone who didn't change their content based on the preferences of their audience. I expect that 10% or less of these people would be successful, where by "successful" I mean they make more from their content than they would by working full time as an entry level employee at a fast food restaurant. There are about 30 million channels on YouTube, and around 1 billion videos, so assuming the standard 80 / 20 distribution holds, we'd expect the top 6 million channels to have a combined 800M videos for an average of 133 videos per top-20% channel. Let's say that 5% of the top 20% of channels meet the "3x per week for 5 years" standard, and 10% of those meet all the other requirements. That would leave us with 0.1% of channels meeting the requirement, or about 30,000 content creators who should be successful. My impression is that you need at least a million or so subscribers to make a living on YouTube. Looking at the stats, there are 16k channels with a million or more subscribers. The estimates are actually within an order of magnitude of each other, which I find very surprising. It is at least plausible that being in the top 1% in terms of amount of content created, and also the top 10% in terms of consistency and responsiveness to the desires of viewers, is largely sufficient for success. Still, I think if we actually looked at the numbers, we'd find that at least half and probably more of the people who are doing "everything right" and have been for the last 5 years are not successful (which is a big update for me, actually. I would have said 99% before actually looking at the stats). Do you think the success rate would be higher than 50%?

tomhoward 6y ago

I really don't get what it is about my comment that's counter to general understanding of how people achieve positive outcomes. It's pretty well established that people who stick at a pursuit for long enough, learn as they go and respond to their audience will find success, if they don't quit first. > What data do you have to back this up? If your primary concern was precise data, you'd first be confronting my parent commenter, who claimed, without any evidence whatsoever: "For every ten people who did this [i.e., posted three quality videos a week, for 1-2 years], maybe one made it big". That's quite plainly an implausible statistic. I get that it's made for rhetorical effect, not precision, but surely that commenter carries the primary burden of evidence for some validity of their position. My position is based on what is generally accepted by anyone with experience in entrepreneurial or creative endeavours. > That's a very different claim. How so?

brabel 6y ago
> That's a very different claim. > How so? That explains your reaction: you don't seem to understand the difference between "all people who get big do x" and "all people who do x get big". There's plenty of evidence showing that doing what successful people do does not guarantee success.
- tomhoward 6y ago
  To break down my comment: Anyone who: - produces content consistently for a long enough period of time, - pays good attention to how their content is received, - continues to adapt their content to what they find the audience wants, - and is attentive in engaging with their audience's messages/comments/etc, will find success eventually. When all parts of this are met, there is no material difference between "all people who get big do x" and "all people who do x get big". I understand that not all people will be able to do all of these things to a sufficient level, quickly enough to satisfy their desire for success, and those people will quit before they make it. But I maintain that for media content creation (unlike, say professional sport), people who really want to find success in that field will be able to work out how to do it given enough persistence and discernment over enough time.
  - xnyan 6y ago
    You are kind of ignoring the question - how do you know this? What it sounds like is you observed a statistically insignificant sample and have drawn conclusions from it.
    - tomhoward 6y ago
      I wasn't ignoring the question; I think I was mistaken about what people were disagreeing with. I was making a point I thought was self-evident: that if you're already capable of creating "3 quality videos a week" (in the words of the original commenter I replied to), you'll be able to attract a growing audience for it if you persist with the content creation and audience engagement. I.e., good product + good marketing -> long-term success, which is how creative/entrepreneurial success always happens. I later realised people seemed to think I was claiming that any person, even one starting with below-average video production abilities, could eventually become as big as PewDiePie if they just "try hard enough". That's not what I was claiming.
  - throwaway2048 6y ago
    Consider this, there is a hypothetical "perfect youtuber lottery". To enter it, you must meet or exceed all the requirements you laid out, you then get a ticket. Tickets are drawn, some small handful are winners. Everyone who won did all the perfect youtuber things, but beyond that the fact they were successful was entirely based on factors outside their control. Is this a reasonable approximation of reality? Maybe, it would certainly fit the mold of what makes a successful person in most other highly skewed areas of life where some very small percentage involved are identifiable as really successful like musicians, actors, authors, artists etc. The problem is that you don't even admit this as a possibility, just the standard refrain of work harder at it and those who fail clearly didn't work hard enough. Unless you define those who are successful as the only people who "did it all right", which is definitely a circular argument... Nobody is saying it doesn't take hard work, just don't expect hard work to be enough, and worse still, if any other areas where creative output is used as income are any indication, don't expect being very good, or even the best to be enough either (plenty of examples of musicians, authors and artists who changed history languishing in obscurity their whole lives)
dragonwriter 6y ago
> My position is based on what is generally accepted by anyone with experience in entrepreneurial or creative endeavours. It sounds a lot like what people in that position would correctly observe as being generally necessary for success being mistaken for being sufficient.
- tomhoward 6y ago
  I think/hope I just addressed this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23467409 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23467409

brabel 6y ago

> What data do you have to back this up? Exactly! That's what people fail to see: it doesn't matter how hard you worked and how good you are - if there's hundreds of people doing the same as you (and I assume for anything that can "explode" on YT and become something worth 200K a month, there always is), your chances are extremely small, even if you actually happen to be THE BEST (which you can never really know, of course), because someone with just a little less talent, or who put a little less effort, might just happen to know another famous youtuber, or come up with slightly better marketing, or by chance get famous on some important forum because a respected poster mentioned their channel, and really hundreds of other things that would keep you from becoming the one taking all the attraction. Once they make it big, they can invest on their channel (buy professional tools, pay professional artists for illustrations etc) and start producing stuff that leaves your stuff in the dust, quickly compensating for their initial "inferiority".

tomhoward 6y ago
> if there's hundreds of people doing the same as you If you're disagreeing with me because you're thinking I'm talking about the case of someone doing the same thing as hundreds of other people, then you're reacting to a straw man interpretation of what I said. You can only succeed if you are doing something unique. That applies to media just as it does to entrepreneurship.
nickfromseattle 6y ago
Chances are someone won't be the best. >ecause someone with just a little less talent, or who put a little less effort, might just happen to know another famous youtuber, or come up with slightly better marketing, or by chance get famous on some important forum because a respected poster mentioned their channel, and really hundreds of other things that would keep you from becoming the one taking all the attraction. All these things could happen to you also, even if you're not the best.

dx034 6y ago

I also believe it's survivor bias. Eventually anyone doing all those things without success will drop out but you only see those that remain. There's certainly an element of both luck and talent to it, dedication alone won't cut it.

tomhoward 6y ago
Yes of course, nobody disputes that. But please carefully re-read what the original commenter and I wrote. Original comment: > My friends who ”made” it posted three quality videos a week. For 1-2 years. My comment: > Anyone who produces content consistently for a long enough period of time, pays good attention to how their content is received, continues to adapt their content to what they find the audience wants, and is attentive in engaging with their audience's messages/comments/etc, will find success eventually. Sure, plenty of people try to do these things, and soon get discouraged and quit. But how many of them deeply devote themselves to learning all the necessary skills? To really learning about content creation, and video production, and audience engagement, and engagement analysis? And even to the personal development work required to overcome any confidence issues and performance skills that might limit their ability to speak well to camera? Sure, you can say not everyone wants to do all that, or has the time to do all that. But all I'm saying is that the people who succeed are the ones who find a way to learn the necessary skills and overcome the obstacles.
- JoshuaDavid 6y ago
  > But all I'm saying is that the people who succeed are the ones who find a way to learn the necessary skills and overcome the obstacles. I don't think anyone here disagrees that most successful content producers do all of these things. People are saying that the number of people who do all of these things is much higher than the number of successful content producers, and therefore doing all of these things does not guarantee success. I am not sure whether you disagree with that assessment or if you think people are saying that consistent production / knowing your audience don't matter and it's all down to luck (which is not what people are saying). Thought experiment: let's say we took a list of everyone who has uploaded at least 3 videos per week to youtube for at least 5 years, filtered those results down to only those producers who uploaded polished content, and further excluded anyone who didn't change their content based on the preferences of their audience. I expect that 10% or less of these people would be successful, where by "successful" I mean they make more from their content than they would by working full time as an entry level employee at a fast food restaurant. There are about 30 million channels on YouTube, and around 1 billion videos, so assuming the standard 80 / 20 distribution holds, we'd expect the top 6 million channels to have a combined 800M videos for an average of 133 videos per top-20% channel. Let's say that 5% of the top 20% of channels meet the "3x per week for 5 years" standard, and 10% of those meet all the other requirements. That would leave us with 0.1% of channels meeting the requirement, or about 30,000 content creators who should be successful. My impression is that you need at least a million or so subscribers to make a living on YouTube. Looking at the stats, there are 16k channels with a million or more subscribers. The estimates are actually within an order of magnitude of each other, which I find very surprising. It is at least plausible that being in the top 1% in terms of amount of content created, and also the top 10% in terms of consistency and responsiveness to the desires of viewers, is largely sufficient for success. Still, I think if we actually looked at the numbers, we'd find that at least half and probably more of the people who are doing "everything right" and have been for the last 5 years are not successful (which is a big update for me, actually. I would have said 99% before actually looking at the stats). Do you think the success rate would be higher than 50%?