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YouTube and Patreon Still Aren’t Paying the Rent for Most Creatives

164 points by herbertl 6y ago

dusted 6y ago
It's almost as if.. Doing stuff that you'd otherwise do in your spare-time, is not a real job for 99% of people ? Yeah, I love playing and making games, nobody wants to play them, and nobody wants to watch me do it, because I'm not good enough at it. That's why I have a day job. There's also a limited need for entertainers/creatives (they are needed, but not comparatively very many).. One person can entertain millions.
- roenxi 6y ago
  There are about 8,000 one-in-a-million people out there for any discipline anyone cares to name. Around 800 of them speak English to some degree and are connected to the internet. There is room on a top-10 list for 10 of them. Number 9 will do OK but is starting to move down the Praeto curve. The competition to entertain others on the internet is fierce; it is difficult for me to see how even someone of that level of talent and calibre could survive except for the fact that most of their competition simply gives up before they start because it looks like a lousy career.
- pydry 6y ago
  Or as if monopolizing a distribution channel allows you to charge rents way in excess of your costs.
  - ChrisKnott 6y ago
    Who are you accusing of doing that? YouTube?
    - pydry 6y ago
      Do you know of any other video platforms with 2.3 billion active users?
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      - ChrisKnott 6y ago
        Do YouTube charge rents way in excess of their costs?
        viro 6y ago
        No they don't charge rent.
  - lotsofpulp 6y ago
    Then it’s a good thing no one has monopolized distributing videos across the internet.
    - pydry 6y ago
      The 2nd biggest video sharing website has 10x lower reach and no ad network. I'm curious to know what counts as a monopoly if not that. The network effect has been good to google.
      - lotsofpulp 6y ago
        Conversations are futile if we’re not working with the same definitions and context. You wrote: > Or as if monopolizing a distribution channel allows you to charge rents way in excess of your costs. Defining “distribution channel” as a single company’s website rather than the internet would make “distribution channel” meaningless in the context of this discussion. It’s trivial to distribute a video with anyone all over the world in this day and age. It’s not trivial to make money from it. Google might have a monopoly on the mechanism that can be used to make money from videos, but that’s a different discussion than having a monopoly on distributing video.
        pydry 6y ago
        If you're distributing ad supported video content where else do you go? Vimeo is the second biggest video sharing platform. They have 200 million eyeballs they can push to your content as opposed to 2.3 billion and no ad network. I don't think it's an enormous stretch to say that youtube own this market. >that’s a different discussion than having a monopoly on distributing video. I neither stated nor implied that they did.
        lotsofpulp 6y ago
        I can entertain the idea that YouTube currently has a monopoly (or “owns the market”) on the service of connecting advertisers to small time content creators. Whether or not it harms society is something I have not concluded. I am aware there are negatives for medium size content creators who lack negotiating power, but also huge upsides to individual content creators who almost always cause YouTube to lose money. And I’m not sure what any alternative is, other than a taxpayer funded version of a YouTube, but that also opens a can of worms. > I neither stated nor implied that they did. Sorry, I interpreted “monopolizing a distribution channel” in the context of YouTube compensating content creators to mean YouTube monopolizing distribution of videos by content creators.
- TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
  There's an even more limited need for fraud-promoting bankers, crooked and corrupt politicians, people who spend their entire lives gambling on the markets, and organised criminals, but somehow we never seem to lack for all of those. This isn't some kind of rational market forces issue. Artists and intellectuals have real power. But starving them of cash, branding them "entertainers", and converting their jobs into a gig economy scramble guarantees they'll be too distracted to realise it. Not unlike other jobs.
  - michaelt 6y ago
    > But starving them of cash, branding them "entertainers", and converting their jobs into a gig economy scramble guarantees they'll be too distracted to realise it. I'm no fan of the 'gig economy' - but haven't most musicians and writers and singers and sportspeople been getting a shitty deal since time immemorial? Just in the 1980s that meant putting years of unpaid practice into your craft then not being able to get a book deal / signed with a record label / a gallery to sell your paintings / a try out with the big team. I feel bad for someone who's struggling to make a living playing guitar on Twitch - but the fact it's hard to make money playing guitar isn't Twitch's fault.
    - chillacy 6y ago
      I don’t know if there’s data to back this, but I suspect that musicians might have gotten a better deal before recording technology, since music performances would have to be hyper local, so there would be multiple markets for music instead of the one (almost global) market that exists today.
  - ajsnigrutin 6y ago
    But how much do you personally pay for the artists' products per month, compared to how much you pay your bank? How many people actually pay anything for some specific artists' stuff, compared to some specific bank? Everybody needs a bank, and there are very few banks, with very few people who really earn a lot. Gambling is gambling.. most lose there. And the rest mentioned are a result of governents/police/court system not working. It's easy to say Bobby the youtuber deserves more money... actually paying him from your pocket is a totally different thing.
- watwut 6y ago
  > It's almost as if.. Doing stuff that you'd otherwise do in your spare-time, is not a real job for 99% of people ? Realistically, people run channels this is about would not do it in spare-time. Making gameplay video that people actually want to watch is not nearly same as playing game for fun. You have to be entertaining for others. It is same difference as between being comedian for money versus being funny with friends.
  - dusted 6y ago
    There's comparatively little need for games to be played, even if NOBODY IN THE WORLD played games for a living, the games would still be played, in the exact way that coal wouldn't be mined. It's a bit the same with other creative work, like music and art, there is a demand for it, but the amount of commercial demand is next to nothing compared to the amound of creative work being done regardless of pay. The number of guitars being played would be more or less the same even if nobody made money playing them. The number of paintings being painted would be more or less the same even if nobody ever sold one. There is some quality to be gained from going professional and devoting your entire time to do something, and part of that is probably a contributing factor why people can earn a living doing it.
    - watwut 6y ago
      > The number of guitars being played would be more or less the same even if nobody made money playing them. This is not true. The number of people who play music or instruments depends on economy of music. When you could live from it, people did it more often and longer. > The number of paintings being painted would be more or less the same even if nobody ever sold one. This is 100% not true.
tiku 6y ago
Perhaps this is a good use case for NFT's, added signatures make it easy to find and reward the owner.
- contravariant 6y ago
  That's somewhat pointless if you wanted to reward the creator.
- curtainsforus 6y ago
  How, exactly, does that do anything about the underlying fact that there's a limited amount of attention to spread around on the populace of creatives?
- EdwardDiego 6y ago
  Probably isn't, but I'm sure someone, someday, will figure out a use for NFTs beyond riding the next bubble.
- jnwatson 6y ago
  This is the best example of "if all you have is a hammer" I've heard in a long time.
sadmann1 6y ago
Don't know about you lads but furry porn is booming right now. Gotta fit the needs of the market instead of your artistic needs
- real-dino 6y ago
  https://i.redd.it/vlqqur72jow31.jpg https://i.redd.it/vlqqur72jow31.jpg
- PurpleFoxy 6y ago
  SFW relevant video https://youtu.be/jJ6GPabvSfY https://youtu.be/jJ6GPabvSfY
thrower123 6y ago
The power law rules all things in the entertainment economy.
- someguyorother 6y ago
  The power law rules (almost) all things human. How often words are used in a language, wealth distribution, social network followers, you name it.
ZephyrBlu 6y ago
Full article without the wall: https://outline.com/ktG6Xz https://outline.com/ktG6Xz
sokoloff 6y ago
Raise your hand if you’re the least bit surprised by this? Content creation is going to give a tiny number of people a high income for several years and everyone else almost nothing. YouTube isn’t struggling with how to make these incomes more even any more than record labels are trying to make every artist have a nice, steady income. It’s a hits driven business.
- PurpleFoxy 6y ago
  The lower end of content creation needs to wake up and realise there isn’t a market for what they have and get a paying job. The refusal to give up keeps prices low by creating an oversupply.
js8 6y ago
You know, in the old days, there were public broadcasters, like BBC (I am not English/American, so I don't know what the state of these is today). They balanced the commercial aspect of the media (somebody has to pay for the waves) with public access. I think people should consider political initiative to have something like Youtube, but in public domain (with the same status as public broadcaster). Basically, the service would run on ads, but would be non-profit in the sense that the ads profits would be mostly returned to the creators on that platform, transparently and fairly.
- WJW 6y ago
  It's already free to watch even the smallest channel on youtube, the income from the largest channels subsidizes the servers needed to transcode the millions of videos that will only ever get a single view. The "problem" is that most creators have miniscule audiences. The "transparent and fairly" returned ad profits for someone with ten viewers is never going to be very large. The power law in entertainment has always been large; the big artists make tens of millions and everyone else scrapes by. The internet has not changed that dynamic.
  - TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
    Except that it's not about profits, it's about culture and quality of life. And pursuit of profit at the expense of everything else reliably destroys both. It's also about closing one of the few paths that the poor can use to stop being poor.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - lotsofpulp 6y ago
      Creating video content for others to consume is one of the least likely to succeed avenues for a poor person to stop being poor, even if YouTube handed over every cent of advertising revenue to the video’s creators.
marcus_holmes 6y ago
99% of creatives have never been able to pay their rent by selling what they make. It's not even about how good they are - some people produce amazing stuff but it's not something that enough other people want to own (or listen to, or watch, or whatever). The lucky few whose creative spark happens to coincide with market demand get to do that all day long. For the rest of us, it's a day job to pay the rent (which might mean creating something that the market wants instead of what scratches our creative itch) or a life of poverty and creative freedom. This is not something that a change in the platforms is going to "fix".
- baryphonic 6y ago
  I wouldn't even say it's just this. Consistency, high quality (in terms of writing, delivery, production value) and a boatload of other factors matter, too. As does the ethos of "authenticity." Ben Eater and 3Blue1Brown are I think good examples of this. I doubt "the market" was demanding videos about higher level math with superb visualizations, or especially implementing a 6502 on breadboards, but these guys both made it happen. I doubt they're raking in the megabux, but they seem to be doing pretty well.
- meheleventyone 6y ago
  > It's not even about how good they are - some people produce amazing stuff but it's not something that enough other people want to own (or listen to, or watch, or whatever). This isn't even the problem. It's that to be successful you need to be more than good at your job you need to be great at doing a few other jobs as well. Namely running a business and marketing. And lucky in catching the break the propels you upwards. This requirement for discoverability, marketability and virality also changes the media significantly. YouTube is rife with ten minute videos, clickbait titles and overenthusiastic yelling. This is entirely on the platforms, their bid for retention to keep people watching one more video and how discovery and recommendations work. If you look at the wider industry of say TV and film you get a much wider array of successful content, supporting more people with more stability. I do think there is a version of YouTube that could result in "better" content whilst employing more people.
  - 6y ago
ZephyrBlu 6y ago
This is not at all surprising. Here is a good explanation of a similar situation by Jordan Peterson (2min): https://youtu.be/BZMBdRfbk6A?t=322 https://youtu.be/BZMBdRfbk6A?t=322 TL;DW Pareto Distribution.
baryphonic 6y ago
In other news, I have yet to make a single dollar from GitHub sponsorships, and I have several tens of stars and forks on my project. Who is going to look after me and my rent? /s In seriousness, you gotta build or make what people want. The vast majority of YouTubers, like open source devs, are making things that mostly they themselves care about. Of the remainder, most are making things some people appreciate, and might even pay attention to for a while, but when push comes to shove wouldn't pay for. A few things are just genuinely so good that people will pay.
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 6y ago
  > Who is going to look after me and my rent? At least politicians know the answer.
- searchableguy 6y ago
  > In other news, I have yet to make a single dollar from GitHub sponsorships, and I have several tens of stars and forks on my project. Who is going to look after me and my rent? /s Heck, repos that are widely used rarely get actual money. Making money shouldn't be conflated with fulfilling a demand. Plenty of things fulfill a demand or create value but fail to monetize. If paying becomes truly optional (no social pressure or pay wall), most people would rather not pay.
blackoil 6y ago
What is the CPM for other media like TV and movies? If Youtube's isn't substantially low, it should be expected as millions of people are experimenting as a creator, and power law rules.
Philip-J-Fry 6y ago
Why should these creators deserve to be paid more? Making money on YouTube and Patreon is a privilege not a right. Yes the big creators make a lot of money, but that's because a lot of users are watching them. If someone is trying to make a career out of YouTube while only making $10,000 a year then the only problem is the person trying to make a career out of that. Making $10,000 on YouTube at all puts you well far ahead of the majority of users and the pay for creativity has never been about how much effort you put in. People should stop trying to view YouTube as a viable career. Most YouTube careers were made out of people doing it in their spare time and finding out people actually want to watch. That's the only way it works. Do your day job and work on your YouTube career in your spare time. Maybe one day you'll find success. The way most entertainers get known is just through sheer luck or connections. This is nothing new. For decades actors, musicians and artists have put up with this. They will follow their dreams while keeping a regular job. Then one day they might get the breakthrough they need. It's never been easier to be a creator today, but the chances are still slim that you'll ever start making serious money out of it. The benefit is that you can easily find a niche to fill, and while you might not making a living wage, you will make some good side money drawing something like vegetables with boobs or something.
- axlee 6y ago
  I can see your argument. On the other hand, the article mentions people who work for companies like Buzzfeed and other agencies, creating extremely successful web content for them, having to work shifts at night on top of their media jobs. That sounds unacceptable to me: I am pretty sure the company employing them can afford them a living wage, and it looks a lot like exploitation.
  - mitchdaily 6y ago
    Sounds like they need a union
  - chii 6y ago
    that's a different problem vs creators not getting much monetization and payment. businesses that employ people for low wages should, in theory, be out competed by businesses that would be willing to pay a little bit more to get the talent. So either the business model _requires_ the low wages for it to work, or the workers are not shopping around for a better workplace (or is sacrificing their wages in the hopes of moving up, or some such passion-related reason like game developers).
reedf1 6y ago
The truth that no one wants to acknowledge is that successful content creators are usually brilliantly multi-talented and hard-working. I'm never surprised to find the ones I like have had whole careers in media (or media-adjacent) fields. I like food youtubers - Binging with Babish was formerly a video fx artist, Adam Ragusea was formerly a journalism professor and musician and Alex (French Guy Cooking) was an electrical engineer, filmmaker, and marketing manager. These people are basically one-man production armies, the food part is basically secondary. They have a killer mix of good-ideas and charisma, production quality (cinematography and sound design), marketing and community savviness, and ridiculous hard work.
- daniel_reetz 6y ago
  This is true, and although they don't tell you this, they also have a team. Sometimes it is just an intern or camera person but some creators have surprisingly large teams.
  - daniel_reetz 6y ago
    This is especially true for the creators who came from media or marketing (like NYC CNC) because they know the value of a team in the media world.
  - azinman2 6y ago
    And what I don't understand is how they can afford these teams off YouTube wages. My only guess is they've figured out how to make non-platform money off their brand (like musicians playing concerts), but for many of them it's quite non-obvious. You can only sell so many t-shirts...
    - sombremesa 6y ago
      "Youtube wages" can be ~$5k/1MM views just from Youtube ads, without even getting into monetization via third party sponsorships or merchandise.
      - 6y ago
deleted 6y ago
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abraxas 6y ago
Youtubers are from extremistan but dentists are from mediocristan[1] The distribution of outcomes in the two job categories is a different curve with Youtuber jobs having a very strong “winner take all” inclination. The problem with any proposed solutions is that they are unable to change these curves. Their existence emerges naturally in various domains. I don’t think anyone ever figured out how to even out an extremistan domain to make it resemble a mediocristan distribution. 1. https://people.wou.edu/~shawd/mediocristan--extremistan.html https://people.wou.edu/~shawd/mediocristan--extremistan.html
- PurpleFoxy 6y ago
  Every market where a single provider is able to satisfy unlimited and global demand will be a winner takes all situation. One youtuber can entertain millions of people while one dentist can only work on a few people per day. You may be the 100,000th best dentist but that doesn’t matter because everyone above you is already booked out.
  - npteljes 6y ago
    Already booked out, and also locality matters a lot. On the internet, a live stream only takes <1s to reach me, while I have to find a dentist in my own area.
    - abraxas 6y ago
      That’s just one dimension of it. If I’m a mega live streamer I can be servicing millions of viewers all at once. As a dentist I’m most likely to be serving 1.
mrtksn 6y ago
Rent is problem even for employees of established companies. It effectively creates a slave labour, quite similar to restrictive immigration visas where the employee cannot afford be unemployed. I'm sur a lot of people are pushed out of character just to be able to pay the rent, hampering both the creativity and he goodwill in the society. We could have much better creative scene if the incomes were not funnelled to landlords. Creative people are motivated by the drive to create, unfortunately they have to restrict themselves when "large sum to be payed to a property owner or suffer life changing consequences" clause is imposed. That's why it's often the case where the creative move to a really cheap neighbourhood and years later you have a generation of impactful artists and a neighbourhood that is trendy.
- sokoloff 6y ago
  If you don’t want to funnel money to a landlord, buy a property. I did and now funnel even more money to my mortgage company and have to handle and pay for repairs, but none to a landlord. It’s almost like having desirable housing is something that a lot of people are willing to spend money on.
  - mrtksn 6y ago
    Almost as if there are two kind of people out there: those with fully paid housing those who have to pay. In most places being the one or the other creates class changing lifestyle difference under the same employment.
    - darkwizard42 6y ago
      This doesn't even make any sense. Everyone has to pay for their housing... you either opt into two different schemes, own it or rent it and both come with upsides and downsides. It is up to the person to decide which works for them and in the means that works for them. You can go to many cities where it makes outright more sense to just rent (and maybe more prudent to do so while you don't have a steady stream of income from streaming yet).
woutr_be 6y ago
Am I wrong to think about “creators” as just businesses? If you’re not making enough money through your business, then maybe you need to reconsider your business plan. You know what you get on Youtube, you don’t have a contract saying how much you’ll be making from creating content for them. Maybe I lack empathy here, but it seems most people saw this as an easy money maker, but were wrong.
- PurpleFoxy 6y ago
  The problem is you are thinking about making money as the goal and content creation as the method. Most of these people are thinking about content creation as the goal and making money and an unfortunate side requirement.
  - woutr_be 6y ago
    > Most of these people are thinking about content creation as the goal and making money and an unfortunate side requirement. If you put it that way, then I don't feel any remorse at all for people who are complaining that content creation can't pay the bills. It's not any different than any other hobby.
  - s0rce 6y ago
    It seems like a universal basic income would address this "unfortunate side requirement" better than somehow making all youtubers get paid enough to make rent. This would let people take the risk of doing content creation, either they get lucky and make a lot of money or they can indefinitely subsist on UBI. In the end society wins (in my opinion) by getting lots of people doing stuff they are interested in.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - PurpleFoxy 6y ago
      The proposals for UBI have always seemed like a replacement of welfare where it’s a survivable amount of money but not ideal, so you are encouraged to find well paying work but can afford to take time off to train or find something new. The thing is, we don’t need to encourage people to become content creators because we already have more than enough content being created and any more would mostly be a waste. The good thing about capitalist markets is they are able to prioritise things that are in need reasonably well. Once that need is met, prices move to stabilise that balance. I’m all for the ubi to replace welfare but I don’t think it will do wonders for creative people who will never turn it in to a higher paying job.
helsinkiandrew 6y ago
> Few creators actually manage to make a living wage through YouTube and Patreon — two of the relatively more mature, robust platforms, both of which are in need of distributing more income to their less popular creators. You can make that argument about YouTube (and complain about Patreon's cut) but on Patreon consumers choose who they want to give money to. Are Patreon expected to take off an extra X% and subsidise the less popular creators?
deleted 6y ago
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cletus 6y ago
So I have to give props to Twitch here. Twitch literally created an ecosystem and a culture of supporting creators that 99.9% of whom could never be supported by ad revenue alone. But what I find with all these creative professions is an undertone of... desperation. A lot of people seem desperate to be famous. It’s kind of sad. Thing is the majority of wannabe Twitch streamers (and this includes YouTube) just aren’t entertaining. I think they see the top 0.1% and say “I could do that”. What they Do note may be easy but getting there wasn’t. People don’t seem to see the years of building an audience and luck among the way. Too many people now just see solar signs. 10 years ago (at least on Twitch) it wasn’t a profession. People did it as a hobby. I imagine this is similar to other fields like acting. So few people are professional actors. The vast majority are working casual jobs for years hoping to get their break and most won’t ever get that break. At least With field like dancing there’s a barrier to entry. Dancers train for years. A lot of YouTube creators don’t have any skills. They just want to be famous based in their looks and their lifestyle. That’s the worst kind of fame seeker (IMHO).
- redisman 6y ago
  Is Twitch any better than Youtube for the creators though? It has the same distribution of top 100 performers who make amazing- to decent- day job salaries and then the other 99.5% are left fighting for scraps. I've watched a few guys do it for years without seeing any growth and grow more disillusioned by the month until it's just a self fulfilling prophecy that no one wants to watch them wallow at this point. They were in the top players of their games too (maybe 95th percentile) but just didn't have the entertainment part down.
  - meheleventyone 6y ago
    My impression at least is that the tail is a bit longer and descends less steeply on Twitch. It seems possible to have a solid middle class income through Twitch as long as you keep on the treadmill. But it also seems awfully precarious. It also seems to be becoming more intertwined with YouTube and using the latter for discovery of the former so who knows which way it’s going.
  - deleted 6y ago
darepublic 6y ago
We need a minimum living wage for YouTube creators? Or it should be completely demonetized /s. Another mindless incarnation of the outrage template
- pietrovismara 6y ago
  Just a minimum living wage for everyone, so that people don't have to invent for themselves a failed career in entertainment, in order to escape unemployment/wage slavery.
  - darepublic 6y ago
    Sure UBI is a valid idea. Trying to create such a system by forcing YouTube to implement it is not productive imo
    - pietrovismara 6y ago
      Never said so. Even tho, if big corps paid their fair share in taxes, instead of using foreign tax havens, it would be way easier to find the resources for a UBI.
SubiculumCode 6y ago
That's because the rent is too damn high.
- darkwizard42 6y ago
  Then why don't the creators move? This is a job that can be done from anywhere (with maybe decent internet access) but that opens up so many lower COL areas in the US and honestly world fitting that bill.
sparrish 6y ago
"the problem of how to more evenly distribute income among creators to achieve a greater number of living wages." It's delusional of the author to think that is a goal what YouTube is aiming for.
namelosw 6y ago
Many people worry about automation would take jobs from most people, while others believe there would be always new jobs. They're both not wrong. But the catch is, when the machine is taking over the "real jobs", the "new jobs" created are more and more let people to entertain each other. Unlike the old-time circuses that have to travel along the continent village-to-village, these entertainers can easily scale to massive audiences with the Internet, leading to information monopolies and the winner-takes-all situation. It would only get worse over time. The current model of capitalism would not work at all for a highly-advanced society where most "real jobs" have been automated, and most people have to join the entertainment industry. (It's actually just how average artists struggle now and in the past, but because they're minorities so people don't care enough. IMHO in a highly-advanced society most people would be more or less like artists.)
1-6 6y ago
Yet some people still don't give up on their career in left-handed puppetry.
alistairSH 6y ago
"Minor League Baseball still not paying rent for most baseball players" "Playing Fridays at the local pub still not paying rent for most guitar players" Etc. Entertainment of all varieties is all "winner take all" occupation - the best make big money, and everybody else makes do with table scraps.
ngcc_hk 6y ago
Top athletes and artists or just top kids making much more money is part of the system. It was observed as why watch 2nd best whatever the criteria of that be.
DoreenMichele 6y ago
While I wish my own Patreon were better funded and the issues in this space are real, this isn't going to be entirely solved by working only on the income end of things. The US needs to reform its housing policies and find a better solution for providing healthcare for all citizens. If it were easier to find a small place to rent for less than $500 per month in the US, if it were easier to live without a car and if the average American weren't being bled for healthcare coverage, then you could live on $10k or so a year without it being a hardship. (Assuming single childless person, basically.) Some people already pull off stuff like that, but it needs to be more widespread. We need to make "the basics" somehow more accessible for more people. The problem isn't "Only a relatively small percentage of people make good money this way and those folks tend to get rich." The problem is that a high percentage of Americans are finding no means to really make ends meet due to a variety of factors that interplay in an ugly way. It's reasonable to say "It's not really the fault of this one thing." But something needs to give.
- ytNumbers 6y ago
  An example of this is the movie "Pursuit of Happiness". Having family/friends to lean on can help in many cases. However, many people are simply too overwhelmed by life to work on improving their situation or even trying something like... https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/ https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/
  - DoreenMichele 6y ago
    One of the issues is that our broken policies are helping to fuel high rates of homelessness. Once you are homeless, you now have a lot of logistical barriers to accomplishing anything, plus social stigma piled on top of that and other issues (like hygiene issues that tend to make health issues worse and harder to resolve in most cases). There is all kinds of data showing it is cheaper literally give people housing than to let them be homeless. I'm not even asking the US to outright give poor folks housing. Just make it possible to find housing that doesn't cost an arm and a leg and where you can make your life work without a car. I don't think I'm asking all that much, to be honest. This shouldn't be that hard. It's not like we need to invent these concepts from scratch. There are lots of examples to draw from for how to make such policies (plus healthcare) work better than what we've got.
Consultant32452 6y ago
I think this is an interesting discussion in a world where raising the minimum wage and "living wage" are somewhat hot political topics. Why is Youtube allowed to have a business model where they can arbitrarily decide not to pay you for content generation? Can you imagine a world in which Uber could just decide not to pay you for deliveries until you meet a certain threshold? And then after they've been paying you for a while, they arbitrarily decide to stop paying you for deliveries.
grug_life 6y ago
There is a reason why the term "starving artist" was coined.
undefined1 6y ago
Schools should really start teaching basic principles, such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_distribution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_distribution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law
- unity1001 6y ago
  Empty capitalist rationalizations that only serve to rationalize systemic faults. People dont care about such rationalizations. If things go way down south in a society, extremism and chaos takes over, and all those people who were rationalizing such systemic inequality end up finding themselves in hot water. From the decline of Roman Republic and then fall of the empire to French Revolution, from religious/nationalist extremism taking over countries and persecuting such opulent classes to whatever societal collapse you pick from history. In contrast to the people in earlier millennia, we now are able to identify problems. And we can fix them. That is what we should be doing - not rationalizing the systemic fault by inventing justifications that advertise the existing systemic fault as 'natural'.
  - seieste 6y ago
    The fact that youtubers with a small following and a lack of monetization don’t make any money is not the result of capitalism. Do you believe that a different economic system would actually fund the long tail of entertainers? The problem is not capitalism, it’s that most of the entertainers are not popular enough to make any money from their viewers, and many still wouldn’t be able to survive if they received 100% of the money YouTube gets. Then where would the money come from? If not their viewers, and not advertising, then who? The government? It’s not a US or capitalist problem, it’s a simple cash flow problem. Can you imagine the Soviet Union or China funding them? Even the 10,000th van lifer?
xfitm3 6y ago
I don't want creators to get paid, because this perversely incentivizes their material. Before youtubers got paid it was a labor of love and IMO the quality was far superior. Now you just have a bunch of money hungry people trying to "make it".
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
karmakaze 6y ago
> Without major platform overhauls, the creator’s gold rush will come to an end It seems natural for a 'gold rush' to come to an end. I don't agree with platforms taking an excessive cut of the value of content that's produced. I also don't consider the value of the content to be dollars. If we have sufficient UBI, then the value in any content produced is that people watched it with interest and learned or was entertained by it. That's the metric we should optimize for, in the long run.
diebeforei485 6y ago
There is a limit on how many carries can be full time youtubers. It's limited by people's watch time. YouTube has grown a lot but that is plateauing.
LatteLazy 6y ago
Most creative will never pay their rent from their art. That's life. I'm a physicist, but there is no money in physics so I do IT.
pasttense01 6y ago
How is this different from the pre-internet period where only a small fraction of those who wrote (via books and magazine articles) could make a living from it?
macawfish 6y ago
Rent is a losing game. As much rent will be extracted as possible.
ausbah 6y ago
I feel like one of the main points was just that lower content creators aren't getting their fair share, like to even get to the point on monitization requires jumping through a bunch of hoops and even then your labor is still underpaid

164 points by herbertl 6y ago

It's almost as if.. Doing stuff that you'd otherwise do in your spare-time, is not a real job for 99% of people ? Yeah, I love playing and making games, nobody wants to play them, and nobody wants to watch me do it, because I'm not good enough at it. That's why I have a day job. There's also a limited need for entertainers/creatives (they are needed, but not comparatively very many).. One person can entertain millions.

roenxi 6y ago
There are about 8,000 one-in-a-million people out there for any discipline anyone cares to name. Around 800 of them speak English to some degree and are connected to the internet. There is room on a top-10 list for 10 of them. Number 9 will do OK but is starting to move down the Praeto curve. The competition to entertain others on the internet is fierce; it is difficult for me to see how even someone of that level of talent and calibre could survive except for the fact that most of their competition simply gives up before they start because it looks like a lousy career.
pydry 6y ago
Or as if monopolizing a distribution channel allows you to charge rents way in excess of your costs.
- ChrisKnott 6y ago
  Who are you accusing of doing that? YouTube?
  - pydry 6y ago
    Do you know of any other video platforms with 2.3 billion active users?
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - ChrisKnott 6y ago
      Do YouTube charge rents way in excess of their costs?
      - viro 6y ago
        No they don't charge rent.
- lotsofpulp 6y ago
  Then it’s a good thing no one has monopolized distributing videos across the internet.
  - pydry 6y ago
    The 2nd biggest video sharing website has 10x lower reach and no ad network. I'm curious to know what counts as a monopoly if not that. The network effect has been good to google.
    - lotsofpulp 6y ago
      Conversations are futile if we’re not working with the same definitions and context. You wrote: > Or as if monopolizing a distribution channel allows you to charge rents way in excess of your costs. Defining “distribution channel” as a single company’s website rather than the internet would make “distribution channel” meaningless in the context of this discussion. It’s trivial to distribute a video with anyone all over the world in this day and age. It’s not trivial to make money from it. Google might have a monopoly on the mechanism that can be used to make money from videos, but that’s a different discussion than having a monopoly on distributing video.
      - pydry 6y ago
        If you're distributing ad supported video content where else do you go? Vimeo is the second biggest video sharing platform. They have 200 million eyeballs they can push to your content as opposed to 2.3 billion and no ad network. I don't think it's an enormous stretch to say that youtube own this market. >that’s a different discussion than having a monopoly on distributing video. I neither stated nor implied that they did.
        lotsofpulp 6y ago
        I can entertain the idea that YouTube currently has a monopoly (or “owns the market”) on the service of connecting advertisers to small time content creators. Whether or not it harms society is something I have not concluded. I am aware there are negatives for medium size content creators who lack negotiating power, but also huge upsides to individual content creators who almost always cause YouTube to lose money. And I’m not sure what any alternative is, other than a taxpayer funded version of a YouTube, but that also opens a can of worms. > I neither stated nor implied that they did. Sorry, I interpreted “monopolizing a distribution channel” in the context of YouTube compensating content creators to mean YouTube monopolizing distribution of videos by content creators.
TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
There's an even more limited need for fraud-promoting bankers, crooked and corrupt politicians, people who spend their entire lives gambling on the markets, and organised criminals, but somehow we never seem to lack for all of those. This isn't some kind of rational market forces issue. Artists and intellectuals have real power. But starving them of cash, branding them "entertainers", and converting their jobs into a gig economy scramble guarantees they'll be too distracted to realise it. Not unlike other jobs.
- michaelt 6y ago
  > But starving them of cash, branding them "entertainers", and converting their jobs into a gig economy scramble guarantees they'll be too distracted to realise it. I'm no fan of the 'gig economy' - but haven't most musicians and writers and singers and sportspeople been getting a shitty deal since time immemorial? Just in the 1980s that meant putting years of unpaid practice into your craft then not being able to get a book deal / signed with a record label / a gallery to sell your paintings / a try out with the big team. I feel bad for someone who's struggling to make a living playing guitar on Twitch - but the fact it's hard to make money playing guitar isn't Twitch's fault.
  - chillacy 6y ago
    I don’t know if there’s data to back this, but I suspect that musicians might have gotten a better deal before recording technology, since music performances would have to be hyper local, so there would be multiple markets for music instead of the one (almost global) market that exists today.
- ajsnigrutin 6y ago
  But how much do you personally pay for the artists' products per month, compared to how much you pay your bank? How many people actually pay anything for some specific artists' stuff, compared to some specific bank? Everybody needs a bank, and there are very few banks, with very few people who really earn a lot. Gambling is gambling.. most lose there. And the rest mentioned are a result of governents/police/court system not working. It's easy to say Bobby the youtuber deserves more money... actually paying him from your pocket is a totally different thing.
watwut 6y ago
> It's almost as if.. Doing stuff that you'd otherwise do in your spare-time, is not a real job for 99% of people ? Realistically, people run channels this is about would not do it in spare-time. Making gameplay video that people actually want to watch is not nearly same as playing game for fun. You have to be entertaining for others. It is same difference as between being comedian for money versus being funny with friends.
- dusted 6y ago
  There's comparatively little need for games to be played, even if NOBODY IN THE WORLD played games for a living, the games would still be played, in the exact way that coal wouldn't be mined. It's a bit the same with other creative work, like music and art, there is a demand for it, but the amount of commercial demand is next to nothing compared to the amound of creative work being done regardless of pay. The number of guitars being played would be more or less the same even if nobody made money playing them. The number of paintings being painted would be more or less the same even if nobody ever sold one. There is some quality to be gained from going professional and devoting your entire time to do something, and part of that is probably a contributing factor why people can earn a living doing it.
  - watwut 6y ago
    > The number of guitars being played would be more or less the same even if nobody made money playing them. This is not true. The number of people who play music or instruments depends on economy of music. When you could live from it, people did it more often and longer. > The number of paintings being painted would be more or less the same even if nobody ever sold one. This is 100% not true.

tiku 6y ago

Perhaps this is a good use case for NFT's, added signatures make it easy to find and reward the owner.

contravariant 6y ago
That's somewhat pointless if you wanted to reward the creator.
curtainsforus 6y ago
How, exactly, does that do anything about the underlying fact that there's a limited amount of attention to spread around on the populace of creatives?
EdwardDiego 6y ago
Probably isn't, but I'm sure someone, someday, will figure out a use for NFTs beyond riding the next bubble.
jnwatson 6y ago
This is the best example of "if all you have is a hammer" I've heard in a long time.

sadmann1 6y ago

Don't know about you lads but furry porn is booming right now. Gotta fit the needs of the market instead of your artistic needs

real-dino 6y ago
https://i.redd.it/vlqqur72jow31.jpg https://i.redd.it/vlqqur72jow31.jpg
PurpleFoxy 6y ago
SFW relevant video https://youtu.be/jJ6GPabvSfY https://youtu.be/jJ6GPabvSfY

thrower123 6y ago

The power law rules all things in the entertainment economy.

someguyorother 6y ago
The power law rules (almost) all things human. How often words are used in a language, wealth distribution, social network followers, you name it.

ZephyrBlu 6y ago

Full article without the wall: https://outline.com/ktG6Xz https://outline.com/ktG6Xz

sokoloff 6y ago

Raise your hand if you’re the least bit surprised by this? Content creation is going to give a tiny number of people a high income for several years and everyone else almost nothing. YouTube isn’t struggling with how to make these incomes more even any more than record labels are trying to make every artist have a nice, steady income. It’s a hits driven business.

PurpleFoxy 6y ago
The lower end of content creation needs to wake up and realise there isn’t a market for what they have and get a paying job. The refusal to give up keeps prices low by creating an oversupply.

js8 6y ago

You know, in the old days, there were public broadcasters, like BBC (I am not English/American, so I don't know what the state of these is today). They balanced the commercial aspect of the media (somebody has to pay for the waves) with public access. I think people should consider political initiative to have something like Youtube, but in public domain (with the same status as public broadcaster). Basically, the service would run on ads, but would be non-profit in the sense that the ads profits would be mostly returned to the creators on that platform, transparently and fairly.

WJW 6y ago
It's already free to watch even the smallest channel on youtube, the income from the largest channels subsidizes the servers needed to transcode the millions of videos that will only ever get a single view. The "problem" is that most creators have miniscule audiences. The "transparent and fairly" returned ad profits for someone with ten viewers is never going to be very large. The power law in entertainment has always been large; the big artists make tens of millions and everyone else scrapes by. The internet has not changed that dynamic.
- TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
  Except that it's not about profits, it's about culture and quality of life. And pursuit of profit at the expense of everything else reliably destroys both. It's also about closing one of the few paths that the poor can use to stop being poor.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - lotsofpulp 6y ago
    Creating video content for others to consume is one of the least likely to succeed avenues for a poor person to stop being poor, even if YouTube handed over every cent of advertising revenue to the video’s creators.

marcus_holmes 6y ago

99% of creatives have never been able to pay their rent by selling what they make. It's not even about how good they are - some people produce amazing stuff but it's not something that enough other people want to own (or listen to, or watch, or whatever). The lucky few whose creative spark happens to coincide with market demand get to do that all day long. For the rest of us, it's a day job to pay the rent (which might mean creating something that the market wants instead of what scratches our creative itch) or a life of poverty and creative freedom. This is not something that a change in the platforms is going to "fix".

baryphonic 6y ago
I wouldn't even say it's just this. Consistency, high quality (in terms of writing, delivery, production value) and a boatload of other factors matter, too. As does the ethos of "authenticity." Ben Eater and 3Blue1Brown are I think good examples of this. I doubt "the market" was demanding videos about higher level math with superb visualizations, or especially implementing a 6502 on breadboards, but these guys both made it happen. I doubt they're raking in the megabux, but they seem to be doing pretty well.
meheleventyone 6y ago
> It's not even about how good they are - some people produce amazing stuff but it's not something that enough other people want to own (or listen to, or watch, or whatever). This isn't even the problem. It's that to be successful you need to be more than good at your job you need to be great at doing a few other jobs as well. Namely running a business and marketing. And lucky in catching the break the propels you upwards. This requirement for discoverability, marketability and virality also changes the media significantly. YouTube is rife with ten minute videos, clickbait titles and overenthusiastic yelling. This is entirely on the platforms, their bid for retention to keep people watching one more video and how discovery and recommendations work. If you look at the wider industry of say TV and film you get a much wider array of successful content, supporting more people with more stability. I do think there is a version of YouTube that could result in "better" content whilst employing more people.
- 6y ago

ZephyrBlu 6y ago

This is not at all surprising. Here is a good explanation of a similar situation by Jordan Peterson (2min): https://youtu.be/BZMBdRfbk6A?t=322 https://youtu.be/BZMBdRfbk6A?t=322 TL;DW Pareto Distribution.

baryphonic 6y ago

In other news, I have yet to make a single dollar from GitHub sponsorships, and I have several tens of stars and forks on my project. Who is going to look after me and my rent? /s In seriousness, you gotta build or make what people want. The vast majority of YouTubers, like open source devs, are making things that mostly they themselves care about. Of the remainder, most are making things some people appreciate, and might even pay attention to for a while, but when push comes to shove wouldn't pay for. A few things are just genuinely so good that people will pay.

0xdeadbeefbabe 6y ago
> Who is going to look after me and my rent? At least politicians know the answer.
searchableguy 6y ago
> In other news, I have yet to make a single dollar from GitHub sponsorships, and I have several tens of stars and forks on my project. Who is going to look after me and my rent? /s Heck, repos that are widely used rarely get actual money. Making money shouldn't be conflated with fulfilling a demand. Plenty of things fulfill a demand or create value but fail to monetize. If paying becomes truly optional (no social pressure or pay wall), most people would rather not pay.

blackoil 6y ago

What is the CPM for other media like TV and movies? If Youtube's isn't substantially low, it should be expected as millions of people are experimenting as a creator, and power law rules.

Philip-J-Fry 6y ago

Why should these creators deserve to be paid more? Making money on YouTube and Patreon is a privilege not a right. Yes the big creators make a lot of money, but that's because a lot of users are watching them. If someone is trying to make a career out of YouTube while only making $10,000 a year then the only problem is the person trying to make a career out of that. Making $10,000 on YouTube at all puts you well far ahead of the majority of users and the pay for creativity has never been about how much effort you put in. People should stop trying to view YouTube as a viable career. Most YouTube careers were made out of people doing it in their spare time and finding out people actually want to watch. That's the only way it works. Do your day job and work on your YouTube career in your spare time. Maybe one day you'll find success. The way most entertainers get known is just through sheer luck or connections. This is nothing new. For decades actors, musicians and artists have put up with this. They will follow their dreams while keeping a regular job. Then one day they might get the breakthrough they need. It's never been easier to be a creator today, but the chances are still slim that you'll ever start making serious money out of it. The benefit is that you can easily find a niche to fill, and while you might not making a living wage, you will make some good side money drawing something like vegetables with boobs or something.

axlee 6y ago
I can see your argument. On the other hand, the article mentions people who work for companies like Buzzfeed and other agencies, creating extremely successful web content for them, having to work shifts at night on top of their media jobs. That sounds unacceptable to me: I am pretty sure the company employing them can afford them a living wage, and it looks a lot like exploitation.
- mitchdaily 6y ago
  Sounds like they need a union
- chii 6y ago
  that's a different problem vs creators not getting much monetization and payment. businesses that employ people for low wages should, in theory, be out competed by businesses that would be willing to pay a little bit more to get the talent. So either the business model _requires_ the low wages for it to work, or the workers are not shopping around for a better workplace (or is sacrificing their wages in the hopes of moving up, or some such passion-related reason like game developers).

reedf1 6y ago

The truth that no one wants to acknowledge is that successful content creators are usually brilliantly multi-talented and hard-working. I'm never surprised to find the ones I like have had whole careers in media (or media-adjacent) fields. I like food youtubers - Binging with Babish was formerly a video fx artist, Adam Ragusea was formerly a journalism professor and musician and Alex (French Guy Cooking) was an electrical engineer, filmmaker, and marketing manager. These people are basically one-man production armies, the food part is basically secondary. They have a killer mix of good-ideas and charisma, production quality (cinematography and sound design), marketing and community savviness, and ridiculous hard work.

daniel_reetz 6y ago
This is true, and although they don't tell you this, they also have a team. Sometimes it is just an intern or camera person but some creators have surprisingly large teams.
- daniel_reetz 6y ago
  This is especially true for the creators who came from media or marketing (like NYC CNC) because they know the value of a team in the media world.
- azinman2 6y ago
  And what I don't understand is how they can afford these teams off YouTube wages. My only guess is they've figured out how to make non-platform money off their brand (like musicians playing concerts), but for many of them it's quite non-obvious. You can only sell so many t-shirts...
  - sombremesa 6y ago
    "Youtube wages" can be ~$5k/1MM views just from Youtube ads, without even getting into monetization via third party sponsorships or merchandise.
    - 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

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abraxas 6y ago

Youtubers are from extremistan but dentists are from mediocristan[1] The distribution of outcomes in the two job categories is a different curve with Youtuber jobs having a very strong “winner take all” inclination. The problem with any proposed solutions is that they are unable to change these curves. Their existence emerges naturally in various domains. I don’t think anyone ever figured out how to even out an extremistan domain to make it resemble a mediocristan distribution. 1. https://people.wou.edu/~shawd/mediocristan--extremistan.html https://people.wou.edu/~shawd/mediocristan--extremistan.html

PurpleFoxy 6y ago
Every market where a single provider is able to satisfy unlimited and global demand will be a winner takes all situation. One youtuber can entertain millions of people while one dentist can only work on a few people per day. You may be the 100,000th best dentist but that doesn’t matter because everyone above you is already booked out.
- npteljes 6y ago
  Already booked out, and also locality matters a lot. On the internet, a live stream only takes <1s to reach me, while I have to find a dentist in my own area.
  - abraxas 6y ago
    That’s just one dimension of it. If I’m a mega live streamer I can be servicing millions of viewers all at once. As a dentist I’m most likely to be serving 1.

mrtksn 6y ago

Rent is problem even for employees of established companies. It effectively creates a slave labour, quite similar to restrictive immigration visas where the employee cannot afford be unemployed. I'm sur a lot of people are pushed out of character just to be able to pay the rent, hampering both the creativity and he goodwill in the society. We could have much better creative scene if the incomes were not funnelled to landlords. Creative people are motivated by the drive to create, unfortunately they have to restrict themselves when "large sum to be payed to a property owner or suffer life changing consequences" clause is imposed. That's why it's often the case where the creative move to a really cheap neighbourhood and years later you have a generation of impactful artists and a neighbourhood that is trendy.

sokoloff 6y ago
If you don’t want to funnel money to a landlord, buy a property. I did and now funnel even more money to my mortgage company and have to handle and pay for repairs, but none to a landlord. It’s almost like having desirable housing is something that a lot of people are willing to spend money on.
- mrtksn 6y ago
  Almost as if there are two kind of people out there: those with fully paid housing those who have to pay. In most places being the one or the other creates class changing lifestyle difference under the same employment.
  - darkwizard42 6y ago
    This doesn't even make any sense. Everyone has to pay for their housing... you either opt into two different schemes, own it or rent it and both come with upsides and downsides. It is up to the person to decide which works for them and in the means that works for them. You can go to many cities where it makes outright more sense to just rent (and maybe more prudent to do so while you don't have a steady stream of income from streaming yet).

woutr_be 6y ago

Am I wrong to think about “creators” as just businesses? If you’re not making enough money through your business, then maybe you need to reconsider your business plan. You know what you get on Youtube, you don’t have a contract saying how much you’ll be making from creating content for them. Maybe I lack empathy here, but it seems most people saw this as an easy money maker, but were wrong.

PurpleFoxy 6y ago
The problem is you are thinking about making money as the goal and content creation as the method. Most of these people are thinking about content creation as the goal and making money and an unfortunate side requirement.
- woutr_be 6y ago
  > Most of these people are thinking about content creation as the goal and making money and an unfortunate side requirement. If you put it that way, then I don't feel any remorse at all for people who are complaining that content creation can't pay the bills. It's not any different than any other hobby.
- s0rce 6y ago
  It seems like a universal basic income would address this "unfortunate side requirement" better than somehow making all youtubers get paid enough to make rent. This would let people take the risk of doing content creation, either they get lucky and make a lot of money or they can indefinitely subsist on UBI. In the end society wins (in my opinion) by getting lots of people doing stuff they are interested in.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - PurpleFoxy 6y ago
    The proposals for UBI have always seemed like a replacement of welfare where it’s a survivable amount of money but not ideal, so you are encouraged to find well paying work but can afford to take time off to train or find something new. The thing is, we don’t need to encourage people to become content creators because we already have more than enough content being created and any more would mostly be a waste. The good thing about capitalist markets is they are able to prioritise things that are in need reasonably well. Once that need is met, prices move to stabilise that balance. I’m all for the ubi to replace welfare but I don’t think it will do wonders for creative people who will never turn it in to a higher paying job.

helsinkiandrew 6y ago

> Few creators actually manage to make a living wage through YouTube and Patreon — two of the relatively more mature, robust platforms, both of which are in need of distributing more income to their less popular creators. You can make that argument about YouTube (and complain about Patreon's cut) but on Patreon consumers choose who they want to give money to. Are Patreon expected to take off an extra X% and subsidise the less popular creators?

deleted 6y ago

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cletus 6y ago

So I have to give props to Twitch here. Twitch literally created an ecosystem and a culture of supporting creators that 99.9% of whom could never be supported by ad revenue alone. But what I find with all these creative professions is an undertone of... desperation. A lot of people seem desperate to be famous. It’s kind of sad. Thing is the majority of wannabe Twitch streamers (and this includes YouTube) just aren’t entertaining. I think they see the top 0.1% and say “I could do that”. What they Do note may be easy but getting there wasn’t. People don’t seem to see the years of building an audience and luck among the way. Too many people now just see solar signs. 10 years ago (at least on Twitch) it wasn’t a profession. People did it as a hobby. I imagine this is similar to other fields like acting. So few people are professional actors. The vast majority are working casual jobs for years hoping to get their break and most won’t ever get that break. At least With field like dancing there’s a barrier to entry. Dancers train for years. A lot of YouTube creators don’t have any skills. They just want to be famous based in their looks and their lifestyle. That’s the worst kind of fame seeker (IMHO).

redisman 6y ago
Is Twitch any better than Youtube for the creators though? It has the same distribution of top 100 performers who make amazing- to decent- day job salaries and then the other 99.5% are left fighting for scraps. I've watched a few guys do it for years without seeing any growth and grow more disillusioned by the month until it's just a self fulfilling prophecy that no one wants to watch them wallow at this point. They were in the top players of their games too (maybe 95th percentile) but just didn't have the entertainment part down.
- meheleventyone 6y ago
  My impression at least is that the tail is a bit longer and descends less steeply on Twitch. It seems possible to have a solid middle class income through Twitch as long as you keep on the treadmill. But it also seems awfully precarious. It also seems to be becoming more intertwined with YouTube and using the latter for discovery of the former so who knows which way it’s going.
- deleted 6y ago

darepublic 6y ago

We need a minimum living wage for YouTube creators? Or it should be completely demonetized /s. Another mindless incarnation of the outrage template

pietrovismara 6y ago
Just a minimum living wage for everyone, so that people don't have to invent for themselves a failed career in entertainment, in order to escape unemployment/wage slavery.
- darepublic 6y ago
  Sure UBI is a valid idea. Trying to create such a system by forcing YouTube to implement it is not productive imo
  - pietrovismara 6y ago
    Never said so. Even tho, if big corps paid their fair share in taxes, instead of using foreign tax havens, it would be way easier to find the resources for a UBI.

SubiculumCode 6y ago

That's because the rent is too damn high.

darkwizard42 6y ago
Then why don't the creators move? This is a job that can be done from anywhere (with maybe decent internet access) but that opens up so many lower COL areas in the US and honestly world fitting that bill.

sparrish 6y ago

"the problem of how to more evenly distribute income among creators to achieve a greater number of living wages." It's delusional of the author to think that is a goal what YouTube is aiming for.

namelosw 6y ago

Many people worry about automation would take jobs from most people, while others believe there would be always new jobs. They're both not wrong. But the catch is, when the machine is taking over the "real jobs", the "new jobs" created are more and more let people to entertain each other. Unlike the old-time circuses that have to travel along the continent village-to-village, these entertainers can easily scale to massive audiences with the Internet, leading to information monopolies and the winner-takes-all situation. It would only get worse over time. The current model of capitalism would not work at all for a highly-advanced society where most "real jobs" have been automated, and most people have to join the entertainment industry. (It's actually just how average artists struggle now and in the past, but because they're minorities so people don't care enough. IMHO in a highly-advanced society most people would be more or less like artists.)

1-6 6y ago

Yet some people still don't give up on their career in left-handed puppetry.

alistairSH 6y ago

"Minor League Baseball still not paying rent for most baseball players" "Playing Fridays at the local pub still not paying rent for most guitar players" Etc. Entertainment of all varieties is all "winner take all" occupation - the best make big money, and everybody else makes do with table scraps.

ngcc_hk 6y ago

Top athletes and artists or just top kids making much more money is part of the system. It was observed as why watch 2nd best whatever the criteria of that be.

DoreenMichele 6y ago

While I wish my own Patreon were better funded and the issues in this space are real, this isn't going to be entirely solved by working only on the income end of things. The US needs to reform its housing policies and find a better solution for providing healthcare for all citizens. If it were easier to find a small place to rent for less than $500 per month in the US, if it were easier to live without a car and if the average American weren't being bled for healthcare coverage, then you could live on $10k or so a year without it being a hardship. (Assuming single childless person, basically.) Some people already pull off stuff like that, but it needs to be more widespread. We need to make "the basics" somehow more accessible for more people. The problem isn't "Only a relatively small percentage of people make good money this way and those folks tend to get rich." The problem is that a high percentage of Americans are finding no means to really make ends meet due to a variety of factors that interplay in an ugly way. It's reasonable to say "It's not really the fault of this one thing." But something needs to give.

ytNumbers 6y ago
An example of this is the movie "Pursuit of Happiness". Having family/friends to lean on can help in many cases. However, many people are simply too overwhelmed by life to work on improving their situation or even trying something like... https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/ https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/
- DoreenMichele 6y ago
  One of the issues is that our broken policies are helping to fuel high rates of homelessness. Once you are homeless, you now have a lot of logistical barriers to accomplishing anything, plus social stigma piled on top of that and other issues (like hygiene issues that tend to make health issues worse and harder to resolve in most cases). There is all kinds of data showing it is cheaper literally give people housing than to let them be homeless. I'm not even asking the US to outright give poor folks housing. Just make it possible to find housing that doesn't cost an arm and a leg and where you can make your life work without a car. I don't think I'm asking all that much, to be honest. This shouldn't be that hard. It's not like we need to invent these concepts from scratch. There are lots of examples to draw from for how to make such policies (plus healthcare) work better than what we've got.

Consultant32452 6y ago

I think this is an interesting discussion in a world where raising the minimum wage and "living wage" are somewhat hot political topics. Why is Youtube allowed to have a business model where they can arbitrarily decide not to pay you for content generation? Can you imagine a world in which Uber could just decide not to pay you for deliveries until you meet a certain threshold? And then after they've been paying you for a while, they arbitrarily decide to stop paying you for deliveries.

grug_life 6y ago

There is a reason why the term "starving artist" was coined.

undefined1 6y ago

Schools should really start teaching basic principles, such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_distribution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_distribution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law

unity1001 6y ago
Empty capitalist rationalizations that only serve to rationalize systemic faults. People dont care about such rationalizations. If things go way down south in a society, extremism and chaos takes over, and all those people who were rationalizing such systemic inequality end up finding themselves in hot water. From the decline of Roman Republic and then fall of the empire to French Revolution, from religious/nationalist extremism taking over countries and persecuting such opulent classes to whatever societal collapse you pick from history. In contrast to the people in earlier millennia, we now are able to identify problems. And we can fix them. That is what we should be doing - not rationalizing the systemic fault by inventing justifications that advertise the existing systemic fault as 'natural'.
- seieste 6y ago
  The fact that youtubers with a small following and a lack of monetization don’t make any money is not the result of capitalism. Do you believe that a different economic system would actually fund the long tail of entertainers? The problem is not capitalism, it’s that most of the entertainers are not popular enough to make any money from their viewers, and many still wouldn’t be able to survive if they received 100% of the money YouTube gets. Then where would the money come from? If not their viewers, and not advertising, then who? The government? It’s not a US or capitalist problem, it’s a simple cash flow problem. Can you imagine the Soviet Union or China funding them? Even the 10,000th van lifer?

xfitm3 6y ago

I don't want creators to get paid, because this perversely incentivizes their material. Before youtubers got paid it was a labor of love and IMO the quality was far superior. Now you just have a bunch of money hungry people trying to "make it".

deleted 6y ago

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karmakaze 6y ago

> Without major platform overhauls, the creator’s gold rush will come to an end It seems natural for a 'gold rush' to come to an end. I don't agree with platforms taking an excessive cut of the value of content that's produced. I also don't consider the value of the content to be dollars. If we have sufficient UBI, then the value in any content produced is that people watched it with interest and learned or was entertained by it. That's the metric we should optimize for, in the long run.

diebeforei485 6y ago

There is a limit on how many carries can be full time youtubers. It's limited by people's watch time. YouTube has grown a lot but that is plateauing.

LatteLazy 6y ago

Most creative will never pay their rent from their art. That's life. I'm a physicist, but there is no money in physics so I do IT.

pasttense01 6y ago

How is this different from the pre-internet period where only a small fraction of those who wrote (via books and magazine articles) could make a living from it?

macawfish 6y ago

Rent is a losing game. As much rent will be extracted as possible.

ausbah 6y ago

I feel like one of the main points was just that lower content creators aren't getting their fair share, like to even get to the point on monitization requires jumping through a bunch of hoops and even then your labor is still underpaid