6 ms·

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

by 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.
    - chii 6y ago
      reading between the lines, it seems like the OP's idea is basically a form of UBI that allows creatives to engage in content creation regardless of the market-fit and commercial viability of the content.
      - MaximumYComb 6y ago
        While I like the principal of a UBI, people not living in poverty, it strikes me that OP's reasoning is one of the reasons why I see issues with a UBI. Who is going to want to work a factory/service job when you can live comfortably pumping out low quality videos that average 10 views? Maybe it would drive income equality and better remuneration for those roles. Maybe we'd simply lose a lot of productivity. Who knows?
        lotsofpulp 6y ago
        That’s the point of UBI. Currently, the wages for those roles are low because they were born to poorer parents. But if given the opportunity not to, then the wages for those roles would go up so that there aren’t so low simply because people lost the ovarian lottery.
      - kofejnik 6y ago
        no, more like state-subsidised highbrow-culture-focused TV channel, which will have to be heavily curated and hard to get into, but which will pay reasonable money to the lucky ones who managed to get commissioned UBI would provide peanuts for everyone and devalue the content even more. Everybody and the fleas on the backs of their dogs will be streaming and influencing.
  - luckylion 6y ago
    > And pursuit of profit at the expense of everything else reliably destroys both. So who decides which artists are about "culture and quality of life" and should be paid to do whatever they like doing? You? Some committee? The population? Because right now it's the population. You might not agree with the choices they make, but that's a different issue.
  - dbbk 6y ago
    I'm not sure I'm following how what you're saying is applicable to people making money making videos on YouTube?
- bitexploder 6y ago
  I’m guessing sites like YouTube could use their machine learning army to make it all a bit more meritocratic. In the last there were big logistical challenges and costs to making a movie. In YT there are no real costs. I’m not sure the power law has to exist on a place like YT.
  - lotsofpulp 6y ago
    I assume YouTube is already rewarding content creators based on how much the world’s people watch them. If so, can it get more meritocratic?
  - FalconSensei 6y ago
    > make it all a bit more meritocratic The only way to make it more meritocratic is to completely remove algorithms. But that could make it even harder for smaller channels to grow. > In the last there were big logistical challenges and costs to making a movie. In YT there are no real costs. Exactly, anyone who has a good idea and a smartphone can record and upload to Youtube. Can it be simpler than that? Of course, in some places people don't have internet/smartphones, but that's not something that it's up for Youtube to fix
- FalconSensei 6y ago
  > the income from the largest channels subsidizes the servers needed to transcode the millions of videos that will only ever get a single view. Exactly. I had 3 different channels, in different points in my life, but the fact that I could, for free, upload a video and have it hosted and then (possibly) watched worldwide on almost any device, it's bonkers. If I had to create an app or pay for storage/upload/etc, it would be impossible.
  - VRay 6y ago
    It wouldn't be impossible. You could rent a VPS for $20/month and serve thousands of people your videos A lot of coders tend to think of videos as being these big, unwieldy things since we used to download them when computers and the internet were a lot weaker. An hour of 480p video is about a gig, 1080p is only about 3 gigs
    - FalconSensei 6y ago
      > You could rent a VPS for $20/month and serve thousands of people your videos That's considering: - Transcoding for all types of devices - Having apps that work on all those devices - Being one app that people already use/already have an account to it to reduce friction - Being in an environment where people already are, and where they can discover your content without you telling them about it Sounds kind of ok-ish to me. But for MANY people (most, I would say), $20 bucks is multiple meals, and is a significant spending considering for quite a while, nobody is going to see the content. If I pay $0 to upload and nobody sees it, I don't lose much.
      - VRay 6y ago
        Yeah, you give up a lot of those bonuses (but not all of them, considering the state of web video..) On the plus side, though, if your videos start pulling in ad money, you keep all of it. And you don't have to worry about getting locked out of your Google account because of some overzealous bot misinterpreting a tiny scrap of background music or conversation about chess piece colors
chii 6y ago
> would be non-profit in the sense that the ads profits would be mostly returned to the creators on that platform The basic premise that by making it non-profit, it would garner a higher returns for the content creators is false. The problem really is that there's not enough revenue generated, to pay people producing the content. Even youtube is run at a loss (only offset by the valuable data they collect for google i suppose). I think people who want to create content, but cannot find the right market to sell that content (aka, cannot reach viral levels) may want to consider doing it only for their own desires, rather than to aim for commercial success.
- mtberatwork 6y ago
  > The problem really is that there's not enough revenue generated, to pay people producing the content. > Even youtube is run at a loss (only offset by the valuable data they collect for google i suppose). YouTube generates $15B in revenue. [1] I'm sure in the early years when they first acquired YouTube, they ran it at a loss. However, as far as I am aware, Google has never stated whether or not YouTube is profitable. Given the amount of revenue YouTube generates in the present day, I would say it's unlikely they are running YouTube at a loss. [1] https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/3/21121207/youtube-google-alphabet-earnings-revenue-first-time-reveal-q4-2019 https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/3/21121207/youtube-google-al...
  - Mindwipe 6y ago
    It is fairly unlikely YouTube makes significant profits. It's costs are enormous. More importantly, even if it were profitable now, it took literally hundreds of billions of investment to get there, and huge subsidy by Google's server infrastructure. Where is this public YouTube going to get an amount of money literally bigger than Nasa's funding from?
  - chii 6y ago
    if youtube was running at a profit, i would have expected alphabet's financial reports to jump at pointing it out. They have never done so, and odds are that it looks really bad from a financial reporting perspective, even tho the user data it can collect is very valuable (but it cannot count as revenue, since there's no marketable value for such data atm).
marcus_holmes 6y ago
> like BBC (I am not English/American, so I don't know what the state of these is today) Still going strong. Still supported by taxes. Still subject to political interference. > transparently and fairly Do you give the rewards out based on views/listens? Because if so then you haven't fixed the system. Because the audience doesn't like everyone's work the same. 10% of the creators will get 90% of the revenue. Do you give out the rewards based on effort? If I spend 10 days making a tune that no-one wants to listen to, should I get the same reward as someone who creates a tune that everyone loves? Is that fair? Is there some middle ground, where say 50% of the revenue is allocated on audience size and 50% on effort? If I spend all my time making bad music then I should get my rent paid, right? That's fair, right? What system should we use that would be fair and still allow unpopular creators to get paid enough to pay their rent?

by js8 6y ago

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.
  - chii 6y ago
    reading between the lines, it seems like the OP's idea is basically a form of UBI that allows creatives to engage in content creation regardless of the market-fit and commercial viability of the content.
    - MaximumYComb 6y ago
      While I like the principal of a UBI, people not living in poverty, it strikes me that OP's reasoning is one of the reasons why I see issues with a UBI. Who is going to want to work a factory/service job when you can live comfortably pumping out low quality videos that average 10 views? Maybe it would drive income equality and better remuneration for those roles. Maybe we'd simply lose a lot of productivity. Who knows?
      - lotsofpulp 6y ago
        That’s the point of UBI. Currently, the wages for those roles are low because they were born to poorer parents. But if given the opportunity not to, then the wages for those roles would go up so that there aren’t so low simply because people lost the ovarian lottery.
    - kofejnik 6y ago
      no, more like state-subsidised highbrow-culture-focused TV channel, which will have to be heavily curated and hard to get into, but which will pay reasonable money to the lucky ones who managed to get commissioned UBI would provide peanuts for everyone and devalue the content even more. Everybody and the fleas on the backs of their dogs will be streaming and influencing.
- luckylion 6y ago
  > And pursuit of profit at the expense of everything else reliably destroys both. So who decides which artists are about "culture and quality of life" and should be paid to do whatever they like doing? You? Some committee? The population? Because right now it's the population. You might not agree with the choices they make, but that's a different issue.
- dbbk 6y ago
  I'm not sure I'm following how what you're saying is applicable to people making money making videos on YouTube?
bitexploder 6y ago
I’m guessing sites like YouTube could use their machine learning army to make it all a bit more meritocratic. In the last there were big logistical challenges and costs to making a movie. In YT there are no real costs. I’m not sure the power law has to exist on a place like YT.
- lotsofpulp 6y ago
  I assume YouTube is already rewarding content creators based on how much the world’s people watch them. If so, can it get more meritocratic?
- FalconSensei 6y ago
  > make it all a bit more meritocratic The only way to make it more meritocratic is to completely remove algorithms. But that could make it even harder for smaller channels to grow. > In the last there were big logistical challenges and costs to making a movie. In YT there are no real costs. Exactly, anyone who has a good idea and a smartphone can record and upload to Youtube. Can it be simpler than that? Of course, in some places people don't have internet/smartphones, but that's not something that it's up for Youtube to fix
FalconSensei 6y ago
> the income from the largest channels subsidizes the servers needed to transcode the millions of videos that will only ever get a single view. Exactly. I had 3 different channels, in different points in my life, but the fact that I could, for free, upload a video and have it hosted and then (possibly) watched worldwide on almost any device, it's bonkers. If I had to create an app or pay for storage/upload/etc, it would be impossible.
- VRay 6y ago
  It wouldn't be impossible. You could rent a VPS for $20/month and serve thousands of people your videos A lot of coders tend to think of videos as being these big, unwieldy things since we used to download them when computers and the internet were a lot weaker. An hour of 480p video is about a gig, 1080p is only about 3 gigs
  - FalconSensei 6y ago
    > You could rent a VPS for $20/month and serve thousands of people your videos That's considering: - Transcoding for all types of devices - Having apps that work on all those devices - Being one app that people already use/already have an account to it to reduce friction - Being in an environment where people already are, and where they can discover your content without you telling them about it Sounds kind of ok-ish to me. But for MANY people (most, I would say), $20 bucks is multiple meals, and is a significant spending considering for quite a while, nobody is going to see the content. If I pay $0 to upload and nobody sees it, I don't lose much.
    - VRay 6y ago
      Yeah, you give up a lot of those bonuses (but not all of them, considering the state of web video..) On the plus side, though, if your videos start pulling in ad money, you keep all of it. And you don't have to worry about getting locked out of your Google account because of some overzealous bot misinterpreting a tiny scrap of background music or conversation about chess piece colors

chii 6y ago

> would be non-profit in the sense that the ads profits would be mostly returned to the creators on that platform The basic premise that by making it non-profit, it would garner a higher returns for the content creators is false. The problem really is that there's not enough revenue generated, to pay people producing the content. Even youtube is run at a loss (only offset by the valuable data they collect for google i suppose). I think people who want to create content, but cannot find the right market to sell that content (aka, cannot reach viral levels) may want to consider doing it only for their own desires, rather than to aim for commercial success.

mtberatwork 6y ago
> The problem really is that there's not enough revenue generated, to pay people producing the content. > Even youtube is run at a loss (only offset by the valuable data they collect for google i suppose). YouTube generates $15B in revenue. [1] I'm sure in the early years when they first acquired YouTube, they ran it at a loss. However, as far as I am aware, Google has never stated whether or not YouTube is profitable. Given the amount of revenue YouTube generates in the present day, I would say it's unlikely they are running YouTube at a loss. [1] https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/3/21121207/youtube-google-alphabet-earnings-revenue-first-time-reveal-q4-2019 https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/3/21121207/youtube-google-al...
- Mindwipe 6y ago
  It is fairly unlikely YouTube makes significant profits. It's costs are enormous. More importantly, even if it were profitable now, it took literally hundreds of billions of investment to get there, and huge subsidy by Google's server infrastructure. Where is this public YouTube going to get an amount of money literally bigger than Nasa's funding from?
- chii 6y ago
  if youtube was running at a profit, i would have expected alphabet's financial reports to jump at pointing it out. They have never done so, and odds are that it looks really bad from a financial reporting perspective, even tho the user data it can collect is very valuable (but it cannot count as revenue, since there's no marketable value for such data atm).

marcus_holmes 6y ago

> like BBC (I am not English/American, so I don't know what the state of these is today) Still going strong. Still supported by taxes. Still subject to political interference. > transparently and fairly Do you give the rewards out based on views/listens? Because if so then you haven't fixed the system. Because the audience doesn't like everyone's work the same. 10% of the creators will get 90% of the revenue. Do you give out the rewards based on effort? If I spend 10 days making a tune that no-one wants to listen to, should I get the same reward as someone who creates a tune that everyone loves? Is that fair? Is there some middle ground, where say 50% of the revenue is allocated on audience size and 50% on effort? If I spend all my time making bad music then I should get my rent paid, right? That's fair, right? What system should we use that would be fair and still allow unpopular creators to get paid enough to pay their rent?