11 ms·

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

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).
  - rileymat2 6y ago
    > or the workers are not shopping around for a better workplace Perhaps they are not shopping around because of monopolistic/anti competitive actions from google search causing competing video services to be unviable. I believe there is an ongoing legal case around this. Edit: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wsj.com/amp/articles/google-sued-by-youtube-rival-over-search-rankings-11610407969 https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wsj.com/amp/articles/google... It is kind of funny getting the amp link in this discussion...
    - wutbrodo 6y ago
      This doesn't make any sense. The discussion is the pay that buzzfeed pays their content creators. If the market for platforms was wide open, that wouldn't change much about this situation, since there would still be an oversupply of content creators that want a salary (as opposed to creators willing to personally take on the investment and risk, which is what the article but not the thread is abjout).
- ajsnigrutin 6y ago
  But this is not "youtube and patreon", but "employer buzzfeed does not pay their employees enough".
- dec0dedab0de 6y ago
  If they're not getting paid enough they should stop doing it. If enough of them stop doing it, then the rest will start to get paid more.
  - gambiting 6y ago
    It's the exact same argument I keep making about tipping - if only everyone everywhere stopped tipping overnight, this stupid system would disappear. Underpaid waiters and drivers would find other jobs because suddenly without tips they wouldn't be able to support themselves. I am also surprised that no one has seen the wisdom of my words yet :P
    - skrebbel 6y ago
      The situation you advocate for is common practice in many countries. I'm likely missing nuances, but to me it seems that the key culprit is minimum wage laws in many US states having an exception for restaurant personnel. If a minimum wage was unconditional and high enough to live from, you wouldn't need tips to survive.
      - lotsofpulp 6y ago
        The US has a big cultural expectation of tipping, so even though the entire west coast, NYC, Chicago, and Washington DC have gotten rid of lower tipped minimum wages and effectively increased wages for waitstaff, almost all people still tip in all of those places. Even more, over the years, the standard tip amount has moved from 10% to 15% to now what seems like wide support for 20%. Not to mention that large portions of the population now tip for non waited transactions too. It gets even crazier when you go out with people and they look at you like you’re cheap for calculating tip on pre tax amounts. There’s a lot of pride in the US for tipping, as if it’s a status symbol.
    - matz1 6y ago
      Nothing stopping you to not tipping. You don't need to wait for everyone to stop tipping for you to not tip right now.
- ImprobableTruth 6y ago
  ... didn't buzzfeed have to lay off a bunch of staff because they're losing money?
- rmah 6y ago
  This has also always been commonplace in the media industry for creatives. Simply put, the supply of labor far far FAR outstrips the demand. It's a highly risky career path, but many take the chance because they want to. No amount of complaining or legislation will ever "fix" it.
  - PurpleFoxy 6y ago
    Also known as “compensating differential”. People _want_ to be a musician or content creator so they are willing to do the job even without being paid much. Which pushes the value down for the job. If you paid people YouTube rates to maintain php garbage they would just say no which keeps the prices up at a decent level.
    - bob33212 6y ago
      This is why capitalism is successful. You need an honest feedback mechanism from labor. If a centralized government assigned people jobs of maintaining a shitty php monolith at a standard wage those people would effectively produce nothing, because it is a shitty job and those people would not enjoy it or work hard because it is unfair that other people get better jobs. The unintended consequence is income inequality but that inequality is the only way to get someone to be a garbage man instead of a youtube commentator or beer reviewer.
    - chipotle_coyote 6y ago
      > People _want_ to be a musician or content creator so they are willing to do the job even without being paid much. Which pushes the value down for the job. Well, no, I don't think so, because this isn't like the market for maintaining PHP garbage. :) Creative work -- at least in this context -- isn't fungible. One low-rent PHP contractor is probably interchangeable with another one, but Patreon creators are not: if you're giving Bob $5 a month, it's because you specifically like Bob's stuff. What a Patreon creator with 50 patrons makes has no material effect on what a Patreon creator with 50,000 patrons makes.
- zpeti 6y ago
  It’s unacceptable that people building their own channel/brand/art have to work nights while doing a day job? This is normal. Life doesn’t owe you success. You have the suffer and work hard if you want more than a day job. Or move to somewhere with low rents and eat rice and beans for a few months, that also works. Success isn’t guaranteed and certainly society doesn’t owe you it.
- Dirlewanger 6y ago
  Buzzfeed and et. al are deeply dishonest companies running on borrowed time.
- znpy 6y ago
  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. In my opinion part of the problem is that these kind of jobs are too much glamourized[1]. If a job doesn't pay enough (according to any metric) move on to a better paying job. If an industry or a field doesn't pay enough, move on to another field/industry. At one point one must be honest enough to admit "this isn't working" or "this barely works, It's not wise to live like this". [1] a similar scenario: van life. there was a fad where a lot of people were trying to get a lifestyle income by living in a van and blogging about that (instagram, youtube, twitter and stuff like that). needless to say, after a while a wave of videos about "the truth of vanlife" has come up. Once again, people don't realize that for one person managing to achieve a huge success, another thousand (or more) will fail, possibly with consequences.
- root_axis 6y ago
  I think this is a fair criticism of Buzzfeed, after all, they have an employee/employer relationship with said creators; this is not true of independent creators.
- TuringNYC 6y ago
  That sounds like a criticism of Buzzfeed. Why should YouTube and Patreon step in and subsidize those salaries? Why not that the employer (Buzzfeed in your example) pay a living wage?
- FalconSensei 6y ago
  On the other hand, people who work entry-level jobs also work multiple job sometimes
williamdclt 6y ago
> For decades actors, musicians and artists have put up with this Well, it's not that simple is it. For decades actors, musicians and artists have been complaining that they have to live in misery to pursue their art and fighting for better conditions, it's not like they've always been OK with the status quo. It's a more general question: should art be subject to the market laws, or should society subsidize art production? In the first case (the liberal POV I suppose) it's up to the artist to find ways to make money out of their art, or keep it as a hobby, or give up on it. On the second case (a more socialist POV), we need to challenge how artists are getting a revenue in our society because it's clearly not working.
- lotsofpulp 6y ago
  > because it's clearly not working. Is it not? How much time or will do people currently have to consume art? The internet has dropped the barrier to getting an audience to near zero. Yet the vast, vast majority of people still want to consume mainstream, curated art. Even though it’s completely free, people don’t sit and browse websites for niche artists. Or, if they do, they certainly aren’t going to pay for it and would prefer the format of TikTok/Instagram.
- rmah 6y ago
  The answer to your question is: art should be subject to market laws and there should be minimal public funding except in very special cases. And IMO, there is no change needed how artists are getting paid because it's clearly working very well.
- pharke 6y ago
  > It's a more general question: should art be subject to the market laws, or should society subsidize art production? Thought you were going somewhere completely different based off of the first sentence. Yes artists have been exploited for decades, but they aren't being exploited by their audiences aka their market. Fans of music, video, performance, etc. are willing to pay quite fair prices (even exorbitant ones) to consume or own the media that they love. The lion's share of that money never reaches the artist that produced it. Vast empires of wealth have been built on the backs of superstar artists and the problem as always is rent seeking which is the enemy of socialists and capitalists alike. We absolutely should not subsidize art production, I can guarantee you that money would also be siphoned off under the current status quo. We're already very close to a solution to this problem with the massive drop in cost of producing any kind of art that is amenable to digital production and distribution. It just needs to continue to tip in the direction of artists being their own producers or being able to hire the people who do the actual work directly rather than going through an established company built on exploitative practices. The next piece of the puzzle is going to be a better system for paying to consume the produced art without relying on the toxic ad ecosystem. We need to starve the greedy giants of the last century out of existence, their only benefit was in connecting people to art when that used to be difficult. Connecting is easy now, paying someone for their work should be too.
clouddrover 6y ago
> The way most entertainers get known is just through sheer luck or connections. Derek Muller has a couple of videos talking about the success of his Veritasium YouTube channel (and work, luck, and success generally): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHsa9DqmId8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHsa9DqmId8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LopI4YeC4I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LopI4YeC4I
unix_fan 6y ago
People seem to believe the magical internet economy will make you rich. There's a big content creator in my country who's barely earning 5000 dollars from it.
- paulcole 6y ago
  > People seem to believe the magical internet economy will make you rich This is the entire founding belief of YC (and a huge swath of “VC culture” and Hacker News in general). Look at how many “businesses” promoted here have no meaningful revenue and no real ideals for how to monetize.
  - lotsofpulp 6y ago
    It’s not magical, it’s simply a market where technology allows for extremely low marginal costs so if you can launch your business over a high moat (such as overcoming network effects with tons of cash), then you can print money once you are entrenched.
  - floren 6y ago
    > Look at how many “businesses” promoted here have no meaningful revenue and no real ideals for how to monetize. They all know how to monetize, it just doesn't sound good to say it out loud: get a bunch of users by offering a free service on VC money, then sell your userbase to a big company.
- criddell 6y ago
  > There's a big content creator in my country who's barely earning 5000 dollars from it. I'm surprised that so many people are happy to describe themselves as content creators. It's an admission that what you create is generic content for some platform to wrap in ads. It's a type of self-commoditization.
  - wutbrodo 6y ago
    I don't think YouTubers generally do refer to themselves as content creators, as opposed to Creators (a term promoted by YouTube but embraced by the community).
mc32 6y ago
Ryan’s toy reviews I think is the prototypical example of finding a niche and exploiting it. It doesn’t require elaborate demos or expensive equipment or deep domain knowledge. It’s youthful exuberance, some theatrics and the right personality.
- wincy 6y ago
  If deep domain knowledge paid off on Youtube people like Ben Eater would be a millionaire from Youtube at this point[0], his videos are so cool and great at explaining computing. Or Clickspring, the guy who made the Antikythera Mechanism [1]. But honestly even for me being a software engineer and someone who considers himself interested in this sort of stuff, I look at these pages sometimes out of wonder but I often end up watching comedy videos and stuff like that on Youtube. The algorithm recommends it, and I watch. [0] https://www.youtube.com/user/eaterbc https://www.youtube.com/user/eaterbc [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ML4tw_UzqZE&list=PLZioPDnFPNsHnyxfygxA0to4RXv4_jDU2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ML4tw_UzqZE&list=PLZioPDnFPN...
  - johnnujler 6y ago
    “Exploiting” is the keyword here. You need to exploit the niche. A better example would be someone like 3Blue1Brown. You have to keep at it long enough and keep improving. Go check Grant’s first video and the latest video, the difference is just night and day. On the contrary, although decent in terms of the content, Ben hasn’t improved in ways measureable. When you use these mediums, you are trying to communicate while being engaging. If Ben indeed is providing engaging content that is deep and valuable, and you’re not just extrapolating from n=1(because you learn something from those videos), it should’ve worked out for him , no?
  - JKCalhoun 6y ago
    I suspect he's doing fine. Millionaire? Well, of course not, but he is sort of niche. But he also sells kits and I suspect that's been very useful to his paying for his ISP. I know I bought his 6502 kit. ;-) I think the smart "content creators" figure out a way to sell plans, etc. in order to take in a little on the side. (Patreon, in my mind, is the worst way to do that.)
snarf21 6y ago
I agree, people should think about it as a lottery ticket. How many people spend $10Ks over the years trying to become good at soccer/basketball/baseball/golf/etc. so they can go pro? We know that it is a 1 in a million shot but results in a multi-billion dollar industry. Creators have to decide on their goals. I design board games on the side. I don't expect it to ever break even, let alone replace my salary but I do it because I enjoy it for it's own sake.
- JKCalhoun 6y ago
  A lottery ticket? It's not that at all. Sadly (or is it?), it's like the real world. Marketing, image, having a product people want is still important. That's not luck, that's paying attention to the market and adjusting accordingly.
  - Aerroon 6y ago
    I agree. I don't think YouTube is a lottery ticket. If you have a decent idea, understand how people in your niche consume content and are willing to put in the work then you can do alright. Having a meteoric rise might be lottery, but mostly it's recognizing what people want and knowing how to "market" it to them. The hardest part is putting in the work. Being your own motivator and then working away at something is very difficult in the long run. I'd also like to add that $10k a year in numerous countries is decent income.
- sharkweek 6y ago
  I would say I'm an alright tennis player, have been playing since I was younger, lessons, coaches, the whole thing. Never even got close to playing at a D1 school though. Mostly out of curiosity, I looked into what it looks like to go pro now. Basically you go into a machine as a young kid, and if you show promise, you get focus from the coaching staff at the academies. Everyone else is basically just a warm body whose parents are paying a ton of money for their teen to be a hitting partner for the academy's golden goose. THEN if you make the show, you're fighting for rankings through some absolutely abysmal satellite tournaments that you're essentially losing money to go play in. Losing in the first round of a major makes you more money than winning one of these things. The delta between the 20th ranked player in the world versus the top 150th insane, too, with one worth millions and one worth maybe a small six figure salary, with a notable portion of it going toward travel/training expenses.
johnnujler 6y ago
As much as extrapolating what characteristics should a job of the future satisfy, based on your past experiences/knowledge, is a reasonable idea. It is also reasonable to assume that certain future jobs won’t look like the past jobs, or for that matter satisfy the criteria of path dependency as witnessed in the past. Leveraging privileges have had surprising outcomes in the past(including creating an industry like Hollywood). There is no one right way.
swsieber 6y ago
Yeah. Most indie game devs don't make enough from it to pay rent. Most authors don't make enough to pay rent from writing.
- happybday 6y ago
  When we talk about copyrights, there's always an argument made in their favour which is basically 'we have to engineer incentives in order to get people to make good new stuff'. Why does that apply to copyright law but not to regulating tech monopolies like Youtube?
  - fomine3 6y ago
    Does Regulating big techs work to give incentives for creators?
015a 6y ago
There's a strong argument that, when you've got companies like Google/YouTube, Spotify, Amazon/Twitch, Patreon, etc at the top capable of paying their executives and engineers and other employees six to seven figure salaries, on the backs of their creatives who barely scrape by, there's an inequality there which isn't ethical. Twitch and YouTube, I think, are interesting ones in the sense that their system costs are probably enormous, primarily due to the 99% of content "creators" on their system which are actually just people like me, uploading videos which five people watch. A tragedy of the commons sort of thing, whereby they still pay to serve my videos, and that all cuts into the pie which is probably better given to professional content creators. But, I think that ultimately all of these platforms would be better ran and managed by the content creators themselves, or at least middlemen who have less of a multi-billion dollar profit incentive. There are a few interesting products heading this way; * Tidal (in music) was a big one, but we'll see what happens now that Square has majority ownership. * Itch.io [1] in gaming. They run what appears to be an extremely barebones operation focusing on delivering extreme value for creators and consumers alike. * Floatplane [2] in video. A service started by the team behind Linus Tech Tips, several high-profile (generally tech-focused) content creators now host their content there. We're also seeing this theme of "screw the middleman" among big media companies, opting to get rid of Netflix or Hulu in favor of their own in-house streaming platform, or Epic's fight against the App Store. It's literally the same impetus; these middlemen take way too much money and ultimately form lowest-common-denominator revenue models which don't benefit most content creators, from large to small. I think this is a trend that will continue to gain traction; I am not bullish on big-tech mega-platforms over the long term. To a degree it sucks for consumers, but ultimately a system which demands content creators scrape by while making big tech rich isn't tenable, and consumers need to recognize that. Big Tech has had years to try and build something equitable; they haven't. Its their fault, not the fault of the content creators. I tend to predict that Twitch is the next one which will see major disruption. The market even among big tech alternatives is basically zero, and Twitch has huge issues which reach beyond just monetization and into legal governance of streamer channels which is legitimately pissing off content creators and viewers alike. They're "stuck" with Twitch, but Twitch isn't actually that big; its just niche (hop on Chaturbate any evening, take one look at the average view-count for their streamers, and recalibrate your perception on Twitch's slice of the entire online streaming pie). [1] https://itch.io/ https://itch.io/ [2] https://www.floatplane.com https://www.floatplane.com
FalconSensei 6y ago
> Yes the big creators make a lot of money, but that's because a lot of users are watching them That's true for anything, even for non-creative work. If you create an app, and nobody buys it (or uses it with ads), you also don't get money.
tessierashpool 6y ago
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. That just isn't true at all, and hasn't been true for at least a decade. Professional YouTubers typically have a background in film, with training in acting, lighting, and editing. Source: I worked for a variety of YouTube-related startups in Los Angeles. This sentiment is just completely inaccurate.
- beaconstudios 6y ago
  there's a world of difference between high-production YouTube and individual creator YouTube. The parent comment seemed to be addressing the type of people who want to be the next PewDiePie, not those who want to compete with Will Smith or Jack Black.
- bityard 6y ago
  I watch a lot of what I would call "blue-collar" YouTubers. Woodworkers, machinists, makers, electrical hobbyists, etc. When they talk about their income, all of them say that their Youtube ad revenue pays next to nothing. Some of them make a decent living via Patreon or have other ways that for their followers to support them (e.g., selling project plans). I can say with 100% confidence that none of them went to film school.
  - rainonmoon 6y ago
    The parent comments are referring to people who have made careers out of YouTube, not people who are paid "next to nothing".
- merb 6y ago
  I'm not sure this is true... most tech channels had zero background with that. I mean linus tech tipps (one of the biggest), started to make youtube videos with limited resources and basically was asked by his old company to help out, without prior knowledge. most gaming related channels were not done with prior backgrounds. also a lot of early youtubers had no prior background. I abo'd tons of german channels who make a living with it, which didn't do anything media related before youtube (some of course did to a certain (small) degree, like jp-performance) youtube is just so big that there a tons of people with tons of background. of course the most successful people are those who know how to sell.
herbertl 6y ago
Hi Philip-J-Fry, thanks for reading and responding! I really appreciate it. I actually totally agree with you—my original title for this piece was actually, "If You Can't Afford to Do It for Free, Don't Be a Creator." (Editors suggested a new title so I deferred, but you can see a trace of it at the URL.) The problem is, more and more people are turning to this as a viable source of income. In the piece, I reference the tragic death of Mocha, who turned to Bilibili to stream when he had nowhere to work (https://www.inkstonenews.com/society/aching-hopelessness-nobody-was-there-help-young-man-falling-through-cracks-chinese-society/article/3119748 https://www.inkstonenews.com/society/aching-hopelessness-nob...). There's some more evidence—say, people trying to calculate how much TikTok engagement they'll need to stream to get Christmas gifts (https://twitter.com/robyncaplan/status/1328432778942312449 https://twitter.com/robyncaplan/status/1328432778942312449). That, plus the survey that more children want to become a vlogger when they grow up (https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/07/american-kids-would-much-rather-be-youtubers-than-astronauts/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/07/american-kids-would-...), is why I wrote the piece. Of course, dream jobs change as people grow up and figure out feasibility, so I'm not too concerned about that. Plus, I have no intention to squish anyone's dreams, but I was hoping for this piece to do two things: 1. Paint a clearer picture of the economics of platforms, and that—for most people—it's generally a terrible way to make money. 2. Encourage media, platforms, and other creators to share more data and facts, instead of another, "This high schooler made $1 million in 5 weeks on Snapchat." https://people.com/human-interest/snapchat-high-school-senior-1-million-dollars/ https://people.com/human-interest/snapchat-high-school-senio... This is an old story. People will know the odds of starting a band and becoming a rock star, and still do it. So I just want to make sure people go all-in on it with deliberation, and that the most marginalized people don't turn to it when they most need it. Williamdclt put it well: "Well, it's not that simple is it. For decades actors, musicians and artists have been complaining that they have to live in misery to pursue their art and fighting for better conditions, it's not like they've always been OK with the status quo." If platforms do have an opportunity to better distribute the income for creative work, I think it's worth collective action from creators to put pressure on them to do it. If that means changing the algorithm to spotlight more people's videos, which means the popular videos effectively cross-subsidize them (like a record label would back in the day), I would think it's worth trying. I did not expect so many comments on this entry, so I'll do my best to contribute—but yours was at the top so I figured I'd start here! Thanks again.
unity1001 6y ago
When you make things like survival 'privilege not a right' with no way out, you end up with societal decline in which extremist nationalist and religious groups take over the disenfranchised people through their advocacy and their charity, and you magically find yourselves in the middle of a dystopian hellhole in which people with non-compliant mindsets are persecuted. Which has happened in every single age in history when same conditions came to being, and the people who could have fixed it resorted to comfortable numbness like 'privilege not a right'. And something being in a way for decades does not mean that it is right, it is rational and it should be kept as it is. If we did that, we wouldnt have been able to become a modern civilization.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

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).
- rileymat2 6y ago
  > or the workers are not shopping around for a better workplace Perhaps they are not shopping around because of monopolistic/anti competitive actions from google search causing competing video services to be unviable. I believe there is an ongoing legal case around this. Edit: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wsj.com/amp/articles/google-sued-by-youtube-rival-over-search-rankings-11610407969 https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wsj.com/amp/articles/google... It is kind of funny getting the amp link in this discussion...
  - wutbrodo 6y ago
    This doesn't make any sense. The discussion is the pay that buzzfeed pays their content creators. If the market for platforms was wide open, that wouldn't change much about this situation, since there would still be an oversupply of content creators that want a salary (as opposed to creators willing to personally take on the investment and risk, which is what the article but not the thread is abjout).
ajsnigrutin 6y ago
But this is not "youtube and patreon", but "employer buzzfeed does not pay their employees enough".
dec0dedab0de 6y ago
If they're not getting paid enough they should stop doing it. If enough of them stop doing it, then the rest will start to get paid more.
- gambiting 6y ago
  It's the exact same argument I keep making about tipping - if only everyone everywhere stopped tipping overnight, this stupid system would disappear. Underpaid waiters and drivers would find other jobs because suddenly without tips they wouldn't be able to support themselves. I am also surprised that no one has seen the wisdom of my words yet :P
  - skrebbel 6y ago
    The situation you advocate for is common practice in many countries. I'm likely missing nuances, but to me it seems that the key culprit is minimum wage laws in many US states having an exception for restaurant personnel. If a minimum wage was unconditional and high enough to live from, you wouldn't need tips to survive.
    - lotsofpulp 6y ago
      The US has a big cultural expectation of tipping, so even though the entire west coast, NYC, Chicago, and Washington DC have gotten rid of lower tipped minimum wages and effectively increased wages for waitstaff, almost all people still tip in all of those places. Even more, over the years, the standard tip amount has moved from 10% to 15% to now what seems like wide support for 20%. Not to mention that large portions of the population now tip for non waited transactions too. It gets even crazier when you go out with people and they look at you like you’re cheap for calculating tip on pre tax amounts. There’s a lot of pride in the US for tipping, as if it’s a status symbol.
  - matz1 6y ago
    Nothing stopping you to not tipping. You don't need to wait for everyone to stop tipping for you to not tip right now.
ImprobableTruth 6y ago
... didn't buzzfeed have to lay off a bunch of staff because they're losing money?
rmah 6y ago
This has also always been commonplace in the media industry for creatives. Simply put, the supply of labor far far FAR outstrips the demand. It's a highly risky career path, but many take the chance because they want to. No amount of complaining or legislation will ever "fix" it.
- PurpleFoxy 6y ago
  Also known as “compensating differential”. People _want_ to be a musician or content creator so they are willing to do the job even without being paid much. Which pushes the value down for the job. If you paid people YouTube rates to maintain php garbage they would just say no which keeps the prices up at a decent level.
  - bob33212 6y ago
    This is why capitalism is successful. You need an honest feedback mechanism from labor. If a centralized government assigned people jobs of maintaining a shitty php monolith at a standard wage those people would effectively produce nothing, because it is a shitty job and those people would not enjoy it or work hard because it is unfair that other people get better jobs. The unintended consequence is income inequality but that inequality is the only way to get someone to be a garbage man instead of a youtube commentator or beer reviewer.
  - chipotle_coyote 6y ago
    > People _want_ to be a musician or content creator so they are willing to do the job even without being paid much. Which pushes the value down for the job. Well, no, I don't think so, because this isn't like the market for maintaining PHP garbage. :) Creative work -- at least in this context -- isn't fungible. One low-rent PHP contractor is probably interchangeable with another one, but Patreon creators are not: if you're giving Bob $5 a month, it's because you specifically like Bob's stuff. What a Patreon creator with 50 patrons makes has no material effect on what a Patreon creator with 50,000 patrons makes.
zpeti 6y ago
It’s unacceptable that people building their own channel/brand/art have to work nights while doing a day job? This is normal. Life doesn’t owe you success. You have the suffer and work hard if you want more than a day job. Or move to somewhere with low rents and eat rice and beans for a few months, that also works. Success isn’t guaranteed and certainly society doesn’t owe you it.
Dirlewanger 6y ago
Buzzfeed and et. al are deeply dishonest companies running on borrowed time.
znpy 6y ago
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. In my opinion part of the problem is that these kind of jobs are too much glamourized[1]. If a job doesn't pay enough (according to any metric) move on to a better paying job. If an industry or a field doesn't pay enough, move on to another field/industry. At one point one must be honest enough to admit "this isn't working" or "this barely works, It's not wise to live like this". [1] a similar scenario: van life. there was a fad where a lot of people were trying to get a lifestyle income by living in a van and blogging about that (instagram, youtube, twitter and stuff like that). needless to say, after a while a wave of videos about "the truth of vanlife" has come up. Once again, people don't realize that for one person managing to achieve a huge success, another thousand (or more) will fail, possibly with consequences.
root_axis 6y ago
I think this is a fair criticism of Buzzfeed, after all, they have an employee/employer relationship with said creators; this is not true of independent creators.
TuringNYC 6y ago
That sounds like a criticism of Buzzfeed. Why should YouTube and Patreon step in and subsidize those salaries? Why not that the employer (Buzzfeed in your example) pay a living wage?
FalconSensei 6y ago
On the other hand, people who work entry-level jobs also work multiple job sometimes

williamdclt 6y ago

> For decades actors, musicians and artists have put up with this Well, it's not that simple is it. For decades actors, musicians and artists have been complaining that they have to live in misery to pursue their art and fighting for better conditions, it's not like they've always been OK with the status quo. It's a more general question: should art be subject to the market laws, or should society subsidize art production? In the first case (the liberal POV I suppose) it's up to the artist to find ways to make money out of their art, or keep it as a hobby, or give up on it. On the second case (a more socialist POV), we need to challenge how artists are getting a revenue in our society because it's clearly not working.

lotsofpulp 6y ago
> because it's clearly not working. Is it not? How much time or will do people currently have to consume art? The internet has dropped the barrier to getting an audience to near zero. Yet the vast, vast majority of people still want to consume mainstream, curated art. Even though it’s completely free, people don’t sit and browse websites for niche artists. Or, if they do, they certainly aren’t going to pay for it and would prefer the format of TikTok/Instagram.
rmah 6y ago
The answer to your question is: art should be subject to market laws and there should be minimal public funding except in very special cases. And IMO, there is no change needed how artists are getting paid because it's clearly working very well.
pharke 6y ago
> It's a more general question: should art be subject to the market laws, or should society subsidize art production? Thought you were going somewhere completely different based off of the first sentence. Yes artists have been exploited for decades, but they aren't being exploited by their audiences aka their market. Fans of music, video, performance, etc. are willing to pay quite fair prices (even exorbitant ones) to consume or own the media that they love. The lion's share of that money never reaches the artist that produced it. Vast empires of wealth have been built on the backs of superstar artists and the problem as always is rent seeking which is the enemy of socialists and capitalists alike. We absolutely should not subsidize art production, I can guarantee you that money would also be siphoned off under the current status quo. We're already very close to a solution to this problem with the massive drop in cost of producing any kind of art that is amenable to digital production and distribution. It just needs to continue to tip in the direction of artists being their own producers or being able to hire the people who do the actual work directly rather than going through an established company built on exploitative practices. The next piece of the puzzle is going to be a better system for paying to consume the produced art without relying on the toxic ad ecosystem. We need to starve the greedy giants of the last century out of existence, their only benefit was in connecting people to art when that used to be difficult. Connecting is easy now, paying someone for their work should be too.

clouddrover 6y ago

> The way most entertainers get known is just through sheer luck or connections. Derek Muller has a couple of videos talking about the success of his Veritasium YouTube channel (and work, luck, and success generally): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHsa9DqmId8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHsa9DqmId8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LopI4YeC4I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LopI4YeC4I

unix_fan 6y ago

People seem to believe the magical internet economy will make you rich. There's a big content creator in my country who's barely earning 5000 dollars from it.

paulcole 6y ago
> People seem to believe the magical internet economy will make you rich This is the entire founding belief of YC (and a huge swath of “VC culture” and Hacker News in general). Look at how many “businesses” promoted here have no meaningful revenue and no real ideals for how to monetize.
- lotsofpulp 6y ago
  It’s not magical, it’s simply a market where technology allows for extremely low marginal costs so if you can launch your business over a high moat (such as overcoming network effects with tons of cash), then you can print money once you are entrenched.
- floren 6y ago
  > Look at how many “businesses” promoted here have no meaningful revenue and no real ideals for how to monetize. They all know how to monetize, it just doesn't sound good to say it out loud: get a bunch of users by offering a free service on VC money, then sell your userbase to a big company.
criddell 6y ago
> There's a big content creator in my country who's barely earning 5000 dollars from it. I'm surprised that so many people are happy to describe themselves as content creators. It's an admission that what you create is generic content for some platform to wrap in ads. It's a type of self-commoditization.
- wutbrodo 6y ago
  I don't think YouTubers generally do refer to themselves as content creators, as opposed to Creators (a term promoted by YouTube but embraced by the community).

mc32 6y ago

Ryan’s toy reviews I think is the prototypical example of finding a niche and exploiting it. It doesn’t require elaborate demos or expensive equipment or deep domain knowledge. It’s youthful exuberance, some theatrics and the right personality.

wincy 6y ago
If deep domain knowledge paid off on Youtube people like Ben Eater would be a millionaire from Youtube at this point[0], his videos are so cool and great at explaining computing. Or Clickspring, the guy who made the Antikythera Mechanism [1]. But honestly even for me being a software engineer and someone who considers himself interested in this sort of stuff, I look at these pages sometimes out of wonder but I often end up watching comedy videos and stuff like that on Youtube. The algorithm recommends it, and I watch. [0] https://www.youtube.com/user/eaterbc https://www.youtube.com/user/eaterbc [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ML4tw_UzqZE&list=PLZioPDnFPNsHnyxfygxA0to4RXv4_jDU2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ML4tw_UzqZE&list=PLZioPDnFPN...
- johnnujler 6y ago
  “Exploiting” is the keyword here. You need to exploit the niche. A better example would be someone like 3Blue1Brown. You have to keep at it long enough and keep improving. Go check Grant’s first video and the latest video, the difference is just night and day. On the contrary, although decent in terms of the content, Ben hasn’t improved in ways measureable. When you use these mediums, you are trying to communicate while being engaging. If Ben indeed is providing engaging content that is deep and valuable, and you’re not just extrapolating from n=1(because you learn something from those videos), it should’ve worked out for him , no?
- JKCalhoun 6y ago
  I suspect he's doing fine. Millionaire? Well, of course not, but he is sort of niche. But he also sells kits and I suspect that's been very useful to his paying for his ISP. I know I bought his 6502 kit. ;-) I think the smart "content creators" figure out a way to sell plans, etc. in order to take in a little on the side. (Patreon, in my mind, is the worst way to do that.)

snarf21 6y ago

I agree, people should think about it as a lottery ticket. How many people spend $10Ks over the years trying to become good at soccer/basketball/baseball/golf/etc. so they can go pro? We know that it is a 1 in a million shot but results in a multi-billion dollar industry. Creators have to decide on their goals. I design board games on the side. I don't expect it to ever break even, let alone replace my salary but I do it because I enjoy it for it's own sake.

JKCalhoun 6y ago
A lottery ticket? It's not that at all. Sadly (or is it?), it's like the real world. Marketing, image, having a product people want is still important. That's not luck, that's paying attention to the market and adjusting accordingly.
- Aerroon 6y ago
  I agree. I don't think YouTube is a lottery ticket. If you have a decent idea, understand how people in your niche consume content and are willing to put in the work then you can do alright. Having a meteoric rise might be lottery, but mostly it's recognizing what people want and knowing how to "market" it to them. The hardest part is putting in the work. Being your own motivator and then working away at something is very difficult in the long run. I'd also like to add that $10k a year in numerous countries is decent income.
sharkweek 6y ago
I would say I'm an alright tennis player, have been playing since I was younger, lessons, coaches, the whole thing. Never even got close to playing at a D1 school though. Mostly out of curiosity, I looked into what it looks like to go pro now. Basically you go into a machine as a young kid, and if you show promise, you get focus from the coaching staff at the academies. Everyone else is basically just a warm body whose parents are paying a ton of money for their teen to be a hitting partner for the academy's golden goose. THEN if you make the show, you're fighting for rankings through some absolutely abysmal satellite tournaments that you're essentially losing money to go play in. Losing in the first round of a major makes you more money than winning one of these things. The delta between the 20th ranked player in the world versus the top 150th insane, too, with one worth millions and one worth maybe a small six figure salary, with a notable portion of it going toward travel/training expenses.

johnnujler 6y ago

As much as extrapolating what characteristics should a job of the future satisfy, based on your past experiences/knowledge, is a reasonable idea. It is also reasonable to assume that certain future jobs won’t look like the past jobs, or for that matter satisfy the criteria of path dependency as witnessed in the past. Leveraging privileges have had surprising outcomes in the past(including creating an industry like Hollywood). There is no one right way.

swsieber 6y ago

Yeah. Most indie game devs don't make enough from it to pay rent. Most authors don't make enough to pay rent from writing.

happybday 6y ago
When we talk about copyrights, there's always an argument made in their favour which is basically 'we have to engineer incentives in order to get people to make good new stuff'. Why does that apply to copyright law but not to regulating tech monopolies like Youtube?
- fomine3 6y ago
  Does Regulating big techs work to give incentives for creators?

015a 6y ago

There's a strong argument that, when you've got companies like Google/YouTube, Spotify, Amazon/Twitch, Patreon, etc at the top capable of paying their executives and engineers and other employees six to seven figure salaries, on the backs of their creatives who barely scrape by, there's an inequality there which isn't ethical. Twitch and YouTube, I think, are interesting ones in the sense that their system costs are probably enormous, primarily due to the 99% of content "creators" on their system which are actually just people like me, uploading videos which five people watch. A tragedy of the commons sort of thing, whereby they still pay to serve my videos, and that all cuts into the pie which is probably better given to professional content creators. But, I think that ultimately all of these platforms would be better ran and managed by the content creators themselves, or at least middlemen who have less of a multi-billion dollar profit incentive. There are a few interesting products heading this way; * Tidal (in music) was a big one, but we'll see what happens now that Square has majority ownership. * Itch.io [1] in gaming. They run what appears to be an extremely barebones operation focusing on delivering extreme value for creators and consumers alike. * Floatplane [2] in video. A service started by the team behind Linus Tech Tips, several high-profile (generally tech-focused) content creators now host their content there. We're also seeing this theme of "screw the middleman" among big media companies, opting to get rid of Netflix or Hulu in favor of their own in-house streaming platform, or Epic's fight against the App Store. It's literally the same impetus; these middlemen take way too much money and ultimately form lowest-common-denominator revenue models which don't benefit most content creators, from large to small. I think this is a trend that will continue to gain traction; I am not bullish on big-tech mega-platforms over the long term. To a degree it sucks for consumers, but ultimately a system which demands content creators scrape by while making big tech rich isn't tenable, and consumers need to recognize that. Big Tech has had years to try and build something equitable; they haven't. Its their fault, not the fault of the content creators. I tend to predict that Twitch is the next one which will see major disruption. The market even among big tech alternatives is basically zero, and Twitch has huge issues which reach beyond just monetization and into legal governance of streamer channels which is legitimately pissing off content creators and viewers alike. They're "stuck" with Twitch, but Twitch isn't actually that big; its just niche (hop on Chaturbate any evening, take one look at the average view-count for their streamers, and recalibrate your perception on Twitch's slice of the entire online streaming pie). [1] https://itch.io/ https://itch.io/ [2] https://www.floatplane.com https://www.floatplane.com

FalconSensei 6y ago

> Yes the big creators make a lot of money, but that's because a lot of users are watching them That's true for anything, even for non-creative work. If you create an app, and nobody buys it (or uses it with ads), you also don't get money.

tessierashpool 6y ago

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. That just isn't true at all, and hasn't been true for at least a decade. Professional YouTubers typically have a background in film, with training in acting, lighting, and editing. Source: I worked for a variety of YouTube-related startups in Los Angeles. This sentiment is just completely inaccurate.

beaconstudios 6y ago
there's a world of difference between high-production YouTube and individual creator YouTube. The parent comment seemed to be addressing the type of people who want to be the next PewDiePie, not those who want to compete with Will Smith or Jack Black.
bityard 6y ago
I watch a lot of what I would call "blue-collar" YouTubers. Woodworkers, machinists, makers, electrical hobbyists, etc. When they talk about their income, all of them say that their Youtube ad revenue pays next to nothing. Some of them make a decent living via Patreon or have other ways that for their followers to support them (e.g., selling project plans). I can say with 100% confidence that none of them went to film school.
- rainonmoon 6y ago
  The parent comments are referring to people who have made careers out of YouTube, not people who are paid "next to nothing".
merb 6y ago
I'm not sure this is true... most tech channels had zero background with that. I mean linus tech tipps (one of the biggest), started to make youtube videos with limited resources and basically was asked by his old company to help out, without prior knowledge. most gaming related channels were not done with prior backgrounds. also a lot of early youtubers had no prior background. I abo'd tons of german channels who make a living with it, which didn't do anything media related before youtube (some of course did to a certain (small) degree, like jp-performance) youtube is just so big that there a tons of people with tons of background. of course the most successful people are those who know how to sell.

herbertl 6y ago

Hi Philip-J-Fry, thanks for reading and responding! I really appreciate it. I actually totally agree with you—my original title for this piece was actually, "If You Can't Afford to Do It for Free, Don't Be a Creator." (Editors suggested a new title so I deferred, but you can see a trace of it at the URL.) The problem is, more and more people are turning to this as a viable source of income. In the piece, I reference the tragic death of Mocha, who turned to Bilibili to stream when he had nowhere to work (https://www.inkstonenews.com/society/aching-hopelessness-nobody-was-there-help-young-man-falling-through-cracks-chinese-society/article/3119748 https://www.inkstonenews.com/society/aching-hopelessness-nob...). There's some more evidence—say, people trying to calculate how much TikTok engagement they'll need to stream to get Christmas gifts (https://twitter.com/robyncaplan/status/1328432778942312449 https://twitter.com/robyncaplan/status/1328432778942312449). That, plus the survey that more children want to become a vlogger when they grow up (https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/07/american-kids-would-much-rather-be-youtubers-than-astronauts/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/07/american-kids-would-...), is why I wrote the piece. Of course, dream jobs change as people grow up and figure out feasibility, so I'm not too concerned about that. Plus, I have no intention to squish anyone's dreams, but I was hoping for this piece to do two things: 1. Paint a clearer picture of the economics of platforms, and that—for most people—it's generally a terrible way to make money. 2. Encourage media, platforms, and other creators to share more data and facts, instead of another, "This high schooler made $1 million in 5 weeks on Snapchat." https://people.com/human-interest/snapchat-high-school-senior-1-million-dollars/ https://people.com/human-interest/snapchat-high-school-senio... This is an old story. People will know the odds of starting a band and becoming a rock star, and still do it. So I just want to make sure people go all-in on it with deliberation, and that the most marginalized people don't turn to it when they most need it. Williamdclt put it well: "Well, it's not that simple is it. For decades actors, musicians and artists have been complaining that they have to live in misery to pursue their art and fighting for better conditions, it's not like they've always been OK with the status quo." If platforms do have an opportunity to better distribute the income for creative work, I think it's worth collective action from creators to put pressure on them to do it. If that means changing the algorithm to spotlight more people's videos, which means the popular videos effectively cross-subsidize them (like a record label would back in the day), I would think it's worth trying. I did not expect so many comments on this entry, so I'll do my best to contribute—but yours was at the top so I figured I'd start here! Thanks again.

unity1001 6y ago

When you make things like survival 'privilege not a right' with no way out, you end up with societal decline in which extremist nationalist and religious groups take over the disenfranchised people through their advocacy and their charity, and you magically find yourselves in the middle of a dystopian hellhole in which people with non-compliant mindsets are persecuted. Which has happened in every single age in history when same conditions came to being, and the people who could have fixed it resorted to comfortable numbness like 'privilege not a right'. And something being in a way for decades does not mean that it is right, it is rational and it should be kept as it is. If we did that, we wouldnt have been able to become a modern civilization.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]