6 ms·

I regularly watch economically prosperous content on youtube that would have had zero chance of distribution 10 years ago. I also watch available but not prospe

• uwuemu 4y ago
  Just look at platforms like Patreon, Subscribestar, Twitch, Onlyfans etc. (these days also Youtube with members and superchats). Hell, ironically enough (given the OP), even substack. These are the places where having just 500-1000 supporters can set you up for a VERY comfortable living, and mostly with no need for advertisement driven business (if you don't want to). That's where the long tail is and it's healthier than ever before.
  • rob74 4y ago
    Also, niche acts on Spotify, Bandcamp etc. - they can now theoretically reach much larger audiences. Of course, the downside is that there are also a lot of other acts to compete with, so the odds of "breaking out" of the long tail are not really good. And I'm not sure how much artists with 10 to 30 000 "monthly listeners" earn on Spotify. Probably not enough to make a living...
    • ghaff 4y ago
      So, if every 30,000 monthly listener on Spotify listens to 10 songs on average they'll earn about $1300 per month by my calculation. Of course, playing weekend gigs at your local bar or college party didn't earn you a living either.
      • galaxyLogic 4y ago
        In NYC a typical bar-band gets one free bear per player, sometimes not even that.
        • achenet 4y ago
          What type of bear? Polar bear? Grizzly bear? just kidding, I'm almost sure you meant beer ;)
          • galaxyLogic 4y ago
            Thanks I'll edit it
    • JKCalhoun 4y ago
      Breaking out of the long tail never had good odds. I suspect the investment though for indie bands now is a lot cheaper (cheaper than say filling up the van at every college-town stop).
      • chiefalchemist 4y ago
        Yes. But that model applies to every one. That is, the lower bar leads to more noise (read: crap bands) and morw competition). Easy means, less effort. Less effort means less creativity. It's a race to the bottom.
        • JKCalhoun 4y ago
          There's still a hurdle — artists still have to be prolific and have the drive/energy to record/edit/upload. That alone filters out most of the noise. Lacking a long tail, culture becomes a race to the banal.
          • chiefalchemist 4y ago
            Prolific has nothing to do with quality. I sold music (i.e. dance / electronic music) from 1990 (pre-internet) and into the mid+ 00s. I saw what easier production and easier distribution did for quality. Ask any DJ who has lived long enough, and no one will tell you there's less noise.
            • JKCalhoun 4y ago
              I don't doubt there's more noise (I wasn't arguing there wasn't — rather that there is still a hurdle). The alternative is worse though.
              • chiefalchemist 4y ago
                If there's an excess of noise, then there is no effective hurdle. A bit of natural unavoidable friction (e.g., uploading song) is not a hurdle. We do have more choice. Unfortunately, there's been a disproportunate increase in friction / noise. A net loss, which supports the article's theory.
  • TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
    Long tails have been around for a long time. If you worked out how to crack the distributor game, you could make a VERY comfortable living back in the 90s producing mediocre dance music under many different names. You could make a VERY comfortable living as a writer in 80s and 90s writing for niche literary or special interest magazines. Or producing mid-market fiction. Especially romantic novels. Until around 2000, you could make a VERY comfortable living as a competent but not outstanding orchestral sessions musician, as long as you lived in one of the bigger music cities (London, LA, NY, Tokyo, Berlin.) Until around 2010, likewise for pop session musicians (add Nashville and a few others.) Most of those opportunities have disappeared. The Long Tail hasn't added anything. It has shuffled around the opportunities. So now you can make a VERY comfortable living as a niche YouTube star, as long as you're the right kind of extrovert and - ideally - at least a little good looking. And so on for all the other current market slots. They're not really new at all - just updated variations on the old "self-employed creative" roles which happen to favour a different set of skills.
    • mypalmike 4y ago
      Thank you. This validates my decision not to become a competent violist. When I see orchestras play, I sometimes wonder if I could have made a career of it.
    • abetusk 4y ago
      The point isn't that the long tail hadn't existed before, it's that more people have access to it through new technology. In other words, it's the difference of approximating a probability distribution with 1 billion points instead of 1 million. Before the internet, long tail effects were present with the 1M that could get past the gauntlet of labels and distribution conglomerates. After the internet, musicians had better avenues to get money more directly from fans and fans had better tools for discovery. You characterize it as being a zero-sum game but I don't believe this is right. I think it's easier now than ever to generate a (small, potentially liveable) income stream from 'mediocre dance music', niche writer, etc. There are more full-time musicians and musicians earning a living than there were 20 years ago [0] [1]. This is directly due to the internet being the distribution channel. I would imagine other fields have been effected similarly though I haven't seen a broad study. [0] https://www.techdirt.com/2013/05/30/massive-growth-independent-musicians-singers-over-past-decade/ https://www.techdirt.com/2013/05/30/massive-growth-independe... [1] https://www.rollingstone.com/pro/features/raine-group-independent-artists-2-billion-in-2020-967138/ https://www.rollingstone.com/pro/features/raine-group-indepe...
• newsclues 4y ago
  Are those content creators being fairly rewarded?
  • yashasolutions 4y ago
    Define fair. Also, not sure fair is even the goal for many of them. If you want to maximize your revenue, you are nearly always better off on your own platform. So these platform take a cut and it is left to the user to make a choice if it's worth it.
  • ghaff 4y ago
    What's "fair"? More people are getting their work seen than ever. But there's no law that if you create something people are going to pay you for it. That's never been the case.
  • Icathian 4y ago
    It's hard to get real numbers from across the spectrum but the short answer is that the popular ones are doing very well. I posted a link on HN to a Magic the Gathering YouTube streamer doing an incredibly transparent breakdown of his income. If you want hard numbers (albeit with a sample size of 1) that'd be a good place to start.
  • egypturnash 4y ago
    I have about 100 supporters on Patreon and this makes enough money for me to cover my bills, and spend my days swanning aimlessly about my town’s cafes and parks, drawing whatever I want to draw. About 15% of what I make goes to Patron and payment processing.
• bricemo 4y ago
  Agree. This article is saying Head content is still king. That is true. But The Long Tail wasn’t necessarily about the long tail being bigger than head. It was that long tail was viable at all. I don’t see how anyone can argue against there being more choice than ever before across all sectors of products and content.
  • ghaff 4y ago
    >But The Long Tail wasn’t necessarily about the long tail being bigger than head. It was that long tail was viable at all. Anderson's point was somewhat different as I recall. It wasn't that individual long tail content is necessarily financially viable for its creators. (Which seems mostly true even if there are some breakouts who wouldn't have existed at least in the same form 25 years ago.) It's that long tail content in aggregate could be financially viable for distributors and other sellers--which seems at least somewhat true. With a hindsight lens, you could argue that the long tail was about profiting off the labor of free and low-paid content creation--although a somewhat counterargument is that consumers get a lot of value too and much of the content is stuff that would never have seen the light of day at least beyond a tiny circle of friends and fans in past times.
    • JKCalhoun 4y ago
      > It's that long tail content in aggregate could be financially viable for distributors and other sellers--which seems at least somewhat true I don't disagree with that point, rather I never cared that the long tail would be "financially viable for distributors". In fact, I suppose I prefer that it is not viable for them. Long live the long tail!
      • ghaff 4y ago
        Well, if it weren't financially viable for the distributors, the long tail wouldn't really be accessible beyond mostly local audiences--as was the case before the mid 90s or so. If long tail content isn't financially viable for YouTube, then YouTube either doesn't exist, charges for hosting, or gatekeeps.
    • 4y ago
• arka2147483647 4y ago
  Many of the successful YouTube creators seem to me to be of the type "somebody in a room, with a camera, Play Button on an Ikea shelf". Looks like moderate middle-class trappings. If that is successful, what does the long tail look like? I mean, there are a lot of people making videos. But I don't really believe many of those get their full income from it.
  • notatoad 4y ago
    part of that is just the youtuber aesthetic. MKBHD basically looks like that, but i don't think there's any doubt that he's making good money off youtube
  • orthoxerox 4y ago
    The long tail looks exactly like that, but without a Play Button. Luck aside, rewards are usually exponential. Is a breakout vlogger with a million subscribers a hundred times better than one with ten thousand? Is he even ten times better?
• JKCalhoun 4y ago
  Yep, author doesn't even mention YouTube. I have found more art and artists via YouTube than I have from Disney. He talks about the "long tail" but then turns around and talks about mainstream (ha ha) companies like Netflix, talks about "Hollywood", etc. The long tail is not going to come from corporate America, and never was.
• throwk8s 4y ago
  I don't think that necessarily contradicts his point. It may be the case that the long tail/niche market/counterculture market is also winner-take-all [1], so that non-mainstream content is much more available, yet almost no one actually producing such content can really make a living at it. [1] Per the article, in the context of "solving a Long Tail problem": "And when I looked at products instead, I found the same distribution: 80% of sales came from 20% of the products."
• jollybean 4y ago
  Yes, but it's a much longer and flatter tail.
• cs137 4y ago
  I regularly watch economically prosperous content on youtube that would have had zero chance of distribution 10 years ago. The game is different and it's too early to tell if things are better now than before. We're seeing a lot of no-talent rich kids ("influencers") as they take over the commons. Facebook used to be a way that anyone, in theory, could gain social influence. Now, it seems to ratify one's lack of influence; if people (e.g., employers, literary agents) look you up on Twitter and see less than 5,000 followers, they assume they can get away with shit. This being said, I think we are past the nadir. We're going from an age in which we had incompetent curators to one in which we don't know who the curators are. As they say about traditional vs. self-publishing, the problem for self-publishing is that there are no gatekeepers, and the problem with traditional publishing is that it has lousy gatekeepers (lousy because they care more about short-term marketability than literary merit). How this is all going to shake out is anybody's guess. What concerns me is the amount of power tech companies now have. It's great that a talented nobody can become a Youtube star, at least now... but what happens if Youtube decides to change its algorithm to punish leftist content? How do we prevent spurious copyright strikes? How do people who are de-platformed for illegitimate reasons (this literally happened to me) seek justice? How do we make sure we're not just building another reputation market that rich people will corner? That's what the tech companies want, after all, for the sole reason that it's most profitable.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]