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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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):
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/
> 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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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).
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
> 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?
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.
"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.
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.
Schools should really start teaching basic principles, such as
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_distribution
Full article without the wall: https://outline.com/ktG6Xz
The power law rules all things in the entertainment economy.
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".
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.
> 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.
We need a minimum living wage for YouTube creators? Or it should be completely demonetized /s. Another mindless incarnation of the outrage template
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
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.)
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?
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.
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.
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.
Yet some people still don't give up on their career in left-handed puppetry.
There is a reason why the term "starving artist" was coined.
Rent is a losing game. As much rent will be extracted as possible.
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
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
TL;DW Pareto Distribution.
That's because the rent is too damn high.
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.
Perhaps this is a good use case for NFT's, added signatures make it easy to find and reward the owner.