The funny thing is, when you look at how badly YouTube stars are getting exploited, you must think there's a villain in the story who's running off with a big bag of cash. "If only YouTube gave...
The funny thing is, when you look at how badly YouTube stars are getting exploited, you must think there's a villain in the story who's running off with a big bag of cash. "If only YouTube gave them more money", you might think, "they could afford to hire a crew". The reality is, nobody's really getting rich. YouTube (Google) is giving them, by all appearances, as much advertising money as they can afford to give, and it's not enough. Actually Google might even be giving them more money than they can afford to give (YouTube is probably still losing money).
It sounds weird. When you shift TV show production from the network model to the YouTube model, you'd expect money to shake out in a vaguely similar way. Huge advertising money rolls in, huge payouts to stars roll out.
The huge advertising money is still rolling in. The only problem is, YouTube has operating costs way beyond what a network has. A TV network has to support, what, maybe a couple dozen shows and a couple hundred cast+crew in total? YouTube, in contrast, has to support maybe a couple hundred million shows. Well, it's not quite the same thing because YouTube isn't supporting all of those millions of YouTubers monetarily, but it does still incur operating costs from all of the millions of videos that get uploaded every minute (and get only 3 or 4 views).
YouTube's dream of everybody being their own TV star is a nice dream, but I think economically it just doesn't work out sustainably. It's super expensive, which means the payouts you'd like to give to content creators are just the scraps that are left over. That means the content creators are trying to create their content on just left-over scraps, which means no real cast and crew. Bummer all around.
I have a few notifications, but since I only have time right now to do one comment I'm going to comment here, because I think there's something really interesting that the media and people in...
I have a few notifications, but since I only have time right now to do one comment I'm going to comment here, because I think there's something really interesting that the media and people in general are completely and entirely missing out on:
To earn minimum wage on YouTube off of what Google pays you per-view alone, you need 2.4mm views a month. That's .0006¢ per view. (The number's likely dropped a bit since that article was released; it's steadily been going down every year.)
Imagine that. That's more than likely more exposure than anything that any of you have ever gotten. Two million, four hundred thousand people watching you. A month. For the equivalent of a McDonald's job.
Does that seem...fair? Like, at all? That's worse than anything Uber's done, and we don't give them an easy time. That seems wrong, doesn't it? Possibly even mentally damaging.
I agree with you, but it's important to bear in mind that there are other ways of getting revenue than from YouTube directly. I'm sure you've seen the promotions that creators have done for...
I agree with you, but it's important to bear in mind that there are other ways of getting revenue than from YouTube directly. I'm sure you've seen the promotions that creators have done for companies like Audible, Blue Apron, Brilliant, etc., and a lot of channels have Patreon accounts set up as a more reliable stream of income from dedicated fans. VidCon (founded by Hank Green) is even offering modest grants to creators now. Those who genuinely want to make a living off YouTuber should seek to diversify their income sources so that they aren't wholly reliant upon the company.
That doesn't diminish your point, though. Alternative income methods can only go so far. YouTube's system definitely is mentally damaging to creators—especially young ones—in that it forces them to work harder than they ever would at a 9–5 job for a pretty meager reward. It's almost setting them up for burnout, in a way. Personally, I believe YouTube has a responsibility to its creators not to incentivize this sort of day-in-day-out exhaustion. However (perhaps this is just my pessimism speaking), I can't see a for-profit company doing that anytime soon.
Oh yeah, absolutely; I was just pointing out that the system itself is a bit messed up. Especially for creators who don't have content that lends itself toward the above. I probably should have...
Oh yeah, absolutely; I was just pointing out that the system itself is a bit messed up. Especially for creators who don't have content that lends itself toward the above. I probably should have italicized:
I've honestly never felt much sympathy for YouTubers who are in it for a living. It was never promised to be a viable alternative to a 'normal' job; merely a reward for creating content. The...
I've honestly never felt much sympathy for YouTubers who are in it for a living. It was never promised to be a viable alternative to a 'normal' job; merely a reward for creating content. The system was/is quite volatile due to various reasons, meaning you're pretty much never promised the same amount of money month to month even if you do equal work. You can suddenly have dozens if not hundreds of your videos de-monetized for illegitimate reasons due to YouTube/Google's piss-poor DMCA handling (the DMCA system itself is to blame for that honestly). It shouldn't be looked at a reliable source of income, especially if it's you're only source.
When I see videos of people saying they've quite their day job to do YouTube full time, I just roll my eyes and wait for the eventual video complaining about how YouTube de-monetized them for some bullshit reason, and promote their new Patreon. We'll see the same shit happen to Twitch eventually, if not already.
I think that as we (as a society) become further and further inoculated against advertising, exposure will begin to matter much less. I think the downfall of a lot of these youtube stars is the...
I think that as we (as a society) become further and further inoculated against advertising, exposure will begin to matter much less.
I think the downfall of a lot of these youtube stars is the canary in the coal mine.
Like, OK, someone got 10,000,000 views. I think more people will be asking the question "how is this content meaningful or enriching" in the future.
While I can't imagine anything I do being watched by that many people, those numbers are pretty poor when compared to TV. Less than a million views a week for a TV show puts it down in PBS levels...
While I can't imagine anything I do being watched by that many people, those numbers are pretty poor when compared to TV. Less than a million views a week for a TV show puts it down in PBS levels of viewers, and that's never been a licence to print money. We don't generally care to pay very much to people who "just" entertain us.
With TV, there are a lot more people, and the content's generally not focused around one person. With TV, it's usually either characters or groups of people. For example, the highest viewership...
With TV, there are a lot more people, and the content's generally not focused around one person. With TV, it's usually either characters or groups of people.
For example, the highest viewership numbers Friends had (during an episode that was apparently directly after the Super Bowl) was 52.9mm. There were 6 main characters.
That means that there was one main character for every 8.81mm viewers.
They were paid quite well for this; being paid anywhere from $22,000-per to the $40,000s during that season.
Ironically, they got paid more in the seasons to come, despite less grandiose outcomes. For example, in their last season, they got paid $1mm each per episode. In the season before that, 750k each. With a smaller amount of viewership.
They also got, and continue to get, royalties for it all.
It's not a great comparison to make, IMO; especially given TV shows also have a lot of side characters, extras, producers and writers to pay, too.
You’re kind of reinforcing my point. That’s how the entertainment business always works: if you’re a big star you get big money, if not you starve. PewDiePie was earning $15m a year recently, and...
You’re kind of reinforcing my point. That’s how the entertainment business always works: if you’re a big star you get big money, if not you starve. PewDiePie was earning $15m a year recently, and you can bet he had used that money to build up a production team and sweat all his intellectual rights.
TV in the early days had a simple model: “find someone interesting, pay them a pittance, put them in front of the camera, mention the sponsor”. Once they’d figured out how to work that model, production values started to increase, and so team sizes. And every time technology advanced to make it easier to make and show programmes, new smaller lightweight challengers appeared, undercutting the established businesses.
Online is just another step in that journey. The only thing that remains constant is “pay them a pittance”, because there’s always more hopefuls out there...
But they are providing the value. If the content creators left, Youtube would die a very quick death, it's not unique in that regard and can be replaced by another site in a matter of years....
Some uploaders have gotten confused about their role in this system, and believe that they are the ones providing value.
But they are providing the value. If the content creators left, Youtube would die a very quick death, it's not unique in that regard and can be replaced by another site in a matter of years. Youtube's only saving grace is that no one else on the net can provide the servers and bandwith to support the exurbant amounts of video content uploaded there. To this day I wonder why the ability to upload content isn't gated behind a more rigorous sign-up process, but I guess that would impede their vision. It'd certainly help with the amount of data uploaded and maybe help with server costs, considering Youtube is roughly breaking even. And that with ~4 billion viewers in 2015, which has probably risen since.
The funny thing is, when you look at how badly YouTube stars are getting exploited, you must think there's a villain in the story who's running off with a big bag of cash. "If only YouTube gave them more money", you might think, "they could afford to hire a crew". The reality is, nobody's really getting rich. YouTube (Google) is giving them, by all appearances, as much advertising money as they can afford to give, and it's not enough. Actually Google might even be giving them more money than they can afford to give (YouTube is probably still losing money).
It sounds weird. When you shift TV show production from the network model to the YouTube model, you'd expect money to shake out in a vaguely similar way. Huge advertising money rolls in, huge payouts to stars roll out.
The huge advertising money is still rolling in. The only problem is, YouTube has operating costs way beyond what a network has. A TV network has to support, what, maybe a couple dozen shows and a couple hundred cast+crew in total? YouTube, in contrast, has to support maybe a couple hundred million shows. Well, it's not quite the same thing because YouTube isn't supporting all of those millions of YouTubers monetarily, but it does still incur operating costs from all of the millions of videos that get uploaded every minute (and get only 3 or 4 views).
YouTube's dream of everybody being their own TV star is a nice dream, but I think economically it just doesn't work out sustainably. It's super expensive, which means the payouts you'd like to give to content creators are just the scraps that are left over. That means the content creators are trying to create their content on just left-over scraps, which means no real cast and crew. Bummer all around.
I have a few notifications, but since I only have time right now to do one comment I'm going to comment here, because I think there's something really interesting that the media and people in general are completely and entirely missing out on:
To earn minimum wage on YouTube off of what Google pays you per-view alone, you need 2.4mm views a month. That's .0006¢ per view. (The number's likely dropped a bit since that article was released; it's steadily been going down every year.)
Imagine that. That's more than likely more exposure than anything that any of you have ever gotten. Two million, four hundred thousand people watching you. A month. For the equivalent of a McDonald's job.
Does that seem...fair? Like, at all? That's worse than anything Uber's done, and we don't give them an easy time. That seems wrong, doesn't it? Possibly even mentally damaging.
I agree with you, but it's important to bear in mind that there are other ways of getting revenue than from YouTube directly. I'm sure you've seen the promotions that creators have done for companies like Audible, Blue Apron, Brilliant, etc., and a lot of channels have Patreon accounts set up as a more reliable stream of income from dedicated fans. VidCon (founded by Hank Green) is even offering modest grants to creators now. Those who genuinely want to make a living off YouTuber should seek to diversify their income sources so that they aren't wholly reliant upon the company.
That doesn't diminish your point, though. Alternative income methods can only go so far. YouTube's system definitely is mentally damaging to creators—especially young ones—in that it forces them to work harder than they ever would at a 9–5 job for a pretty meager reward. It's almost setting them up for burnout, in a way. Personally, I believe YouTube has a responsibility to its creators not to incentivize this sort of day-in-day-out exhaustion. However (perhaps this is just my pessimism speaking), I can't see a for-profit company doing that anytime soon.
Oh yeah, absolutely; I was just pointing out that the system itself is a bit messed up. Especially for creators who don't have content that lends itself toward the above. I probably should have italicized:
come to think of it.
I've honestly never felt much sympathy for YouTubers who are in it for a living. It was never promised to be a viable alternative to a 'normal' job; merely a reward for creating content. The system was/is quite volatile due to various reasons, meaning you're pretty much never promised the same amount of money month to month even if you do equal work. You can suddenly have dozens if not hundreds of your videos de-monetized for illegitimate reasons due to YouTube/Google's piss-poor DMCA handling (the DMCA system itself is to blame for that honestly). It shouldn't be looked at a reliable source of income, especially if it's you're only source.
When I see videos of people saying they've quite their day job to do YouTube full time, I just roll my eyes and wait for the eventual video complaining about how YouTube de-monetized them for some bullshit reason, and promote their new Patreon. We'll see the same shit happen to Twitch eventually, if not already.
I think that as we (as a society) become further and further inoculated against advertising, exposure will begin to matter much less.
I think the downfall of a lot of these youtube stars is the canary in the coal mine.
Like, OK, someone got 10,000,000 views. I think more people will be asking the question "how is this content meaningful or enriching" in the future.
While I can't imagine anything I do being watched by that many people, those numbers are pretty poor when compared to TV. Less than a million views a week for a TV show puts it down in PBS levels of viewers, and that's never been a licence to print money. We don't generally care to pay very much to people who "just" entertain us.
With TV, there are a lot more people, and the content's generally not focused around one person. With TV, it's usually either characters or groups of people.
For example, the highest viewership numbers Friends had (during an episode that was apparently directly after the Super Bowl) was 52.9mm. There were 6 main characters.
That means that there was one main character for every 8.81mm viewers.
They were paid quite well for this; being paid anywhere from $22,000-per to the $40,000s during that season.
Ironically, they got paid more in the seasons to come, despite less grandiose outcomes. For example, in their last season, they got paid $1mm each per episode. In the season before that, 750k each. With a smaller amount of viewership.
They also got, and continue to get, royalties for it all.
It's not a great comparison to make, IMO; especially given TV shows also have a lot of side characters, extras, producers and writers to pay, too.
You’re kind of reinforcing my point. That’s how the entertainment business always works: if you’re a big star you get big money, if not you starve. PewDiePie was earning $15m a year recently, and you can bet he had used that money to build up a production team and sweat all his intellectual rights.
TV in the early days had a simple model: “find someone interesting, pay them a pittance, put them in front of the camera, mention the sponsor”. Once they’d figured out how to work that model, production values started to increase, and so team sizes. And every time technology advanced to make it easier to make and show programmes, new smaller lightweight challengers appeared, undercutting the established businesses.
Online is just another step in that journey. The only thing that remains constant is “pay them a pittance”, because there’s always more hopefuls out there...
But they are providing the value. If the content creators left, Youtube would die a very quick death, it's not unique in that regard and can be replaced by another site in a matter of years. Youtube's only saving grace is that no one else on the net can provide the servers and bandwith to support the exurbant amounts of video content uploaded there. To this day I wonder why the ability to upload content isn't gated behind a more rigorous sign-up process, but I guess that would impede their vision. It'd certainly help with the amount of data uploaded and maybe help with server costs, considering Youtube is roughly breaking even. And that with ~4 billion viewers in 2015, which has probably risen since.