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YouTube top earners: A seven-year-old making $22M

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Re: YouTube top earners: A seven-year-old making $22M

#261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> why force equal outcomes on such a niche place like Youtube? I didn't get that from the OP at all - I think it's a valid (and quite an interesting) question to pose (especially as a marketer): what is it about YouTube's audience that seemingly favours male creators? Not about "forcing" anything, but it's always interesting to dive into why platform demographics differ and the reasons behind it. (Also, my assumption…

> What is stopping women and girls from dominating Youtube? I think it is valid in English language to consider this sentence as saying women doing better than men on the platform. dominate is not another word for equality in English.

True, but it's also valid in English colloquially to use "dominate" as to just be really good at something too, and that was my interpretation in this context.

Re: YouTube top earners: A seven-year-old making $22M

#262
post #172

A small point: did anybody notice how this reward mechanism prize the "idiocy" far more than the "knowledge"? I mean most followed YT channels, most upvotes on FB etc are about "brainless things", "brainless contents" vs valuable technical or cultural contents. An YT channel about "just for laugh" or "sport" or "how to decorate nails" have FAR more subscribers and viewers than a tech, historic, physics, ... DIY chann…

Not many people are interested in practical learning as entertainment. It's always been the case, for books, for movies, for games, etc.

Re: YouTube top earners: A seven-year-old making $22M

#263
post #70

My 6 y.o. lives in a youtube universe. Every content he creates, he makes a video and publishes on youtube. Making slimes, building stamps, building paper train wagons, visiting places, and of course unpacking toys and stuff. He always concludes video or other stories like `pls press the Like button, and subscribe to my channel in order not to miss a thing`. When I talk too much he says 'papa skip ad', with a tap ges…

You should explain to him that whatever you publish on the Internet is forever and whether he'd like someone in his adult life to be able to find that content.

> whatever you publish on the Internet is forever

Maaaaybe. Link Rot is a real thing. Look at Twitch. They delete a LOT of footage all the time. A lot of speedruns are lost to time due to these 'top-level' decisions.

https://www.polygon.com/2014/8/6/5975413/twitch-video-on-dem...

Re: YouTube top earners: A seven-year-old making $22M

#265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My GF is an elementary school teacher and she says the amount of kids who are developing anti-social behaviors is increasing pretty rapidly. Kids these days have computers and are basically simply "escaping" to the internet to live in a fantasy world that is disconnected from reality. Some even display active addictions to computer games, like minecraft, while others say they only have friends online in the games or…

I grew up during the transition. Before I had regular access to technology I spent most of my after-school and recess time staring off into space, pacing around constructing imaginary worlds, and reading YA fiction. I had no interest in my peers, and no idea how to connect with them, years before I ever touched a computer. When I finally did get into the internet, and programming, it was manna from heaven. Now I get…

>If it weren't for that, I might have wasted away, disintegrated, completely detached from the normal human world.

Or you might have found a friend and started a social circle based on common interests. Now you never have to, you get various approximations of that. You can hop onto an MMO and have an approximation of a social circle. You can code until a manager says "good job" and have an approximation of social approval. Hell you can watch porn and get an approximation of sex. You can watch ASMR videos and get an approximation of affection (don't tell me a video of a cute girl with audio that sounds like she's whispering in your ear isn't meant to be an approximation of affection).

It's good to have tech and the things it brings us, but on the other hand they're clearly sucking people into a passive life where they interact with the actual world as little as possible. I've looked back on how socially retarded I am because I ran away from the world using these tools, and I don't like it. And it's only a personal failure to a certain extent. We all know, clear as a bright spring day, that a lot of apps and services are build deliberately to keep you there as long as possible as often as possible.

When people say they wouldn't have it any other way, I'm not sure it's for any reason but they either don't know or can't handle any other way.

Re: YouTube top earners: A seven-year-old making $22M

#266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then again, thinking about the kids' tv shows that only really existed to sell the toys (eg, Transformers) it's not that surprising.

Not surprising, but I find the practice disturbing. I imagine it's hard for busy parents to police the commercials the children sees, and much of the marketing to children likely occurs in this unwanted but hard to avoid space. The end result is corporations trying to train children that the best way to live and enjoy one's self is if they buy a steady stream plastic goods made overseas, eventually to be discarded in…

> I imagine it's hard for busy parents to police the commercials the children sees

I hear things like this a lot. It's not hard, it just takes time. Is it hard to make that time? If it is too hard to make time to do something with your kids that you yourself think is important, you have to reconsider your priorities.

If you didn't plan appropriately, and decided to have kids before realizing the effort required, then you need to do some risk-reward analysis and determine which things you "have time" to pay attention to and which you don't.

> unwanted but hard to avoid space

Again, not hard, just time consuming. Time and interest will make sure your kids are well adjusted (well, at least as well adjusted as their parents).

Re: YouTube top earners: A seven-year-old making $22M

#267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I grew up during the transition. Before I had regular access to technology I spent most of my after-school and recess time staring off into space, pacing around constructing imaginary worlds, and reading YA fiction. I had no interest in my peers, and no idea how to connect with them, years before I ever touched a computer. When I finally did get into the internet, and programming, it was manna from heaven. Now I get…

>If it weren't for that, I might have wasted away, disintegrated, completely detached from the normal human world. Or you might have found a friend and started a social circle based on common interests. Now you never have to, you get various approximations of that. You can hop onto an MMO and have an approximation of a social circle. You can code until a manager says "good job" and have an approximation of social app…

I'm still not convinced the "real world" is actually better, tbh (if we're talking about human interaction specifically, I don't mind getting outside occasionally).

I live in both, I can function decently in both, and I still prefer the passive tech life. Pretty sure without tech, I'd still prefer to be distant/alone most of the time, with only occasional contact with other human beings

Re: YouTube top earners: A seven-year-old making $22M

#268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not shocked they are making $20M or so. I'm slightly shocked that the money comes from advertisers interested in influencing 6-7 year old kids.

As someone with a six year old daughter who loves YouTube. I worry about this too. I can't really explain why I am worried, maybe I am just being a parent. I just hope in future sometime my daughter doesn't have some altered version of reality gleaned from commercials on YouTube.

I worry that my 2 year old daughter will develop these addictions. My hope is that in modeling good behavior (kids are always watching! They learn more watching our behavior than we can ever try to teach them!) she will not.

Now my fear is just that my behavior is not good enough.

Re: YouTube top earners: A seven-year-old making $22M

#270

> As he is still a child, 15% of Ryan's earnings are put into a bank account that he can only access when he becomes a legal adult. Why 15%? Why not 100%? Why not even 50%? Should this sit right with me? I want to believe this child isn't being exploited. EDIT: Thanks for clearing that up for me. It seems I was misunderstanding.

It says 15% OF this earnings, he might be getting more than that but 15% is locked up until he is an adult. Even so, the parents are probably the actual 'runners' of the company (?) doing all the work except being on camera. Meaning administrative work, accounting, filming, editing, marketing maybe and so on.

The parents are on camera a lot as well. The kid is just playing with stuff, the parents are doing all of the work.
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