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YouTube and Patreon Still Aren’t Paying the Rent for Most Creatives

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Re: YouTube and Patreon Still Aren’t Paying the Rent for Most Creatives

#11

Post by roenxi »

dusted wrote: post #2

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 million…

There are about 8,000 one-in-a-million people out there for any discipline anyone cares to name. Around 800 of them speak English to some degree and are connected to the internet.

There is room on a top-10 list for 10 of them. Number 9 will do OK but is starting to move down the Praeto curve. The competition to entertain others on the internet is fierce; it is difficult for me to see how even someone of that level of talent and calibre could survive except for the fact that most of their competition simply gives up before they start because it looks like a lousy career.

Re: YouTube and Patreon Still Aren’t Paying the Rent for Most Creatives

#12

Post by marcus_holmes »

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".

Re: YouTube and Patreon Still Aren’t Paying the Rent for Most Creatives

#14

Post by WJW »

js8 wrote: post #10

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 se…

It's already free to watch even the smallest channel on youtube, the income from the largest channels subsidizes the servers needed to transcode the millions of videos that will only ever get a single view.

The "problem" is that most creators have miniscule audiences. The "transparent and fairly" returned ad profits for someone with ten viewers is never going to be very large. The power law in entertainment has always been large; the big artists make tens of millions and everyone else scrapes by. The internet has not changed that dynamic.

Re: YouTube and Patreon Still Aren’t Paying the Rent for Most Creatives

#15

Post by pydry »

dusted wrote: post #2

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 million…

Or as if monopolizing a distribution channel allows you to charge rents way in excess of your costs.

Re: YouTube and Patreon Still Aren’t Paying the Rent for Most Creatives

#16

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

dusted wrote: post #2

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 million…

There's an even more limited need for fraud-promoting bankers, crooked and corrupt politicians, people who spend their entire lives gambling on the markets, and organised criminals, but somehow we never seem to lack for all of those.

This isn't some kind of rational market forces issue. Artists and intellectuals have real power. But starving them of cash, branding them "entertainers", and converting their jobs into a gig economy scramble guarantees they'll be too distracted to realise it.

Not unlike other jobs.

Re: YouTube and Patreon Still Aren’t Paying the Rent for Most Creatives

#18

Post by ChrisKnott »

pydry wrote: post #15
dusted wrote: post #2

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 million…

Or as if monopolizing a distribution channel allows you to charge rents way in excess of your costs.

Who are you accusing of doing that? YouTube?

Re: YouTube and Patreon Still Aren’t Paying the Rent for Most Creatives

#19

Post by curtainsforus »

tiku wrote: post #3

Perhaps this is a good use case for NFT's, added signatures make it easy to find and reward the owner.

How, exactly, does that do anything about the underlying fact that there's a limited amount of attention to spread around on the populace of creatives?

Re: YouTube and Patreon Still Aren’t Paying the Rent for Most Creatives

#20

Post by baryphonic »

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.

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