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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

#61

Post by sokoloff »

mrtksn wrote: post #42

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…

If you don’t want to funnel money to a landlord, buy a property. I did and now funnel even more money to my mortgage company and have to handle and pay for repairs, but none to a landlord.

It’s almost like having desirable housing is something that a lot of people are willing to spend money on.

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

#62

Post by chii »

mtberatwork wrote: post #50
chii wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> would be non-profit in the sense that the ads profits would be mostly returned to the creators on that platform The basic premise that by making it non-profit, it would garner a higher returns for the content creators is false. The problem really is that there's not enough revenue generated, to pay people producing the content. Even youtube is run at a loss (only offset by the valuable data they collect for google…

> The problem really is that there's not enough revenue generated, to pay people producing the content. > Even youtube is run at a loss (only offset by the valuable data they collect for google i suppose). YouTube generates $15B in revenue. [1] I'm sure in the early years when they first acquired YouTube, they ran it at a loss. However, as far as I am aware, Google has never stated whether or not YouTube is profitabl…

if youtube was running at a profit, i would have expected alphabet's financial reports to jump at pointing it out.

They have never done so, and odds are that it looks really bad from a financial reporting perspective, even tho the user data it can collect is very valuable (but it cannot count as revenue, since there's no marketable value for such data atm).

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

#63

Post by mrtksn »

sokoloff wrote: post #61
mrtksn wrote: post #42

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…

If you don’t want to funnel money to a landlord, buy a property. I did and now funnel even more money to my mortgage company and have to handle and pay for repairs, but none to a landlord. It’s almost like having desirable housing is something that a lot of people are willing to spend money on.

Almost as if there are two kind of people out there: those with fully paid housing those who have to pay. In most places being the one or the other creates class changing lifestyle difference under the same employment.

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

#64

Post by luckylion »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #26
WJW wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 alway…

Except that it's not about profits, it's about culture and quality of life. And pursuit of profit at the expense of everything else reliably destroys both. It's also about closing one of the few paths that the poor can use to stop being poor.

> And pursuit of profit at the expense of everything else reliably destroys both.

So who decides which artists are about "culture and quality of life" and should be paid to do whatever they like doing? You? Some committee? The population?

Because right now it's the population. You might not agree with the choices they make, but that's a different issue.

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

#65

Post by rmah »

axlee wrote: post #37
Philip-J-Fry wrote: post #25

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…

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.

This has also always been commonplace in the media industry for creatives. Simply put, the supply of labor far far FAR outstrips the demand. It's a highly risky career path, but many take the chance because they want to. No amount of complaining or legislation will ever "fix" it.

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

#66

Post by lotsofpulp »

pydry wrote: post #54
lotsofpulp wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conversations are futile if we’re not working with the same definitions and context. You wrote: > Or as if monopolizing a distribution channel allows you to charge rents way in excess of your costs. Defining “distribution channel” as a single company’s website rather than the internet would make “distribution channel” meaningless in the context of this discussion. It’s trivial to distribute a video with anyone all ov…

If you're distributing ad supported video content where else do you go? Vimeo is the second biggest video sharing platform. They have 200 million eyeballs they can push to your content as opposed to 2.3 billion and no ad network. I don't think it's an enormous stretch to say that youtube own this market. >that’s a different discussion than having a monopoly on distributing video. I neither stated nor implied that the…

I can entertain the idea that YouTube currently has a monopoly (or “owns the market”) on the service of connecting advertisers to small time content creators.

Whether or not it harms society is something I have not concluded. I am aware there are negatives for medium size content creators who lack negotiating power, but also huge upsides to individual content creators who almost always cause YouTube to lose money. And I’m not sure what any alternative is, other than a taxpayer funded version of a YouTube, but that also opens a can of worms.

> I neither stated nor implied that they did.

Sorry, I interpreted “monopolizing a distribution channel” in the context of YouTube compensating content creators to mean YouTube monopolizing distribution of videos by content creators.

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

#67

Post by rmah »

williamdclt wrote: post #46
Philip-J-Fry wrote: post #25

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…

> For decades actors, musicians and artists have put up with this Well, it's not that simple is it. For decades actors, musicians and artists have been complaining that they have to live in misery to pursue their art and fighting for better conditions, it's not like they've always been OK with the status quo. It's a more general question: should art be subject to the market laws, or should society subsidize art produ…

The answer to your question is: art should be subject to market laws and there should be minimal public funding except in very special cases. And IMO, there is no change needed how artists are getting paid because it's clearly working very well.

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

#68

Post by devoutsalsa »

dec0dedab0de wrote: post #51
axlee wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If they're not getting paid enough they should stop doing it. If enough of them stop doing it, then the rest will start to get paid more.

In general I agree with your statement. But the grim reality is that good jobs are hard to get. It’s not always possible to find better opportunity. And you may not have the resources necessary to find something better (e.g. I can’t afford to go in a better job opportunity‘a interview, because I can’t get time off my current job, and I need this job to survive.

About 10 years ago I was living in San Francisco on less than $25k/year. Half my money went to rent, the other half went to food and the occasional movie. I couldn’t cook much, as I didn’t have a kitchen. I was able to increase my income because I’m educated, know some of the right things, and I got lucky as hell. But I was surrounded by people living on less who were flat out stuck. They all asked me why I was living there, and the answer was because I had started a business while homeless and got lucky enough that it was taking off. But I was super lucky to have that opportunity at all.

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

#69

Post by rileymat2 »

chii wrote: post #45
axlee wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

that's a different problem vs creators not getting much monetization and payment. businesses that employ people for low wages should, in theory, be out competed by businesses that would be willing to pay a little bit more to get the talent. So either the business model _requires_ the low wages for it to work, or the workers are not shopping around for a better workplace (or is sacrificing their wages in the hopes of…

> or the workers are not shopping around for a better workplace

Perhaps they are not shopping around because of monopolistic/anti competitive actions from google search causing competing video services to be unviable.

I believe there is an ongoing legal case around this.

Edit: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wsj.com/amp/articles/google...

It is kind of funny getting the amp link in this discussion...

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

#70

Post by mbg721 »

dec0dedab0de wrote: post #51
axlee wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If they're not getting paid enough they should stop doing it. If enough of them stop doing it, then the rest will start to get paid more.

The implication of that is that Big Tech has been selling snake-oil, and the idealism attached to the Internet was misplaced.
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