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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

#81

Post by paulcole »

unix_fan wrote: post #77
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…

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.

> People seem to believe the magical internet economy will make you rich

This is the entire founding belief of YC (and a huge swath of “VC culture” and Hacker News in general).

Look at how many “businesses” promoted here have no meaningful revenue and no real ideals for how to monetize.

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

#82

Post by zpeti »

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.

It’s unacceptable that people building their own channel/brand/art have to work nights while doing a day job?

This is normal. Life doesn’t owe you success. You have the suffer and work hard if you want more than a day job. Or move to somewhere with low rents and eat rice and beans for a few months, that also works.

Success isn’t guaranteed and certainly society doesn’t owe you it.

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

#84

Post by cletus »

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).

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

#85

Post by pharke »

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…

> It's a more general question: should art be subject to the market laws, or should society subsidize art production?

Thought you were going somewhere completely different based off of the first sentence. Yes artists have been exploited for decades, but they aren't being exploited by their audiences aka their market. Fans of music, video, performance, etc. are willing to pay quite fair prices (even exorbitant ones) to consume or own the media that they love. The lion's share of that money never reaches the artist that produced it. Vast empires of wealth have been built on the backs of superstar artists and the problem as always is rent seeking which is the enemy of socialists and capitalists alike. We absolutely should not subsidize art production, I can guarantee you that money would also be siphoned off under the current status quo. We're already very close to a solution to this problem with the massive drop in cost of producing any kind of art that is amenable to digital production and distribution. It just needs to continue to tip in the direction of artists being their own producers or being able to hire the people who do the actual work directly rather than going through an established company built on exploitative practices. The next piece of the puzzle is going to be a better system for paying to consume the produced art without relying on the toxic ad ecosystem. We need to starve the greedy giants of the last century out of existence, their only benefit was in connecting people to art when that used to be difficult. Connecting is easy now, paying someone for their work should be too.

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

#86

Post by ImprobableTruth »

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…

Why would you subsidize art that virtually nobody cares about? You might as well subsidize every hobby in existence.

I'm pretty sure even most socialists would agree with this - even those who want to abolish money. If your art isn't valuable to society, you'll get treated like someone who digs holes and then fills them all day.

Now, art which is widely appreciated but still has trouble getting funded might be another matter (because they're e.g. directed at a demographic that doesn't have much money), but most of the people who can't live off their art definitely don't fall into this category - they simply aren't popular.

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

#87

Post by pydry »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #66
pydry wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. An…

>huge upsides to individual content creators who almost always cause YouTube to lose money.

Not seeing the upside nor the evidence of YouTube losing significant amounts of money.

>And I’m not sure what any alternative is

Applying antitrust laws.

We can thank the explosion of Internet startups and innovation to their judicious application to Microsoft in the late 90s (it tied their hands significantly).

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

#88

Post by bob33212 »

PurpleFoxy wrote: post #75
rmah wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Also known as “compensating differential”. People _want_ to be a musician or content creator so they are willing to do the job even without being paid much. Which pushes the value down for the job. If you paid people YouTube rates to maintain php garbage they would just say no which keeps the prices up at a decent level.

This is why capitalism is successful. You need an honest feedback mechanism from labor. If a centralized government assigned people jobs of maintaining a shitty php monolith at a standard wage those people would effectively produce nothing, because it is a shitty job and those people would not enjoy it or work hard because it is unfair that other people get better jobs. The unintended consequence is income inequality but that inequality is the only way to get someone to be a garbage man instead of a youtube commentator or beer reviewer.

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

#89

Post by daniel_reetz »

daniel_reetz wrote: post #71
reedf1 wrote: post #27

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 elect…

This is true, and although they don't tell you this, they also have a team. Sometimes it is just an intern or camera person but some creators have surprisingly large teams.

This is especially true for the creators who came from media or marketing (like NYC CNC) because they know the value of a team in the media world.

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

#90

Post by scsilver »

ImprobableTruth wrote: post #86
williamdclt wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Why would you subsidize art that virtually nobody cares about? You might as well subsidize every hobby in existence. I'm pretty sure even most socialists would agree with this - even those who want to abolish money. If your art isn't valuable to society, you'll get treated like someone who digs holes and then fills them all day. Now, art which is widely appreciated but still has trouble getting funded might be anothe…

Becaus the art itself is secondary to the quality of life a virbrant arts community gives to a city/town. Even an untallented art and ary collectives create a richer community. We dont need parks either, they are quality of life investments.
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