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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

#131

Post by wutbrodo »

mbg721 wrote: post #95
PurpleFoxy wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have they? I haven’t seen a single promotion on YouTube telling me I could make a living being a content creator. I think people hype them selves up about it when they see the top 0.5% on YouTube and think they can be the same. Nowhere have I seen YouTube lie or mislead about this. The problem is there are simply too many content creators. We don’t need “generic lets play guy 373628”. There is more than enough conten…

I mean, fine, YouTube doesn't get out with a bullhorn and yell "Make a Living with Videos!", but their incentives make it seem like a path to stardom. "Too many content creators" isn't a problem. "Too much bad content" is.

> Too much bad content" is.

Is it? How else do you grow "good content", short of curating it (with all of the topdown biases and blind spots that that approach implies?)

On top of that, who decided what "good content" is? I occasionally get recommendations from Weird YouTube, and sometimes they're absolutely delightful. This sounds a lot like "nobody needs more than three broadcast channels"

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

#132

Post by wutbrodo »

rileymat2 wrote: post #69
chii wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

This doesn't make any sense. The discussion is the pay that buzzfeed pays their content creators. If the market for platforms was wide open, that wouldn't change much about this situation, since there would still be an oversupply of content creators that want a salary (as opposed to creators willing to personally take on the investment and risk, which is what the article but not the thread is abjout).

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

#133

Post by chongli »

gambiting wrote: post #52
dec0dedab0de wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's the exact same argument I keep making about tipping - if only everyone everywhere stopped tipping overnight, this stupid system would disappear. Underpaid waiters and drivers would find other jobs because suddenly without tips they wouldn't be able to support themselves. I am also surprised that no one has seen the wisdom of my words yet :P

These are collective action problems [1]. Many of the biggest problems facing humanity are collective action problems. We’d have done a far better job fighting COVID, for example, if we could get every person in the world on the same page. Likewise for climate change.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_action_problem

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

#134

Post by meheleventyone »

redisman wrote: post #125
meheleventyone wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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). This isn't even the problem. It's that to be successful you need to be more than good at your job you need to be great at doing a few other jobs as well. Namely running a business and marketing. And lucky in catching the break the propels you up…

> I do think there is a version of YouTube that could result in "better" content whilst employing more people. Patreon? The only thing is that it still requires a 3rd party discovery tool with a huge reach where Youtube comes in again.

Patreon is just another revenue stream and doesn’t strictly tackle the issues I’m talking about directly. Similarly the way smaller channels support themselves with sponsorships, product placement and merchandise. It seems extremely important to have that diversification in light of the way ad revenue can be switched off seemingly without recourse.

I’m more interested in how the discovery platform itself could be reshaped which is the key to truly supporting a wide variety of successful content.

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

#135

Post by wutbrodo »

criddell wrote: post #118
unix_fan wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> There's a big content creator in my country who's barely earning 5000 dollars from it. I'm surprised that so many people are happy to describe themselves as content creators . It's an admission that what you create is generic content for some platform to wrap in ads. It's a type of self-commoditization.

I don't think YouTubers generally do refer to themselves as content creators, as opposed to Creators (a term promoted by YouTube but embraced by the community).

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

#137

Post by namelosw »

Many people worry about automation would take jobs from most people, while others believe there would be always new jobs.

They're both not wrong. But the catch is, when the machine is taking over the "real jobs", the "new jobs" created are more and more let people to entertain each other. Unlike the old-time circuses that have to travel along the continent village-to-village, these entertainers can easily scale to massive audiences with the Internet, leading to information monopolies and the winner-takes-all situation.

It would only get worse over time. The current model of capitalism would not work at all for a highly-advanced society where most "real jobs" have been automated, and most people have to join the entertainment industry.

(It's actually just how average artists struggle now and in the past, but because they're minorities so people don't care enough. IMHO in a highly-advanced society most people would be more or less like artists.)

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

#138

Post by meheleventyone »

redisman wrote: post #127
cletus wrote: post #84

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…

Is Twitch any better than Youtube for the creators though? It has the same distribution of top 100 performers who make amazing- to decent- day job salaries and then the other 99.5% are left fighting for scraps. I've watched a few guys do it for years without seeing any growth and grow more disillusioned by the month until it's just a self fulfilling prophecy that no one wants to watch them wallow at this point. They…

My impression at least is that the tail is a bit longer and descends less steeply on Twitch. It seems possible to have a solid middle class income through Twitch as long as you keep on the treadmill. But it also seems awfully precarious. It also seems to be becoming more intertwined with YouTube and using the latter for discovery of the former so who knows which way it’s going.

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

#139

Post by darkwizard42 »

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…

The obvious alternative is to move to somewhere more affordable than the potentially mismatched cost-of-living area you are in and the income you bring in...

I don't think this argument holds much water because these online careers can be done from ANYWHERE and definitely do not require you to live in LA, NYC, SF, or even moderate cost of living areas like Atlanta, Nashville, Phoenix.

Rent is going to cost SOMETHING everywhere until you own your own property (which isn't free either and requires maintenance and comes with taxes).

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

#140

Post by 0xdeadbeefbabe »

baryphonic wrote: post #20

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…

> Who is going to look after me and my rent?

At least politicians know the answer.

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