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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

#181

Post by meheleventyone »

Kalium wrote: post #172
meheleventyone wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't make it because you don't have the budget. Then you start a YouTube channel appealing to the lowest common denominator and die a little more inside each day as you yell "ring that bell" umpteen times whilst pumping out content to avoid losing the favor of the algorithm. But you find success so keep doing it whilst hoping you remain popular and don't get demonetized. You still don't get to make the thing you…

Really, what I'm looking for is if you've thought about the failure modes of centralized management of resources and tastemaking. It seems you believe there are no different ones. Is that accurate?

No, why on earth would you take that from a few comments here? It seems rather condescending and presumptuous. And as the great example of YouTube shows pseudo-democratizing those things doesn't actually fix them either.

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

#182

Post by FalconSensei »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #12

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 mig…

> 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 is very true. When I go to anime conventions, I see MANY people with incredible talents. And sometimes I do want to buy a poster or something. But, there's only so much wall on my small apartment to hang posters...

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

#183

Post by Kalium »

meheleventyone wrote: post #181
Kalium wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really, what I'm looking for is if you've thought about the failure modes of centralized management of resources and tastemaking. It seems you believe there are no different ones. Is that accurate?

No, why on earth would you take that from a few comments here? It seems rather condescending and presumptuous. And as the great example of YouTube shows pseudo-democratizing those things doesn't actually fix them either.

In that case, please correct me! I would like to know more about your thoughts on the failure modes of centralization vs democratization in the arena of artistic production and resourcing.

I understand if you consider such questions condescending and presumptuous, though.

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

#184

Post by evo »

snarf21 wrote: post #121
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 agree, people should think about it as a lottery ticket. How many people spend $10Ks over the years trying to become good at soccer/basketball/baseball/golf/etc. so they can go pro? We know that it is a 1 in a million shot but results in a multi-billion dollar industry. Creators have to decide on their goals. I design board games on the side. I don't expect it to ever break even, let alone replace my salary but I d…

While I agree that an individual should look at it as a lottery ticket, as a society we should be careful about macro trends towards new lotteries.

Many big tech companies arise from disintermediation plays--finding some market that has high overhead and figuring out a way to transact it more cheaply. This is great: it lowers barriers to entry and liberates a new surplus, but it's not clear who then captures this new surplus, the market participants or the marketplace?

I would posit that the lottery system is a mechanism to enable the excess surplus to be siphoned away from the market participants towards the marketplace. Humans are _terrible_ at estimating the expected value of low-probability high-impact events, and dangling a few rags-to-riches stories lets your participants imagine they're going to make it. In reality, it bifurcates the market and drops the median outcome (presumably, this surplus is captured by the transaction fees of the marketplace).

As an example where this could play out, I might look at restaurants--if delivery apps and shadow kitchens lower the clearing costs for me to find a dinner, does that then mean the "best" restaurant in town can now scale up, to the detriment of the second or third best? (On the other hand, the physical limitations make this story a harder sell than purely digital goods.)

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

#185

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

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.

Which incentives are you referring to here? As far as I can tell, all of the small Youtube creators are there because they enthusiastically want to make videos; I've never seen anyone say they wanted to do something else but Youtube tricked them into thinking they could get rich and famous.

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

#186

Post by mrtksn »

darkwizard42 wrote: post #141
mrtksn wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This doesn't even make any sense. Everyone has to pay for their housing... you either opt into two different schemes, own it or rent it and both come with upsides and downsides. It is up to the person to decide which works for them and in the means that works for them. You can go to many cities where it makes outright more sense to just rent (and maybe more prudent to do so while you don't have a steady stream of inc…

That's obviously not true, in every country I lived in there was this thing called "inheritance" which a lot of times means parents who happen to have done the grinding and leave the house to their kids.

Its instant double salary in real terms most of the times.

It's very different from being wealthy, it doesn't come with the "elite" stuff but its more like "premium economy" that creates adults of same productivity class with drastically different consumption style and degree freedom.

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

#187

Post by FalconSensei »

PurpleFoxy wrote: post #80
woutr_be wrote: post #43

Am I wrong to think about “creators” as just businesses? If you’re not making enough money through your business, then maybe you need to reconsider your business plan. You know what you get on Youtube, you don’t have a contract saying how much you’ll be making from creating content for them. Maybe I lack empathy here, but it seems most people saw this as an easy money maker, but were wrong.

The problem is you are thinking about making money as the goal and content creation as the method. Most of these people are thinking about content creation as the goal and making money and an unfortunate side requirement.

Which, unfortunately, is the incorrect way to think if you larger goal is to afford rent and food.

When I was finishing high school, I had to choose between music or comp-sci for university. Went with comp-sci because I didn't think as a trumpet player I would be able to do much, besides being one of the 5 (citation needed) teachers in my city, or being VERY lucky and survive playing gigs, mostly which would be playing music I didn't like.

It worked well for me, as I ended up having a couple bands, and also did some freelance gigs. Because it was my hobby - I didn't care for money, as I got a job - I could go full Marie Kondo and only play what gave me joy.

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

#188

Post by Strom »

devoutsalsa wrote: post #173
Strom wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is such a bizarre take. You're living in San Francisco, one of the most prestigious cities in the world, and yet you're describing your situation as if you're living in Sangvor, Tajikistan. No one in San Francisco is stuck. [1] By skipping a few of those movie tickets and buying months in advance you could get a plane ticket out of there. In plenty of places in the US there isn't even an airport, not to mention…

And do where? The money I knew how to earn was in San Francisco. I didn't know how to earn a living in a much cheaper spot. Everything I knew was there. If I scraped together enough money for a plane ticket, what would I do when I got there?

There are free government and non-profit social counseling services where people help you figure out what job you can do. There's also reddit and your friends/family for easier non-professional advice.

However, I think it's completely fine that you stayed in SF and made progress there.

As for your claim that you could earn some money in SF and not elsewhere - that's the core of my argument. My point being that San Francisco has more opportunity than pretty much anywhere else in the world. That you specifically could make money in SF, but not elsewhere.

No doubt that earning much less than plenty of other SF residents can have an emotional impact and make it look like your life isn't going so great. It's just that when you look at the US as a whole, or the world as a whole - then SF starts looking like a fountain of opportunity.

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

#189

Post by tessierashpool »

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…

Most YouTube careers were made out of people doing it in their spare time and finding out people actually want to watch. That's the only way it works.

That just isn't true at all, and hasn't been true for at least a decade. Professional YouTubers typically have a background in film, with training in acting, lighting, and editing.

Source: I worked for a variety of YouTube-related startups in Los Angeles. This sentiment is just completely inaccurate.

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

#190

Post by samvher »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #16
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…

I do think it's a market forces issue. But it's an issue where forces don't align with societal value (which I think is an extremely common problem in the modern economy). Back when musicians/publishers had real leverage over who could access their music/content by means of their control over the media holding these, it was in some ways easier for them to make money. It's the gatekeepers that manage to extract rents from the system, and it's hard for any single artist/intellectual to do anything about that, and if multiple try to do something about it together there's always going to be an incentive to defect or not join that effort in the first place.
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