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YouTube and Patreon Still Aren’t Paying the Rent for Most Creatives
201–210 of 249 posts
Re: YouTube and Patreon Still Aren’t Paying the Rent for Most Creatives
#202Why 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 sentimen…
I watch a lot of what I would call "blue-collar" YouTubers. Woodworkers, machinists, makers, electrical hobbyists, etc. When they talk about their income, all of them say that their Youtube ad revenue pays next to nothing. Some of them make a decent living via Patreon or have other ways that for their followers to support them (e.g., selling project plans).
I can say with 100% confidence that none of them went to film school.
Re: YouTube and Patreon Still Aren’t Paying the Rent for Most Creatives
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
An example of this is the movie "Pursuit of Happiness". Having family/friends to lean on can help in many cases. However, many people are simply too overwhelmed by life to work on improving their situation or even trying something like... https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/
One of the issues is that our broken policies are helping to fuel high rates of homelessness. Once you are homeless, you now have a lot of logistical barriers to accomplishing anything, plus social stigma piled on top of that and other issues (like hygiene issues that tend to make health issues worse and harder to resolve in most cases). There is all kinds of data showing it is cheaper literally give people housing t…
Vastly increasing the housing stock by massively building upwards would knock down big city housing costs, but those who currently own real estate will fight that and vote out anyone promoting such a solution. NIMBY. It's a shame, but it is democracy in action. The people who would benefit from lower rental costs need to get out and vote in politicians who will solve the "rent is too damn high!" problem.
Re: YouTube and Patreon Still Aren’t Paying the Rent for Most Creatives
#204Why 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…
Hi Philip-J-Fry, thanks for reading and responding! I really appreciate it. I actually totally agree with you—my original title for this piece was actually, "If You Can't Afford to Do It for Free, Don't Be a Creator." (Editors suggested a new title so I deferred, but you can see a trace of it at the URL.)
The problem is, more and more people are turning to this as a viable source of income. In the piece, I reference the tragic death of Mocha, who turned to Bilibili to stream when he had nowhere to work (https://www.inkstonenews.com/society/aching-hopelessness-nob...).
There's some more evidence—say, people trying to calculate how much TikTok engagement they'll need to stream to get Christmas gifts (https://twitter.com/robyncaplan/status/1328432778942312449). That, plus the survey that more children want to become a vlogger when they grow up (https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/07/american-kids-would-...), is why I wrote the piece.
Of course, dream jobs change as people grow up and figure out feasibility, so I'm not too concerned about that. Plus, I have no intention to squish anyone's dreams, but I was hoping for this piece to do two things:
1. Paint a clearer picture of the economics of platforms, and that—for most people—it's generally a terrible way to make money. 2. Encourage media, platforms, and other creators to share more data and facts, instead of another, "This high schooler made $1 million in 5 weeks on Snapchat." https://people.com/human-interest/snapchat-high-school-senio...
This is an old story. People will know the odds of starting a band and becoming a rock star, and still do it. So I just want to make sure people go all-in on it with deliberation, and that the most marginalized people don't turn to it when they most need it.
Williamdclt put it well: "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."
If platforms do have an opportunity to better distribute the income for creative work, I think it's worth collective action from creators to put pressure on them to do it. If that means changing the algorithm to spotlight more people's videos, which means the popular videos effectively cross-subsidize them (like a record label would back in the day), I would think it's worth trying.
I did not expect so many comments on this entry, so I'll do my best to contribute—but yours was at the top so I figured I'd start here! Thanks again.
Re: YouTube and Patreon Still Aren’t Paying the Rent for Most Creatives
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
One of the issues is that our broken policies are helping to fuel high rates of homelessness. Once you are homeless, you now have a lot of logistical barriers to accomplishing anything, plus social stigma piled on top of that and other issues (like hygiene issues that tend to make health issues worse and harder to resolve in most cases). There is all kinds of data showing it is cheaper literally give people housing t…
Vastly increasing the housing stock by massively building upwards would knock down big city housing costs, but those who currently own real estate will fight that and vote out anyone promoting such a solution. NIMBY. It's a shame, but it is democracy in action. The people who would benefit from lower rental costs need to get out and vote in politicians who will solve the "rent is too damn high!" problem.
It's more complicated than that, which is kind of a good thing. There are other avenues that have some hope of working.
Re: YouTube and Patreon Still Aren’t Paying the Rent for Most Creatives
#206So 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…
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Re: YouTube and Patreon Still Aren’t Paying the Rent for Most Creatives
#207Earlier 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…
I’m guessing sites like YouTube could use their machine learning army to make it all a bit more meritocratic. In the last there were big logistical challenges and costs to making a movie. In YT there are no real costs. I’m not sure the power law has to exist on a place like YT.
> make it all a bit more meritocratic
The only way to make it more meritocratic is to completely remove algorithms. But that could make it even harder for smaller channels to grow.
> In the last there were big logistical challenges and costs to making a movie. In YT there are no real costs.
Exactly, anyone who has a good idea and a smartphone can record and upload to Youtube. Can it be simpler than that? Of course, in some places people don't have internet/smartphones, but that's not something that it's up for Youtube to fix
Re: YouTube and Patreon Still Aren’t Paying the Rent for Most Creatives
#208> Without major platform overhauls, the creator’s gold rush will come to an end
It seems natural for a 'gold rush' to come to an end.
I don't agree with platforms taking an excessive cut of the value of content that's produced.
I also don't consider the value of the content to be dollars. If we have sufficient UBI, then the value in any content produced is that people watched it with interest and learned or was entertained by it. That's the metric we should optimize for, in the long run.
Re: YouTube and Patreon Still Aren’t Paying the Rent for Most Creatives
#209Why 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…
When you make things like survival 'privilege not a right' with no way out, you end up with societal decline in which extremist nationalist and religious groups take over the disenfranchised people through their advocacy and their charity, and you magically find yourselves in the middle of a dystopian hellhole in which people with non-compliant mindsets are persecuted. Which has happened in every single age in history when same conditions came to being, and the people who could have fixed it resorted to comfortable numbness like 'privilege not a right'.
And something being in a way for decades does not mean that it is right, it is rational and it should be kept as it is. If we did that, we wouldnt have been able to become a modern civilization.
Re: YouTube and Patreon Still Aren’t Paying the Rent for Most Creatives
#210While I wish my own Patreon were better funded and the issues in this space are real, this isn't going to be entirely solved by working only on the income end of things. The US needs to reform its housing policies and find a better solution for providing healthcare for all citizens. If it were easier to find a small place to rent for less than $500 per month in the US, if it were easier to live without a car and if t…
Indeed. Addressing systemic inequality is the key to solution of all these problems. Creator economy, new forms of working etc cannot solve this by itself. As long as basic commodities required for survival are made subject of profit maximization, this undesirable situation happens.