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

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211–220 of 249 posts

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

#211

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…

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 histor…

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

#212

Schools should really start teaching basic principles, such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_distribution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law

Empty capitalist rationalizations that only serve to rationalize systemic faults.

People dont care about such rationalizations. If things go way down south in a society, extremism and chaos takes over, and all those people who were rationalizing such systemic inequality end up finding themselves in hot water. From the decline of Roman Republic and then fall of the empire to French Revolution, from religious/nationalist extremism taking over countries and persecuting such opulent classes to whatever societal collapse you pick from history.

In contrast to the people in earlier millennia, we now are able to identify problems. And we can fix them. That is what we should be doing - not rationalizing the systemic fault by inventing justifications that advertise the existing systemic fault as 'natural'.

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

#213
post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It seems like a universal basic income would address this "unfortunate side requirement" better than somehow making all youtubers get paid enough to make rent. This would let people take the risk of doing content creation, either they get lucky and make a lot of money or they can indefinitely subsist on UBI. In the end society wins (in my opinion) by getting lots of people doing stuff they are interested in.

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

#214
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.

"If you dont want to pay your dues to your feudal lord as a serf, become a lord yourself"

That's what you are saying.

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

#215
post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

Indeed, life should not be a grind.

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

#217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"If you dont want to pay your dues to your feudal lord as a serf, become a lord yourself" That's what you are saying.

I bought a house for my family to live in, or more precisely, I put 20% down on a house and borrowed a bunch of money from the bank that I'm now paying off quite possibly even into retirement.

If that's now frowned upon, I must have missed a memo.

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

#218
post #91

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…

> 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 upwards. But this is a problem for all fields. If devs want to work independently, need to be good at business and marketing as well.

Devs are creatives, with exactly the same problems as any musician, artist, film-maker, or cosplayer (for example).

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

#219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

A lottery ticket? It's not that at all. Sadly (or is it?), it's like the real world. Marketing, image, having a product people want is still important. That's not luck, that's paying attention to the market and adjusting accordingly.

I agree. I don't think YouTube is a lottery ticket. If you have a decent idea, understand how people in your niche consume content and are willing to put in the work then you can do alright. Having a meteoric rise might be lottery, but mostly it's recognizing what people want and knowing how to "market" it to them.

The hardest part is putting in the work. Being your own motivator and then working away at something is very difficult in the long run.

I'd also like to add that $10k a year in numerous countries is decent income.

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

#220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And what I don't understand is how they can afford these teams off YouTube wages. My only guess is they've figured out how to make non-platform money off their brand (like musicians playing concerts), but for many of them it's quite non-obvious. You can only sell so many t-shirts...

"Youtube wages" can be ~$5k/1MM views just from Youtube ads, without even getting into monetization via third party sponsorships or merchandise.
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