What I quite frankly struggle to understand is why this deal seems to be a good proposition for people. Your odds of becoming the next PewDiePie are Powerball odds, essentially. The work offers no security, no benefits, and very lumpy income. You say one wrong thing, and you get cancel cultured (some cases, it's justified. But is it always?). My point: Why would you pick this up as a primary source of income? It's a terrible deal, yet so many people choose it. Maybe I'm really privileged in being able to walk away from bad deals. I wouldn't take a new job for less pay.

Isn't this basically the same thing as wanting to be a rock star or pro athlete or movie star? As a kid, I had fantasies of those things just like loads of others.

The entertainment industry itself reinforced this with stories where the "winners" were those who never stopped trying to make it big, no matter what their parents said or how broke they got (much to my chagrin as my dad tried to explain why it was never gonna happen).

The performing arts really are a notoriously difficult way to make a living and kid-me didn't realize that for every Mick Jagger, Michael Jordan, and Michael J. Fox who "never gave up the dream" there were millions of Mike and Michelle Smiths who spent an inordinate amount of their lives chasing that winning ticket but never pulling the right numbers.

Thankfully, I also found that you can still pursue music, athletics, acting, or whatever else you enjoy as a hobby or side gig and still have a hell of a lot of fun (and probably end up a more well-rounded person).

From the standpoint of odds of success, it's probably not terribly different than trying to become a professional athlete, actor or musician. You have a tiny sliver of those who try who make it big, a much larger wedge who scrape by and the vast majority who get nowhere with it. While it's a lottery ticket, it's one that can make an order of magnitude of difference in many people's lives compared to their other options.

Is it worth the 95%+ of outcomes where you don't make it, struggle to pay life's basic expenses, and are left with little to marketable skills to employers? I get the appeal of the success of making it, but way more people are more optimistic than they ought to be. You could instead have a conventional career, and play the lotto weekly, and expose yourself to the same financial outcome. To go full in on YouTube sounds like such a suboptimal decision, unless you're already retired or doing it as a hobby.

For many of the people taking their shot, the struggle to pay life's basic expenses and having no marketable skills is the alternative. It's not like most of the people are asking themselves 'do I pursue a career in tech/law/medicine/business or do I take a shot on YouTube?' I'm sure there are some, but I don't think those options are even remotely what the typical content creator is looking at.

Yeah, pretty much this. If you have few options and the ones available to you without a lot of training/self teaching pay terribly with poor conditions, going for YouTube/Twitch/whatever stardom seems like a good bet. The fact the skill level needed to become successful is likely lower than it'd be for an actor/musician/athelete probably helps too.

People choose it because they legitimately want to make Youtube videos, not because they've done a cost-benefit analysis and decided that Youtube is the best source of income available to them.

Many people want to be popular. Some want to be popular so much that they'll sacrifice essentially everything else to do so. Entire industries exist to divide a cake such that it allocates popularity to some portion of seekers and allocates everything else to other players in the industry.

No one who gets into this is thinking of it as a "deal". There's no single point of transaction where they do the entire cost/benefit analysis. What happens is more like:

1. They record a video of something on their phones and upload it to share with their friends. Practically every human with a smartphone does this at some point.

2. Maybe they enjoyed that and the feedback they got from their friends, so they make it public and maybe upload a few more. They start thinking about sharing videos to an audience bigger than the people they personally know. This is a completely natural transition because most people on Earth are frequently watching YouTube videos that were shared just like that.

3. Now it starts to feel like the video itself is the goal and not the experience they were having that they happened to film. Instead of "we were doing X and recorded it" it's "I'm making a video of X". They make more little videos and upload them. They enjoy seeing their production skills improve, and it feels good to make things. Their friends think they're funny and it feels really nice getting a positive comment or thumbs up on the video. They are getting zero money. It's entirely about intrinsic reward.

4. Some small fraction of the people who reach 3 stick with it enough and have the right personality/video skills/topic/whatever to get a bit of traction. Now they're making a tiny amount of money and being a "YouTuber" starts to feel like more of who they are. They start to wonder how far they can take this.

5. Now that some trickle of money is coming it, they naturally start thinking about investing in what they do. It makes sense to maybe get a better camera, or buy Final Cut Pro. They start putting real time into this, at the expense of other hobbies and activities.

6. At this point, being a YouTuber starts to involve actual trade-offs. They're putting enough time and money into it that they are sacrificing other opportunities. Raising their production value and keeping up with posting frequency means they need to make videos even when they don't feel like it. They start doing the calculation of whether it's worth it.

7. Those who decide it is worth it now need to start taking it more seriously. The sacrifices they are making are clear and fixed, but the rewards (popularity and money) are less predictable. Now they are at the point you mention where they start really caring about optimizing for YouTube's opaque algorithm. Those who do it well may actually be able to make a living, but it always feels tenuous and uncertain. Staking your income on the combination of popularity contest/machine learning algorithm/ad platform is pretty sketchy. But for some it actually works. And, at this point, you're in pretty far, already have a lot of experience and time put in, so it makes sense to see how far you can ride it.

#7 seems to have hints of sunk cost fallacy, but #1-6 really explain how this organically happens for people. They don't go into expecting the outcome to be #7, which would explain the fallacies I was making. Thanks!

I think people tend to over-correct when discovering the sunk cost fallacy. It is definitely a fallacy people fall for, pretty frequently. But there are also things that look like sunk cost fallacies that are actually trying to extract value from previous investments.

In the case of YouTubers, if you already have thousands of followers, video gear, lighting, hard-earned performance skills, and video editing proficiency, then it is entirely rational to try to continue to leverage those investments for your future income.

I've got two decades of experience in software engineering. It's not a sunk cost fallacy for me to continue looking for software engineering jobs, it's me trying to capitalize on that investment.

The real hard part is figuring out when some past investment like that is winding down such that you're better off discarding your potential future earning from it order to spend that time building up a new investment. You don't wait until the copper mine is completely empty to shut it down. You close it when the copper you can extract is worth less than you could get from spending that time elsewhere. Making that calculation for our intangible skill investments is really difficult.

Same pattern for podcasters.

"and you get cancel cultured (some cases, it's justified. But is it always?)"

Feels like you're just trying to make a political comment here.

Do you have a list of Youtubers who were unjustly "cancelled"? The way you phrase it "sometimes justified... but not always" makes it sound like you're familiar with unfairly "cancelled" youtubers, so I'm curious.

If it were just one youtuber who was unjustly cancelled you wouldn't have written "some cases, justified" which implicitly means "most cases, unjustified" so I'd really love to see evidence that your implicit claim that most cases are unjustified isn't just a cheap political jab

My comment is about the financial risks in being a YouTube star: there's a risk you lose your income abruptly, but I suppose you could be fired from a normal job. Companies go under; CEOs get canned. I promise, my intent was not political.

I do, however, feel the risks are higher in YouTube because what you say is more subject to public scrutiny. Your colleagues aren't going to advocate for your removal at work for what you say outside of work hours around your friends in a social setting. But when you're a public figure, or representing brands in videos, even those little moments become subject to criticism. YouTube stars' lives blend professional and personal spheres in ways that ordinary careers do not.

So, to be clear, you cannot think of a single youtuber who was "cancelled" unjustly, despite writing a statement which implied that most of the cases were unjust as a rule?

To be frank, this is exactly what I thought, and really calls into question why you would make such a biased and baseless comment.

Your criticism appears to have nothing to do with youtube at all, and is a general criticism of public life and how being a public figure opens you up to greater scrutiny both from the platforms you use publicly as well as the audiences you reach. Which, while true, is a truism that is far older than the internet... or electricity... or democracy...

The difference between other public figures, such as politicians, presidents, and movie stars is they make millions of dollars per year. YouTube stars usually don't. They're putting all of the time and little money they have into something so fragile, so easily broken. PewDiePie mentions this in his video about taking a break: He did not expect a YouTube career to be a possible, long-sustaining venture. He expected, maybe 1-2 years of success and then it'd fizzle out, though that's not what happened. This paragraph is my criticism specifically with YouTube. It enabled lower and middle class people, who don't have the financial security to handle the realities of life as a public figure, to become public figures.

Why do you need me to name a person impacted by cancel culture? The discussion shouldn't latch onto one person's particular situation. I have enough empathy in me to believe that some people impacted by cancel culture regret their actions, and are given no opportunity to make amends, and I think that's toxic and it encourages people to be further more toxic, because they're given no other option than to double down. Cancel culture is a very new phenomena and is not as old as electricity or democracy.

"Why do you need me to name a person impacted by cancel culture?

Because you lied to push a biased and false political narrative, and when challenged, you admitted it. I wanted you to substantiate your beliefs because I knew you had fallen for bad propaganda, and I hoped that by demanding evidence, you would re-evaluate your biased position, realize it was not founded on reality or evidence, and grow as a person. I hoped in some small way to cure this propaganda infection, and inoculate you against future attacks on your concept of reality. Obviously, that failed.

P.S. if you think everyone in the public is millionaires only, you live an extremely ignorant or privileged life. Almost none of the politicians, news reporters, actors on television, athletes are millionaires. It's very rare to be a millionaire and only the top of the top are. The vast majority of everyone you see on television or read on the internet are not a millionaires.

If you think Youtube is a grinder, check out College Football and the NFL. See how many kids give their bodies, their health, their lives and only 1/1000 even make it, and of that number, generally only 1/100 will sign a major million+ contract.

Want another example? Check out YCombinator, the culture of over-work, hackers, start-ups, entrepreneurs, where young folks are killing themselves to find a billionaire to fund them. Almost none of them will succeed, but they're motivated by the image of a tiny number of rare successes.

The world is full of young people giving 150% effort for paltry returns on their time investment all to enrich entrenched oligarchs/oligopolies. Youtube isn't the worst, it isn't an outlier, and there are far more important and dangerous systems than youtube.

ProJared is a good example of this. He bounced back from it at least somewhat as I understand, but it was a really nasty few months

Off the top of my head, James Charles lost a million subscribers before people changed their mind about whose side they were on.

Toby Turner had rape allegations made against him which were later taken back. It's hard to say where his channel would be had that not happened, but the timing makes it seem like it was a major factor in its decline.

If I were YouTube I wouldn't be transparent about these details. You're basically giving people a playbook for how to game your system. It would make recommendations useless because they'd be less organic and it would make monetization schemes harder to fight against. In my opinion keeping these details unknown is a good first line of defense.

Laws (especially tax laws) are useless because.

> You're basically giving people a playbook for how to game your system.

You aren't wrong, but accepting secrecy for this reason is a flawed premise. As it assumes that giving YouTube arbitrary and oversight free power over what people view and what it's creators make is better than trying to prevent an open rule set from being gamed.

We learned this was a bad idea in government, food, construction, vehicle safety, etc a long long time ago. Software is just overdue for it's own set of transparency rules.

> As it assumes that giving YouTube arbitrary and oversight free power over what people view and what it's creators make is better than trying to prevent an open rule set from being gamed.

Those are 2 separate and independent things.

Regardless, they are not controlling what creators make or view. Creators can make whatever they want and users can choose to watch whatever they want. YouTube also explicitly says when a video is recommended. Also note that this Youtube's platform.

Comparing this to the other things you list is also not a great comparison. It's quite a reach actually. For instance, not knowing what was in food is different than not knowing the formula.

> Regardless, they are not controlling what creators make or view.

Are you claiming recommendations do not affect views and views do not affect what content people create? This is obviously false.

> For instance, not knowing what was in food is different than not knowing the formula.

This is a great comparison actually, we all consume Youtube's recommendations without knowing either what was taken into account (the contents) or the exact weights of these things (the formula).

When a platform becomes sufficiently ubiquitous, it needs special rules. What if people said: "It's perfectly fine for telephone companies to blacklist customers for political reasons. Those customers are free to walk to the people they would have phone-called, and talk to them face-to-face. Or to lay fiber and build their own phone companies."

We've been round and round this with tax rules, to the point that many countries have a GAAR: general anti-avoidance rule, like the Potter Stewart "know it when I see it" rule for porn.

Are youtube's recommendations actually that good?

Recommendations for people I subscribe to are great, but don't need much magic.

Recommendations for creators I've liked or viewed many videos of before are generally good.

Recommendations for videos with tags that I tend to like are hit and miss.

Other recommendations are usually low quality garbage, in my experience.

I suspect their recommendation algorithm is overly complicated because it optimizes for ad revenue rather than value to viewer. I think a simple algorithm weighting viewer->creator score and creator->other creator score could produce higher quality recommendations than their current system. Maybe add a dash of keyword to the final sort to allow videos on the same topics to be grouped together.

> If I were YouTube I wouldn't be transparent about these details.

That won't stop other actors from monitoring recommendations / search results and observing how they change. With a bit of ML they could train a model on that data and obtain all the answers they want. The information is hard to observe up close but easy to extract when you collect lots of observations.

Society doesn't need everyone broadcasting.

Just like the brain doesn't need every neuron broadcasting its state to every other neuron.

That's the fundamental flaw of Social Media and Media in general - Many to Many Broadcast - is not as useful to society as thought.

And we are learning it at high cost.

TikTok is betting that society wants it. Many to Many Broadcast is the normal cultural mode of Gen Z

I think you meant useful here

yup thanks changed

> On the one hand, it's amazing that one person can produce a show which reaches what previously you'd have needed a multinational TV organisation for

YouTube is larger than many previous TV organizations, with none of the benefits of working for them

Is it a smart idea to build your own mailing list to decouple your reliance from platform's notification system?

Yes, CPG Grey has one and talks about it in https://youtu.be/DIssymQvrbU

Feasible? Yes. One-tenth as lucrative? Probably. But it is a useful fallback if you're at risk of getting banned.

It's not just the notification system to existing subscribers as the recommendation - free advertising - to people who are not already subscribers. And PDP gets a huge benefit from this advertising.

> if you're at risk of getting banned

Which is unfortunately anyone and everyone on YouTube

Email's the only social network outside the reach of a major corp. It's always a better idea.

I’m surprised Google hasn’t tried to turn GMail into a walled-garden yet. Not as an instant policy-change - but by starting by extending email (e.g. pushing everyone to use SMTP/TLS and initially refusing to send emails to SMTP recipients without TLS, then a few years later refusing to accept emails from unauthenticated message senders, then improving e-mail (e.g. interactive forms directly in emails, etc) in a way that only other Gmail users can benefit from (like iMessage vs SMS, despite using the same app and UI) - eventually Gmail would be too far ahead of everyone else for features and be walled-off. It hasn’t happened yet - but it _could_ happen - especially as more large companies are using or considering Gmail for their corporate e-mail.

Oh, but they already have.

Setup your email server following absolutely every best practice, even the most optional ones, then try to mail yourself on gmail. Then mark it as not spam. Then keep trying and you will figure out it already happened.

To be honest I think they are converting parts of Gmail (or the Calendar part) into a walled garden already.

I struggled yesterday to copy a work appointment from my Gmail Calendar in the web browser to my personal Calendar in Calendar.app on my Mac.

No option in Google Calendar to export the calendar event as an ICS at all. Google Calendar events also don’t seem to contain ICS files either. I think CalDAV and ICS are now niche enough that Google feels it can afford to neglect these.

So long as email has big competitors like Microsoft’s O365 Google can’t make a play to break email standards but if O365 declines in usage I bet Google will try to sow up the email market.

not..really? try running a personal server. its subject to all sorts of opaque policies wrt getting mail accepted by the big guys. at least can you host on some other big guy and probably be able to send, but I wouldn't say 'outside the reach'

Is YouTube's algorithm more or less mysterious than the fickle taste of traditional broadcast media producers?

> They're left with chaining themselves to a video camera to appease their machine god.

PewDiePie has tens of millions of dollars for vlogging and here you are making him sound like a peasant locked in serfdom.

For every PewDiePie there are dozens of millions of creators trying desperately to recreate his success. Obviously this article is not just about PewDiePie's personal distress.

For every uplifting dishwasher-turned-billionaire story, there are millions of dishwashers who will never share that fate.

He isn't a vlogger, not sure why it was reported that way. He had a vlog series like a year or two ago for a week.

You've said, I watched PewDiePie's video, he also says he: He's "not a vlogger". What is he then, what's the industry term? I've failed to see it identified anywhere.

Gaming/meme/reaction/commentary channel. Bit if everything

For each person making millions of dollars, there's millions of creators who want to be stars doing exactly that. Having worked in the game streaming business for a while, I can assure you there's no shortage of those people.

There are also hundreds making a sensible living and thousands making a decent supplemental income.

My dad makes holiday videos and various guitar repair / upgrade videos, he doesn't earn enough to live off of but it's bought him all of the guitars he's ever dreamed of owning.

I'm also related to Steejo and Suzy Lu who both make their living from game video streaming. They work harder than most people but they also have a degree of autonomy that most people would envy.

It's a cage. A gilded cage, but a cage nonetheless.

Not related to youtube, but related to the gilded cage thing. Back in the day when I worked at a print shop, there was a pharma-sales guy that had some cards and random brochures printed with us here and there. About a year later, he has me create the collateral and website for a new business he wanted to do, asphalt repaving. I thought he was out of his mind. But he explained, he and others in the area that do pharma-sales make about $160k-$200k a year (2009) without trying (middle of nowhere Virginia mind you). They all know each other and they all say the same thing about the job, golden handcuffs. They all hate doing it with a passion because they know half the shit they peddle is dogshit and the other half is overpriced compared to what it should be and they're just going with the motions of the business. But where else are they going to make the same kind of money? Before I left, almost a year later, I saw him again and to be honest, he was a lot happier (also seemed way less suicidal) owning and running an asphalt repaving truck. He also said once he buys his second truck and trains another crew, he'll make more than he did in pharma-sales. For him, that year was a total win. So yea, nothing is really free, even making lots of money has its price.

It's not much of a cage if he can choose to quit any time he wants. The only thing keeping him in the cage is his desire to keep making tons of money.