Mostly out of curiosity, I looked into what it looks like to go pro now. Basically you go into a machine as a young kid, and if you show promise, you get focus from the coaching staff at the academies. Everyone else is basically just a warm body whose parents are paying a ton of money for their teen to be a hitting partner for the academy's golden goose.
THEN if you make the show, you're fighting for rankings through some absolutely abysmal satellite tournaments that you're essentially losing money to go play in. Losing in the first round of a major makes you more money than winning one of these things.
The delta between the 20th ranked player in the world versus the top 150th insane, too, with one worth millions and one worth maybe a small six figure salary, with a notable portion of it going toward travel/training expenses.
He didn't have that next level of extreme athleticism- he could make every shot and was very proficient and earned a good living on tour, but if he hadn't come from good money he never would have been there in the first place, because he didn't have the native talent, never getting into the 60s in ATP rankings.
Doing great as a coach though.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
I can say with 100% confidence that none of them went to film school.
most tech channels had zero background with that. I mean linus tech tipps (one of the biggest), started to make youtube videos with limited resources and basically was asked by his old company to help out, without prior knowledge.
most gaming related channels were not done with prior backgrounds. also a lot of early youtubers had no prior background. I abo'd tons of german channels who make a living with it, which didn't do anything media related before youtube (some of course did to a certain (small) degree, like jp-performance)
youtube is just so big that there a tons of people with tons of background. of course the most successful people are those who know how to sell.
On the other hand, the article mentions people who work for companies like Buzzfeed and other agencies, creating extremely successful web content for them, having to work shifts at night on top of their media jobs. That sounds unacceptable to me: I am pretty sure the company employing them can afford them a living wage, and it looks a lot like exploitation.
people who work for companies like Buzzfeed and other
agencies, creating extremely successful web content for
them, having to work shifts at night on top of their
media jobs.
If a job doesn't pay enough (according to any metric) move on to a better paying job. If an industry or a field doesn't pay enough, move on to another field/industry.
At one point one must be honest enough to admit "this isn't working" or "this barely works, It's not wise to live like this".
[1] a similar scenario: van life. there was a fad where a lot of people were trying to get a lifestyle income by living in a van and blogging about that (instagram, youtube, twitter and stuff like that). needless to say, after a while a wave of videos about "the truth of vanlife" has come up. Once again, people don't realize that for one person managing to achieve a huge success, another thousand (or more) will fail, possibly with consequences.
If you paid people YouTube rates to maintain php garbage they would just say no which keeps the prices up at a decent level.
Well, no, I don't think so, because this isn't like the market for maintaining PHP garbage. :) Creative work -- at least in this context -- isn't fungible. One low-rent PHP contractor is probably interchangeable with another one, but Patreon creators are not: if you're giving Bob $5 a month, it's because you specifically like Bob's stuff. What a Patreon creator with 50 patrons makes has no material effect on what a Patreon creator with 50,000 patrons makes.
This is normal. Life doesn’t owe you success. You have the suffer and work hard if you want more than a day job. Or move to somewhere with low rents and eat rice and beans for a few months, that also works.
Success isn’t guaranteed and certainly society doesn’t owe you it.
I am also surprised that no one has seen the wisdom of my words yet :P
I'm likely missing nuances, but to me it seems that the key culprit is minimum wage laws in many US states having an exception for restaurant personnel. If a minimum wage was unconditional and high enough to live from, you wouldn't need tips to survive.
It gets even crazier when you go out with people and they look at you like you’re cheap for calculating tip on pre tax amounts. There’s a lot of pride in the US for tipping, as if it’s a status symbol.
About 10 years ago I was living in San Francisco on less than $25k/year. Half my money went to rent, the other half went to food and the occasional movie. I couldn’t cook much, as I didn’t have a kitchen. I was able to increase my income because I’m educated, know some of the right things, and I got lucky as hell. But I was surrounded by people living on less who were flat out stuck. They all asked me why I was living there, and the answer was because I had started a business while homeless and got lucky enough that it was taking off. But I was super lucky to have that opportunity at all.
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 outside the US.
> I couldn’t cook much, as I didn’t have a kitchen.
You don't need a kitchen. You can just have an electric stove in your bedroom. [2]
You're right in saying that you were super lucky. Lucky to live in San Francisco.
--
[1] Except for the mentally ill and people with other similarly valid severe disabilities.
[2] https://static01.nyt.com/images/2019/07/19/us/0722-hkecon-pr...
I'm putting words in your mouth, I know, and I apologize. But it's the gentrification I am bringing up.
So many construction workers that repair roofs, install drywall, etc. in Silicon Valley live several hours away in Los Banos and have that crazy commute to get to where they can find employment.
Crazy world we live in.
My point is more so around realizing the wealth of opportunity. Yes not every DJ will make it in San Francisco, but as you allude to, in most places in the world zero DJs will make it.
I don't claim that life can't be challenging in/around San Francisco. I'm claiming that it's less challenging than in almost anywhere else in the world.
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.
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 content pumping in to the system right now.
"Too many content creators" isn't a problem. "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"
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 moving up, or some such passion-related reason like game developers).
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...
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.
Imho: Influencer are cringeworthy, they deserve the title.
You'd expect the creator to have more respect for their output.
This is the entire founding belief of YC (and a huge swath of “VC culture” and Hacker News in general).
Look at how many “businesses” promoted here have no meaningful revenue and no real ideals for how to monetize.
They all know how to monetize, it just doesn't sound good to say it out loud: get a bunch of users by offering a free service on VC money, then sell your userbase to a big company.
Most indie game devs don't make enough from it to pay rent.
Most authors don't make enough to pay rent from writing.
Derek Muller has a couple of videos talking about the success of his Veritasium YouTube channel (and work, luck, and success generally):
Twitch and YouTube, I think, are interesting ones in the sense that their system costs are probably enormous, primarily due to the 99% of content "creators" on their system which are actually just people like me, uploading videos which five people watch. A tragedy of the commons sort of thing, whereby they still pay to serve my videos, and that all cuts into the pie which is probably better given to professional content creators.
But, I think that ultimately all of these platforms would be better ran and managed by the content creators themselves, or at least middlemen who have less of a multi-billion dollar profit incentive. There are a few interesting products heading this way;
* Tidal (in music) was a big one, but we'll see what happens now that Square has majority ownership.
* Itch.io [1] in gaming. They run what appears to be an extremely barebones operation focusing on delivering extreme value for creators and consumers alike.
* Floatplane [2] in video. A service started by the team behind Linus Tech Tips, several high-profile (generally tech-focused) content creators now host their content there.
We're also seeing this theme of "screw the middleman" among big media companies, opting to get rid of Netflix or Hulu in favor of their own in-house streaming platform, or Epic's fight against the App Store. It's literally the same impetus; these middlemen take way too much money and ultimately form lowest-common-denominator revenue models which don't benefit most content creators, from large to small.
I think this is a trend that will continue to gain traction; I am not bullish on big-tech mega-platforms over the long term. To a degree it sucks for consumers, but ultimately a system which demands content creators scrape by while making big tech rich isn't tenable, and consumers need to recognize that. Big Tech has had years to try and build something equitable; they haven't. Its their fault, not the fault of the content creators.
I tend to predict that Twitch is the next one which will see major disruption. The market even among big tech alternatives is basically zero, and Twitch has huge issues which reach beyond just monetization and into legal governance of streamer channels which is legitimately pissing off content creators and viewers alike. They're "stuck" with Twitch, but Twitch isn't actually that big; its just niche (hop on Chaturbate any evening, take one look at the average view-count for their streamers, and recalibrate your perception on Twitch's slice of the entire online streaming pie).
[1] https://itch.io/
That being said, I think a more scalable and better solution is more-so the "lean middleman" model (ie Itch-like). The problem with YouTube and Twitch isn't the core of their position in this system; the problem is that they're too big. They have thousands of employees, they're hosted on big cloud providers, and they're accountable to profit-seeking mega-corps; all of these things drive the revenue that creators see down, and the argument that they're fundamentally necessary in a system like this is tenuous.
Content moderation is definitely the hardest problem to solve at their scale, and its a strong argument for why they have to be so big. I think this is something that needs to be solved in two ways: first, by lowering the number of rules which need to be enforced (ie nudity? maybe that's ok, as long as the channel is properly age-gated and the age of the streamer is confirmed), and second, by increasing the bar to even getting a platform in the first place (ie it should take a week or so, manual approval of recognition of the rules, and some fee that the content producer actually has to pay which supports the platform and increases investment).
Big Tech is insanely conservative when it comes to any changes that would either hurt their sign-up metrics or hurt their ability to sell advertisements. This is where new platforms need to focus, because Big Tech fundamentally and intrinsically cannot compete against you there. What options open up when you throw out the idea that you need to sell advertisements, and you throw out the idea that "growth at any cost" is the goal (big tech loves that for the growth part; no one pays attention to the "any cost" part).
That's true for anything, even for non-creative work. If you create an app, and nobody buys it (or uses it with ads), you also don't get money.
It doesn’t require elaborate demos or expensive equipment or deep domain knowledge.
It’s youthful exuberance, some theatrics and the right personality.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/user/eaterbc [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ML4tw_UzqZE&list=PLZioPDnFPN...
But he also sells kits and I suspect that's been very useful to his paying for his ISP. I know I bought his 6502 kit. ;-)
I think the smart "content creators" figure out a way to sell plans, etc. in order to take in a little on the side. (Patreon, in my mind, is the worst way to do that.)
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.
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.
It's a more general question: should art be subject to the market laws, or should society subsidize art production? In the first case (the liberal POV I suppose) it's up to the artist to find ways to make money out of their art, or keep it as a hobby, or give up on it. On the second case (a more socialist POV), we need to challenge how artists are getting a revenue in our society because it's clearly not working.
Is it not? How much time or will do people currently have to consume art? The internet has dropped the barrier to getting an audience to near zero. Yet the vast, vast majority of people still want to consume mainstream, curated art. Even though it’s completely free, people don’t sit and browse websites for niche artists. Or, if they do, they certainly aren’t going to pay for it and would prefer the format of TikTok/Instagram.
I'm not being flippant. This is a serious question that needs to be addressed in any would-be public art program. Sooner or later you run into limits.
I'm pretty sure even most socialists would agree with this - even those who want to abolish money. If your art isn't valuable to society, you'll get treated like someone who digs holes and then fills them all day.
Now, art which is widely appreciated but still has trouble getting funded might be another matter (because they're e.g. directed at a demographic that doesn't have much money), but most of the people who can't live off their art definitely don't fall into this category - they simply aren't popular.
Publically funded broadcasting for example has been phenomenally successful.
The created art is simply how the vast, vast majority of people in a city will interact with a local community of artists and thus how their quality of life is increased by their existence. A group of e.g. untalented musicians will simply have a terrible quality of live/cost ratio. We don't fund parks simply because they're a quality of life investment - but because they're a _good_ investment.
This can be exploited. Imagine if I wrote a program that simply outputs a string of 1000 random notes and durations and published this as a song every day, with a random UUID for the title. This is technically art, but is it the same as your favorite musician?
Now if someone is buying each of those songs for a million dollars each, that's between the artist and person making the purchase.
Should society subsidize that though? How do you draw the line?
I'm not suggesting that artists should be paid unconditionally per piece, obviously that'd be ridiculous. I'm not suggesting _anything_. I'm just saying that maybe (maybe not) society as a whole finds enough value in art that it wants to make sure that artists can survive. Maybe "the market" is the whole answer, maybe we want the market to have no part in artists' income, maybe it's just one part of the answer (lots of countries like Italy and France heavily subsidize culture & art).
> How do you draw the line?
By drawing a line? We manage to draw lines on unemployment pensions, retirement pensions, research subsidies, children benefits, universal healthcare... It's nothing magical, we draw lines by writing laws that seem to account for different cases, and we know it's not perfect and that there's loopholes in laws, that some people get too much and some others too little, but we iterate and adapt.
But in summary, I don't know! I'm not a politician, an economist, an artist or even a particularly keen art consumer. I just don't believe "the market" is the One True Answer.
Thought you were going somewhere completely different based off of the first sentence. Yes artists have been exploited for decades, but they aren't being exploited by their audiences aka their market. Fans of music, video, performance, etc. are willing to pay quite fair prices (even exorbitant ones) to consume or own the media that they love. The lion's share of that money never reaches the artist that produced it. Vast empires of wealth have been built on the backs of superstar artists and the problem as always is rent seeking which is the enemy of socialists and capitalists alike. We absolutely should not subsidize art production, I can guarantee you that money would also be siphoned off under the current status quo. We're already very close to a solution to this problem with the massive drop in cost of producing any kind of art that is amenable to digital production and distribution. It just needs to continue to tip in the direction of artists being their own producers or being able to hire the people who do the actual work directly rather than going through an established company built on exploitative practices. The next piece of the puzzle is going to be a better system for paying to consume the produced art without relying on the toxic ad ecosystem. We need to starve the greedy giants of the last century out of existence, their only benefit was in connecting people to art when that used to be difficult. Connecting is easy now, paying someone for their work should be too.
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.
People should stop trying to view YouTube as a viable career. 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. Do your day job and work on your YouTube career in your spare time. Maybe one day you'll find success.
The way most entertainers get known is just through sheer luck or connections. This is nothing new. For decades actors, musicians and artists have put up with this. They will follow their dreams while keeping a regular job. Then one day they might get the breakthrough they need. It's never been easier to be a creator today, but the chances are still slim that you'll ever start making serious money out of it. The benefit is that you can easily find a niche to fill, and while you might not making a living wage, you will make some good side money drawing something like vegetables with boobs or something.