Which is another way of staying that YouTube will leave a wake of burned out and faded creators behind it.

Just like all social media

Just like all human art and celebrity culture.

We loved the Bee Gees, then we hated them, then we loved them again...

My favorite band from that time is ABBA, if only because they totally rocked these cat dresses, which would have made a killing on etsy if the internet existed back then.

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/apr/27/abba-announce-...

I mean even if love art and artists from thousands of years ago, their celebrity did fade away. But we can still enjoy their best works, same with contemporary artists who produce good shit for a while and then decline (or revert back) into mediocrity.

I mean Pewdiepie still mostly just makes dumb videos of him and gets an absurd number of views, and has over 100m subscribers.

and it's great. Imagine if he had created an incubator for the next generation of let's players or tried to make a media company. It would have been terrible (see: Casey Neistat's 368)

He stuck to his usual content and his margins just keep increasing since there's no added costs for a higher viewerbase.

I don't really understand why some YouTube people go off doing this. What is the value proposition exactly, their success is due to themselves, how do they commodatize that and scale it to a company

> What is the value proposition exactly

Having a career.

It's very rare for someone to last decades as a performer in the entertainment industry, and online content moves faster than most. You don't want to suddenly have no audience age 35 with zero skills or experience outside making potentially niche YouTube videos.

This typically comes from chasing after higher sources of recognition/prestige/clout, and it's especially prone to happen when you have a background in the "traditional" industry and saw the whole endeavor of producing Internet content as a stepping stone. "Finally, I can run a proper show with real production values", they say. Emulating an idol is the goal, but there's often no particular benchmark guiding it and their creative role suddenly shifts towards managerial elements, so the final product is invariably worse than whatever they did before. Plus the impulse to do it is pretty much always an indulgence running counter to market trends.