Earlier this year, I began looking at youtube subscription and view numbers a lot. A younger family member said something about a very popular youtuber who had been accused of racism and being a nazi, so I looked at it to see what the fuss was all about.
It turns out this person has the most-subscribed channel on youtube and made $4 million last year from ad revenue. Four million dollars for reviewing video games and making lame jokes...!
Anyway, that led to some exploration about how people make money off of youtube, and then a little more about how people make money off of social media. It is a truly strange world, where "influencers" become influential via means that now make me automatically distrust all of them until proven otherwise that they have some actual skills or abilities or knowledge.
I'm not looking forward to this new world. I guess I'm an old curmudgeon. Oh well.
And in any case, youtube isn't a job creator. it's a lottery. It's pretty simple: if it was a large job creator, Google would have told everybody about that. But when trying to search about the subject, the most you'll find is stories about stars.
YouTube is a huge opportunity creator. The lottery aspect comes from the fact that the offer is enormous.
Before YouTube, if you wanted to make your life talking about some niche subject you were out of lack. It is now possible because the barriers for entry have fallen.
Casinos work very hard to make you lose your money. Achieving success on YouTube is hard but it is largely skill based. Having a successful channel requires a lot of determination. You may get lucky and have one viral video which makes you some cash, however in order to have a sustainable stream of revenue you have to produce good content on a very regular basis.
To me, this seems way way less luck based than TV or Hollywood production where you have to conform to a ton of rules, then get lucky at an audition in order to have a chance to appear in something that has to pass through ten committees to be green lit.
Find a subject, make good content and if there are a few thousand people passionate about it you will meet the months end.
Nobody will argue that youtube haven't enabled people to get exposure, or on the immense effect youtube had on culture/business/marketing/etc...
The question is about jobs. how many people can live full-time from making content for youtube ? What's the share of people who succeed in that ? How stable is their job ?
And i don't mean to be blunt, but really, to answer those questions, only data can help.
$4 million is a lot of money but nothing in comparison with what an “old world” celebrity earns for a fraction of work. Earning money on YouTube is very hard because the ad Payments are ridiculously low.
PewDiePie happens to be one of the first to tap into the most popular genre on YouTube, hence the volume. But if you dig into some very specific channels with high production values you can see that the potential is huge.
$4.4 million is close to the average Major League Baseball salary now (the median is closer to $1.5 million). A mediocre relief pitcher can yield that. 125 players are earning $10 million or more now.
Or another perspective on it. All NBA player salaries combined - roughly $3.2 billion for ~420 players - is higher than the total salaries (not total compensation) of all the Fortune 500 CEOs combined. Maybe ~1,200 NBA players total over the next ten years, will take home $35 to $40 billion in income combined.
The value of having any consequential spot in a massive platform.
If anything, this shows that YouTube is actually spreading the wealth somewhat more. If the salary of the biggest YouTuber with the most sought after audience earns as much as an average baseballer. Or probably what some first class footballer would get for a 15 second spot on tv.
Do they? I think the creator/YouTube split is approximately 50/50 which seems reasonable as both parties provide value.
I have friends just about managing to live off YouTube money (with other related revenue streams like blogs) with a "small" following in some niche area. The few people I know of in "minor" sports have a full time job to pay their bills.
What kind of traffic do you think your friends bring ? and with that in mind, what's your estimate to the number of people making a living from YouTube ?
> Four million dollars for reviewing video games and making lame jokes...!
I used to think a similar thing, however as I learn more about him the more I think it's unfair to think he makes millions of dollars for (almost) nothing.[1]
He appears to be very astute when it comes to his business and produces a large amount of content which must be hard and time consuming work, even considering he has people working for him. He entertains millions of people on a daily basis and, even if it isn't content I enjoy, he deserved to be compensated.
[1] I'm not in a position to assess the various controversies around PewDiePie and I don't think they're relevant to this point as most of his content is unrelated.
Online Multiplayer Video Games:
Peak Daily Users
5,000,000 League of Legends (Riot Games 2009, Free / Cosmetic microtransactions)
2,552,565 PLAYER UNKNOWN'S BATTLEGROUNDS (Steam / Bluehole Inc. 2017, $30 / Cosmetic microtransactions)
727,479 Dota 2 (Steam / Valve Corporation 2013, Free / Cosmetic microtransactions)
547,883 Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (Valve Corporation 2012, $15 / Cosmetic microtransactions)
-in-built audience of about 500k-5million
-low barrier of entry high skill ceiling
-former professional players stream their games daily and give advice
-livestream audience of 10k-20k concurrent viewers
-streamer can earn up to 5 million USD a year from: monthly subscription model for cosmetic chat features, ad and merchandise revenue streams
There are many intersections between genres, because teenagers are interested in a lot of things, fashion, music, video-games, tv shows. There is also a certain infantisation of 20-30's due to the increasingly common choice to put off starting a family until late 30s.
A good example is the two brothers Logan (22) and Jake (20) Paul. Former viners(1) who were on a Disney tv show (2) moved to youtube (3) bringing over their fans from vine and disney and adding new ones due to clever self-promotion. Any 5 to 15 year old in America knows their name and about 5-10 million watch their videos daily.
What is their talent? In a post-modern twist, the story of their success is their product. Much like the various Kardashian sisters, famous for being famous very much describes where they are. They both live a Truman Show / EdTV esque life of daily fan interaction. every single day of their lives is documented into 15-20 minute long videos which they upload to their channels.
(1)(2)(3) the more intersections you can get the better your chances of having a wider audience. the youtuber you mentioned does not have 50 million people watching, he has 1-3 million, the fiasco around his racist slur was viral marketing on his behalf to draw attention to his struggling channel. his peak relevancy was probably in 2014 and he has been struggling for the past 3 years to remain relevant as his fanbase grows up and he needs to adapt to their changing interests.
video games are a 100 billion dollar industry with china's addiction for the electronic crack soon dwarfing anything the rest of the world does.
Based on what I remember, $4M is what he earned in the year, not all FROM YouTube. Most of that money came from other deals. Of course those deals were possible because of his popularity on YouTube, but it is not a case of Google spreading wealth.
Almost all of those jobs are jobs (other than e-celebrities, but you can't call that a job) that are outsourced to extremely low wage off shore workers.
>other than e-celebrities, but you can't call that a job.
I think this job catagory hides a lot. E-celebtrities do not gain a following for doing nothing. They do something that gets them followers, and that something is their job. I also do not see a reason to exclude sponsorship/Patreon from this catagory; as that just seems to be another method of monetizing the same work. I also do not see why podcasts and webcamming do not fall into this catagory.
Most of these jobs look very familiar. Is arbitrage and speculation so much different just because its about Bitcoin? For most of these examples there are very similar old-school equivalents.
Also, note that there’s mention of specific political groups exclusively as trolls, but who are the professional counter-trolls? As my mom used to say, when it comes to fighting, it takes two to tango. Aren’t both just trolls?
Internet fights are pretty tedious to witness. Just ask HN’s moderators. But why trust them, when you can read plenty on your own.
One person’s moderator is another person’s censor. Trolling and moderation go hand in hand, and moderation is the true counter-troll.
>>> ... but who are the professional counter-trolls?
The actual journalists, at least the ones that wade into the swamp of comments sections. The vast majority of real journalists shirk any duty to respond. That's a big mistake imho.
Also google and other search engines, at least insofar as they are looking to revamp search results to promote actual stories and drive down junk news. But there is another link on HN today about the dangers of allowing search engines to become the arbiters of truth.
So, news, fake news, trolls, counter-trolls, content farms, revenge porn scanning (?), surveillance and censorship, large-internet-property moderation (special classes for special sites), content curation, “influencers” (???), propaganda production...
All these mind crimes should just fall under a single umbrella class of worker called “motherfucking internet bullshit artistry (all levels)” ...and oh yeah, the article neglects one of the most recent sub-classes: child video troll (and of course child video troll moderator (scanner?) AND coming soon (!!!) child video counter-troll, as discussed over here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15670109
When will we get to see child news and fake child news?
Seriously though, if 90% of everything is bullshit [0], where’s the distinction between good and evil? It’s just regional sports teams from what I can tell, and just as pointless.
I think the jobs listed are simply ephemera of the current state of the internet, technology, and media rather than a reflection of 'the future'. Although, I do agree that with the thread that jobs of the future have little promise of widespread prosperity, which Tyler Cowen details very, very well in 'Average is Over'
Hacking-insurance adjusters: This is just starting to become a thing. Once the insurance market matures, and claims become more routine, an industry of adjusters/inspectors will emerge.
Autodrive car rescue: When the robots get confused they will need specialized people to sort them out. Your average tow-truck driver doesn't want to approach a Tesla stuck doing a perpetual loop in a roundabout. I'm waiting for the 911 caller stating "I'm heading west on I-94 at 70mph and the car won't stop."
Space imagery analyst: Once the domain of the NRO/NSA, as space imagery becomes cheaper and more available even small corporations will need people who know how to read and interpret sat data.
I think many more product types could target smaller niches through some auto-scaling like service. For example, let's talk about food. it's possible to imagine Amazon starting a cloud for manufacturing food, where you send the recipes of what food to make, and you get a batch of it made(maybe not so large), and this gets distributed/sold via Amazon's grocery section.
Same for restaurants, you upload you recipe, and some chain restaurant makes your food and give you royalties.
And of course it could happen to clothes(already with printed t-shirts), electronics, shoes, etc. Maybe even houses, if housing gets done at a factory, modular fashion, using a set of standard blocks and software verification.
And there are all kinds of new technologies, like hyperloop, bio manufacturing, etc - that would require building a lot of infrastructure. and the fastest the rate of change goes up, maybe infrastructure we'll get refreshed faster.
And clearly we could use more teachers.
Or people at command centers for self-driving cars.
Moderation has been a job, if you can even call it one, since the dawn of internet. Discussion forums had their own moderators ensuring content quality.
Podcasts, curation and automated content farms have also existed for a long time to actually qualify for the list. The content farms were previously heavily focused on low quality blog posts have now moved towards video.
32 comments
[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 85.5 ms ] threadIt turns out this person has the most-subscribed channel on youtube and made $4 million last year from ad revenue. Four million dollars for reviewing video games and making lame jokes...!
Anyway, that led to some exploration about how people make money off of youtube, and then a little more about how people make money off of social media. It is a truly strange world, where "influencers" become influential via means that now make me automatically distrust all of them until proven otherwise that they have some actual skills or abilities or knowledge.
I'm not looking forward to this new world. I guess I'm an old curmudgeon. Oh well.
Before YouTube, if you wanted to make your life talking about some niche subject you were out of lack. It is now possible because the barriers for entry have fallen.
That’s like calling casinos “opportunity creators.” The lottery aspect comes from the randomness of success.
To me, this seems way way less luck based than TV or Hollywood production where you have to conform to a ton of rules, then get lucky at an audition in order to have a chance to appear in something that has to pass through ten committees to be green lit.
Find a subject, make good content and if there are a few thousand people passionate about it you will meet the months end.
The question is about jobs. how many people can live full-time from making content for youtube ? What's the share of people who succeed in that ? How stable is their job ?
And i don't mean to be blunt, but really, to answer those questions, only data can help.
PewDiePie happens to be one of the first to tap into the most popular genre on YouTube, hence the volume. But if you dig into some very specific channels with high production values you can see that the potential is huge.
Or another perspective on it. All NBA player salaries combined - roughly $3.2 billion for ~420 players - is higher than the total salaries (not total compensation) of all the Fortune 500 CEOs combined. Maybe ~1,200 NBA players total over the next ten years, will take home $35 to $40 billion in income combined.
The value of having any consequential spot in a massive platform.
I have friends just about managing to live off YouTube money (with other related revenue streams like blogs) with a "small" following in some niche area. The few people I know of in "minor" sports have a full time job to pay their bills.
I used to think a similar thing, however as I learn more about him the more I think it's unfair to think he makes millions of dollars for (almost) nothing.[1]
He appears to be very astute when it comes to his business and produces a large amount of content which must be hard and time consuming work, even considering he has people working for him. He entertains millions of people on a daily basis and, even if it isn't content I enjoy, he deserved to be compensated.
[1] I'm not in a position to assess the various controversies around PewDiePie and I don't think they're relevant to this point as most of his content is unrelated.
The guy works hard, and while I'm not a fan I don't begrudge him the wealth.
if you prefer to read instead.
Online Multiplayer Video Games: Peak Daily Users 5,000,000 League of Legends (Riot Games 2009, Free / Cosmetic microtransactions) 2,552,565 PLAYER UNKNOWN'S BATTLEGROUNDS (Steam / Bluehole Inc. 2017, $30 / Cosmetic microtransactions) 727,479 Dota 2 (Steam / Valve Corporation 2013, Free / Cosmetic microtransactions) 547,883 Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (Valve Corporation 2012, $15 / Cosmetic microtransactions)
-in-built audience of about 500k-5million -low barrier of entry high skill ceiling -former professional players stream their games daily and give advice -livestream audience of 10k-20k concurrent viewers -streamer can earn up to 5 million USD a year from: monthly subscription model for cosmetic chat features, ad and merchandise revenue streams
There are many intersections between genres, because teenagers are interested in a lot of things, fashion, music, video-games, tv shows. There is also a certain infantisation of 20-30's due to the increasingly common choice to put off starting a family until late 30s.
A good example is the two brothers Logan (22) and Jake (20) Paul. Former viners(1) who were on a Disney tv show (2) moved to youtube (3) bringing over their fans from vine and disney and adding new ones due to clever self-promotion. Any 5 to 15 year old in America knows their name and about 5-10 million watch their videos daily.
What is their talent? In a post-modern twist, the story of their success is their product. Much like the various Kardashian sisters, famous for being famous very much describes where they are. They both live a Truman Show / EdTV esque life of daily fan interaction. every single day of their lives is documented into 15-20 minute long videos which they upload to their channels.
(1)(2)(3) the more intersections you can get the better your chances of having a wider audience. the youtuber you mentioned does not have 50 million people watching, he has 1-3 million, the fiasco around his racist slur was viral marketing on his behalf to draw attention to his struggling channel. his peak relevancy was probably in 2014 and he has been struggling for the past 3 years to remain relevant as his fanbase grows up and he needs to adapt to their changing interests.
video games are a 100 billion dollar industry with china's addiction for the electronic crack soon dwarfing anything the rest of the world does.
Not exactly a bright future.
I think this job catagory hides a lot. E-celebtrities do not gain a following for doing nothing. They do something that gets them followers, and that something is their job. I also do not see a reason to exclude sponsorship/Patreon from this catagory; as that just seems to be another method of monetizing the same work. I also do not see why podcasts and webcamming do not fall into this catagory.
Also, note that there’s mention of specific political groups exclusively as trolls, but who are the professional counter-trolls? As my mom used to say, when it comes to fighting, it takes two to tango. Aren’t both just trolls?
Internet fights are pretty tedious to witness. Just ask HN’s moderators. But why trust them, when you can read plenty on your own.
One person’s moderator is another person’s censor. Trolling and moderation go hand in hand, and moderation is the true counter-troll.
The actual journalists, at least the ones that wade into the swamp of comments sections. The vast majority of real journalists shirk any duty to respond. That's a big mistake imho.
Also google and other search engines, at least insofar as they are looking to revamp search results to promote actual stories and drive down junk news. But there is another link on HN today about the dangers of allowing search engines to become the arbiters of truth.
All these mind crimes should just fall under a single umbrella class of worker called “motherfucking internet bullshit artistry (all levels)” ...and oh yeah, the article neglects one of the most recent sub-classes: child video troll (and of course child video troll moderator (scanner?) AND coming soon (!!!) child video counter-troll, as discussed over here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15670109
When will we get to see child news and fake child news?
Seriously though, if 90% of everything is bullshit [0], where’s the distinction between good and evil? It’s just regional sports teams from what I can tell, and just as pointless.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon's_law
Hacking-insurance adjusters: This is just starting to become a thing. Once the insurance market matures, and claims become more routine, an industry of adjusters/inspectors will emerge.
Autodrive car rescue: When the robots get confused they will need specialized people to sort them out. Your average tow-truck driver doesn't want to approach a Tesla stuck doing a perpetual loop in a roundabout. I'm waiting for the 911 caller stating "I'm heading west on I-94 at 70mph and the car won't stop."
Space imagery analyst: Once the domain of the NRO/NSA, as space imagery becomes cheaper and more available even small corporations will need people who know how to read and interpret sat data.
I think many more product types could target smaller niches through some auto-scaling like service. For example, let's talk about food. it's possible to imagine Amazon starting a cloud for manufacturing food, where you send the recipes of what food to make, and you get a batch of it made(maybe not so large), and this gets distributed/sold via Amazon's grocery section.
Same for restaurants, you upload you recipe, and some chain restaurant makes your food and give you royalties.
And of course it could happen to clothes(already with printed t-shirts), electronics, shoes, etc. Maybe even houses, if housing gets done at a factory, modular fashion, using a set of standard blocks and software verification.
And there are all kinds of new technologies, like hyperloop, bio manufacturing, etc - that would require building a lot of infrastructure. and the fastest the rate of change goes up, maybe infrastructure we'll get refreshed faster.
And clearly we could use more teachers.
Or people at command centers for self-driving cars.
Podcasts, curation and automated content farms have also existed for a long time to actually qualify for the list. The content farms were previously heavily focused on low quality blog posts have now moved towards video.
As for gig economy, check this discussion from yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15669454