Comment on Anon watches youtube
DandomRude@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Sometimes I get the impression that social media fame is continuing the narrative of the American dream worldwide: strangely enough, many people assume that it happens regularly that someone steps out of their parent’s bedroom, records a few videos, and overnight, without much effort, becomes a multimillionaire – just like that.
This is the absolute exception and has hardly happened at all for a long time. Online, it’s long been like the real world economy: without the support of powerful players, it’s basically impossible for anyone to become successful. It’s a tough business with an endless number of competing content producers, from whom influential financiers can choose the content and the faces to go with it and pocket the lion’s share.
And there is yet another misconception underlying the illusion of quick money: you only earn enough to live on once you have a certain reach – something very few people achieve. Most work hard for ridiculously low amounts, if they earn anything at all.
Consumers, on the other hand, persist in the attitude that the internet has taught them over the last twenty years: they expect high-quality content on a daily basis without having to pay anything for that. They assume that the producers of this content earn good money from it, but in the vast majority of cases - and if there is any money made in the first place - this is not true at all, because it is not the creative people who earn the big, but those who exploit them.
Anyone who believes that content producers can finance themselves through voluntary donations is usually completely wrong — Wikipedia’s fundraising campaigns, in which only a tiny percentage of users contribute anything, are just one example of many, even though Wikipedia is one of the most visited websites in many countries around the world.
Anyone who believes that content producers can finance themselves through voluntary donations is usually completely wrong
It works quite well on Twitch - if you have a lot of viewers on Twitch, you usually get enough donations to live off of. YouTube just never managed to find a good way to make creators profit directly from their content.
Yes, having a large audience is the problem. If you have that, you can earn good money on YouTube too, especially since you can sign additional marketing deals. The thing is, though, that getting a large audience is anything but easy—most people who try fail.
The audience you need to make good money on YouTube, without external deals, is orders of magnitudes larger than on Twitch, though.
It’s true that getting a large audience on Twitch is really hard nowadays, though. Seems like it was a lot easier a couple of years ago, not sure if it’s just because of changed algorithms or because of supply-side market saturation.
Yes, that may be true. I can’t say much about Twitch because I don’t know anything about it.
from whom influential financiers can choose the content and the faces to go with it and pocket the lion’s share.
How? This kind of doesn’t make sense to me because it seems like some kind of talent manager wouldn’t have a lot to offer in terms of actually increasing someone’s chances of making it big on social media, if it’s a type of content that doesn’t require any special resources to produce and is suited to being made by one person.
There are basically two approaches:
Typically, these companies pursue both approaches simultaneously.
What they offer the actual content producers, i.e., the (sometimes even pseudo-self-employed) employees, is the following:
There are certainly other advantages, but the key point is the contact with advertising customers, i.e., companies that want to engage in social media marketing. These contacts are only accessible to private individuals if they already have one or multiple successful accounts, which unfortunately only very few of those aspiring to a professional career in this field ever achieve.
but the key point is the contact with advertising customers, i.e., companies that want to engage in social media marketing. These contacts are only accessible to private individuals if they already have one or multiple successful accounts, which unfortunately only very few of those aspiring to a professional career in this field ever achieve.
I get the impression that you also generally have to already have a successful account to be considered by agencies, which would defeat the point somewhat of it being a way to get over the initial hurdle. I watch vtubers on Twitch and from what they sometimes say about how sponsorships work, much of it is somewhat automated and gated mainly by account popularity metrics, which makes sense because why would advertisers want to pay a premium to another middleman if they didn’t have to? There was a vtuber agency that collapsed recently when it came out that they were insolvent and had been defrauding many people they worked with along with various other corruption and abuse, and given how similar scandals aren’t uncommon and the need for creators to be doing the work of building themselves up as a business regardless, makes it seem like a pretty bad deal.
Once again, everything revolves around 'Murica
Hopefully that era will finally be coming to a close soon.
Valmond@lemmy.world 1 day ago
It’s like the gold diggers and the shovel sellers, guess who came out on top…
DandomRude@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Exactly, it’s the American dream that has always been propagated to conceal the true circumstances and thus ensure that everything stays the same.