What they should do is collectively take their content somewhere else.
As an aside, I'm seeing the same pattern at Amazon. People thought they were opening a business on amazon selling retail. Then amazon started selling the profitable products themselves, storing the products themselves, ... basically doing more and more of the work and taking more control and taking money from the people who helped them become powerful. Businesses there are now devolving into repackaging jobs.
Now Youtube is doing the same. They used focus on being a search and distribution mechanism. Now they produce content, allow sponsorships, have more ads per minute of viewing then television, ... jobs there are again, repackaging jobs. Repackage scenes from movies, previews, upload documentaries, sports clips...
They both grew through the expansion of the long tail. The reality is: where are people in the long tail going to go to sell their repackaged stuff?
Nowhere. There's no other amazon. Ebay? The flea market of the internet? That's where people who wanted to sell to wal-mart go.
The only place for them to go would be to create their own online store, or their own website where people can watch their movies. Then you have to be found through...
... that's right, Google. Nope. That won't work either, because only AdWords sponsored content appears in Google searches anymore. Google wants you adding data snippets to google.com so people won't even visit your website.
The internet has turned to garbage. You're better off going to the library like the old days.
The internet has been ruined by the mainstream and the money grubbers.
> What they should do is collectively take their content somewhere else.
The problem is the economics won't be any better anywhere else. Youtube is the way it is because of all the many stakeholders (viewers responding to clickbait, politicians, copyright holders, bad actors etc). Any other platform would eventually have the same problems and either cave into them, or be sued into oblivion.
As for the ad-related issues Youtube isn't profitable, and it's clear people aren't yet willing to pay for it.
The reason for "Repackage scenes from movies, previews, upload documentaries, sports clips" is because that's what people want to view quite simply. Those videos have millions of views.
Youtube certainly could do a lot better, but you have to at least understand the factors that pour into why it's struggling. Managing communities is hard. Managing a platform where 300 hours of video are uploaded every minute is very hard.
It's the particular revenue model of the marketplace that causes the problem—the one where cashflow all fans-in from advertisers to YouTube itself, and then from there back out to content creators according to view metrics.
YouTube content creators have responded to the flaws in this model by choosing a better one: one where advertisers pay them directly; they put the ad directly into the video; and YouTube isn't involved.
The production side of this alternate relationship is a big hassle, though; it's like it's the 1930s again, when the actors in soap operas would stop to advertise soap.
It'd be very easy to build a "middle way" where the platform handles inserting the ad creative into the video, and handles payment processing between the advertiser and the content-creator, and even captures view metrics to allow the advertiser visibility into their spend—but where the platform doesn't decide which advertisements run on which videos (with that instead being entirely up to the advertiser and the content creator to schedule between themselves.)
Yes, insofar as Google is an ad-tech company, that distributed-ad-auction is their business model's secret sauce/moat, and I'm suggesting they just throw it away. But in this case, the "tech" part of ad-tech is precisely what's killing YouTube as a monetizable platform. Content creators just need ads, not ad-tech.
Who pays for the hosting costs then? It is very expensive for YouTube to host all of the videos that they do, and they way they pay for that is taking a portion of advertising revenue. Small YouTubers are subsidized by larger ones, since larger creators give YouTube the ad revenue they need to pay for the costs of hosting all of the videos that don't get much ad revenue. If YouTubers stop using YouTube ads entirely, I think it will be increasingly unprofitable for YouTube to allow smaller YouTubers, and casual people, to post videos on the platform.
And I don't see how this middle way is any better for most YouTubers anyways. The reason some YouTubers get demonetized is that advertisers don't want to show ads on certain types of content. If advertisers don't want to show ads on a video through YouTube, they probably won't want to do that through this third party service either. For large YouTubers it can certainly help (which is why they are already doing it) since advertisers can seek out large YouTubers who have a fanbase matching their requirements, but I don't see how it helps in general.
In such an alternative approach, YouTube would still be taking a cut of the fees as the payment-processor interceding between advertisers and content-creators. Their business model would be equivalent to that of Patreon's, in the sense that when the content-creator gets paid, they get paid.
With current YouTube, any fees paid in by advertisers are theirs to do with as they like, and payment-of-content-creators is just a nice thing that YouTube happens to do, but can not-do on a whim with no ill effects. "Revenue from advertisers" and "expenses paying out content-creators" are two entirely independent lines on their balance sheet.
In this alternate model, the money they would receive from advertisers would now be a liability on their balance-sheet, something owed (except for the fraction taken as fee) to the content creator, just as if it was money in a savings account they were holding for the content-creator.
Because then YouTube has no incentive (or ability, really) to prevent what it thinks of as “advertiser-unfriendly” content-creators from being monetized. As long as there are advertisers making deals with a content creator, that content creator is, by definition, advertiser friendly.
It's not profitable but they should put more focus on the people bringing in the majority of their views, meaning pay them more than the clown who just came along and got lucky on one or two videos (most likely copying someone else with a bigger following).
Most large video makers these days get pathetic amounts of ad revenue (less than $100 for a video with a few million views) and instead are making a vast amount more on patreon or similar sites.
Its those creators that have the most to gain at an alternate site, the restrictions of youtube are all downsides, and they receive no money directly from it, the only real upside youtube offers is audience reach.
If you look up "how much I make on youtube" videos you can see creator's dashboards to give you some evidence. The answer is that it varies vastly depending on audience, county, topic and advertiser's
interest.
A typical full time content creator creates a new video per day. To go full time you'd need a couple of thousand per month, lets say $2,000. With these numbers that is 500k to 8 million views a month, or around 15k to 350k views a video. That might not sound like a lot, but given that it is for the entire world you can fit basically any niche within those numbers.
Go full time crushing things with an hydraulic press? Yes! Go full time discussing medieval weapons? Yes! Go full time building things with no tools from scratch in the woods? Yes! Go full time trying to beat Super Mario as fast as possible? Double yes! And so on.
My point is, this revenue is more than enough for interesting content to be produced, content that would never exist without this kind of monetization scheme. It might not be the best model for high end documentaries or movies, but it works for a different set of content which is still highly sought after.
> That might not sound like a lot, but given that it is for the entire world you can fit basically any niche within those numbers.
A common fallacy in business.
> Go full time crushing things with an hydraulic press? Yes! Go full time discussing medieval weapons? Yes! Go full time building things with no tools from scratch in the woods? Yes! Go full time trying to beat Super Mario as fast as possible? Double yes! And so on.
They're not that much a weird niche really. Go to any large university and there's probably a club full of people who discuss medieval weapons full time. Actually there's probably at least two (one that's more purist in terms of historical accuracy, and another that's more focused on fun), then there's probably also a fencing club, a kendo club, maybe a HEMA club, dozens of gaming groups.
And it's not like it's not niche that isn't served by TV. There's plenty of documentary / infotainment series on medieval weapons and combat. There's serious series. There's Deadliest Warrior. Youtube often gets viewers because it's a different format, not because it's serving a very weird niche. Cheap, regular content (and often the comment box keeps creators a bit more honest), suggested next episode, more talky, short episodes.
As for those other examples, there's Mythbusters (smash stuff!), survival shows (primitive technology in a different format). Gaming is the only really odd one - it just isn't shown on TV much.
Just like in SERPs, some keywords (video verticals?) are more valuable than others to advertisers, so views monetize differently per vertical. You can bet that a video about e.g. high-end fashion or jewellery gets huge CPMs; and that a video about e.g. software piracy gets basically nil CPMs (because the viewers are the least likely audience to pay for anything!)
I had a video with 1.4 million views. I took it down. It didn't pay jack and wasn't inline with my content anyways. That said, 1.4 million views, maybe 4 to 500 tops.
The ad-supported internet has turned to garbage. The academic and hobbyist internet is fine, and not that much different from the old days. The governmental internet depends a lot on where you are, but .gov.uk is really rather good, and vastly better at what it does than snailmail and Post Offices were in the old days.
> The academic and hobbyist internet is fine, and not that much different from the old days.
YouTube, and dreams of monetization, have infected the hobbyist internet too. I am active in some niche travel hobbies. It used to be that people in this subculture would write detailed text blogs with tips about various routes and definitions. Now, people think video is the default medium for sharing one’s information, and so they make YT videos that have lots of whizbang effects and GoPro shots but aren’t very information-dense. You have to sit through many minutes (or up to an hour) of a guy stuttering “Uh... So...” to eventually glean details that might help you. It sucks. For a while the people who made these videos would also spam Reddit and specialist forums with links, clearly interested in the prospect of monetizing, but now everyone seems to understand that YT is not a reliable path to financial success.
The decline of text blogging is also partly Google’s fault, in that lots of hobbyist blogs are now excluded from search results even if you try to search for the exact terms you know are found in the blog entry.
People just go to where the audience is. I've considered both starting a blog and starting a YouTube channel, and realized that if I actually want people to see my content then only YouTube makes sense. After all, I don't even follow any blogs myself!
Maybe one day there will be a platform that makes following blogs as convenient as following youtubers
> Maybe one day there will be a platform that makes following blogs as convenient as following youtubers
There was such a platform: the RSS ecosystem. Unfortunately, Google managed to attract something like 80% of the market to its offering, Google Reader, and then it shut Google Reader down, which basically killed off RSS. RSS does remain today, but it is a shadow of what it once was.
> The decline of text blogging is also partly Google’s fault, in that lots of hobbyist blogs are now excluded from search results even if you try to search for the exact terms you know are found in the blog entry.
Interesting; I wasn't aware of that. Do you know whether alternative search engines like DDG have the same problem?
Old days: random cool stuff, sea of garbage, impossible to find anything.
Middling days: random cool stuff, sea of garbage, Google!
Now: random cool stuff, sea of garbage, impossible to find anything.
It’s still gotten easier to put things on the Internet than ever before. There are still even more hobbyist sites than ever. Google hasn’t actively rolled those things back, it’s just taken us back to the garbage fire of the old days.
I went to a government website the other day. 5 pages of forms I filled out several times. Each time on the final page, "system error, cannot proceed."
I called the agency, they said, "You should print out the PDF, fill that out and bring it to our office."
Can you believe that?? There aren't enough programmers to make the .gov stuff work right because FAANG is buying them all. So, I'm not sure you are right on that.
> Can you believe that?? There aren't enough programmers to make the .gov stuff work right because FAANG is buying them all. So, I'm not sure you are right on that.
There are enough. There certainly are in the US and likely so other places. It's that government often pays peanuts compared to private sector and adds poor management and poor advancement prospects on top.
If people aren't willing to work for you because your working conditions suck, it might be worth considering better ones.
Being a contractor is where it's at, it's just hard to win the contracts sometimes because you gotta know people. Once you do, it's not unusual to see a $3 million budget to build a basic website.
The government might also have a lot of trouble finding programmers that have never done any illegal drugs, which probably doesn't help. Although that might only really be something the three letter agencies care about, I'm not sure.
Your assumption that this is happening because those engineers are less skilled is completely wrong. I've worked at both private and govt. the problem in Govt is that resources just go towards the wrong projects. and things that could be fixed never do get fixed due to bureaucracy and regulations. engineers working for gov sometimes are forced to use the worst tools imaginable: often due to regulations (the tools/software used needs to be licensed or some other bs regulations).
Believe me when I say there is a lot of money to be made making it easier for people to package information to give to the government. Yes, the government should spend more money on IT.
I agree with you. This is just a huge side conversation.
Also, there is a TON of great educational content on youtube produced by governments. Google won't show me those videos on web pages at the government website, but they'll show me the youtube video with ads on it.
Government offices don't just lose on salary, but also on working conditions.
Secondhand anecdotes recount fistfights in the office and the unfireable-until-the-election official viewing porn during working hours and continually infecting their desktop and the intranet with malware.
I've also seen a number of .gov sites that require googleapis or use google and other trackers. .gov is very much involved with monetization and tracking
You disregard ebay but ebay actually has economic alignment with its sellers. The buyer experience isn't as good as Amazon's, but the seller experience is better in that you can control your destiny more.
But this apparently makes it a flea market?
There's going to be a tradeoff between curation and producer freedom. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
I used to sell auto accessories in my spare time (around 5 years ago). I used both eBay and Amazon, but left Amazon.
First, Amazon's fees were higher (not sure if that's still the case). When you're selling low margin items, like I was, it was nearly not worth it. Second, the way I was grouped with similar sellers was madness. I had multiple returns because my item didn't match the picture. Well, considering Amazon used someone else's image and description on the listing, that makes sense.
eBay was many times better for selling items. I was able to use my images, customize descriptions, and ultimately pay less fees.
Apparently you took the flea market comparison as disparaging and it was intended that way. Why? What's wrong with flea markets? I shop there regularly and have sold there many times. I usually get great deals there on either side of the transaction. I can say the same about Ebay. For Ebay to be a kind of vast internet flea market seems like a good thing.
I get plenty of low quality goods at Walmart and Amazon too, and plenty of scams as well. Sometimes it's the cheap goods I'm there for, and I don't expect high quality for that. Caveat emptor applies everywhere.
The problem comes when you don't realize you're digging through crap looking for pearls and imagine that it's all pearls.
There's going to be a tradeoff between curation and producer freedom. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
I think the above is one of the key takeaways from the collective experience of the 20-teens! In a way, it's a summary of the whole history of the Internet.
People thought they were opening a business on amazon selling retail. Then amazon started selling the profitable products themselves, storing the products themselves, ... basically doing more and more of the work and taking more control and taking money from the people who helped them become powerful.
Isn't this a pattern with big tech companies and their walled gardens? "App devs thought they were starting a business on the bigco app store, selling direct to users. Then bigco started making their in-built versions of the popular apps themselves... basically doing more and more of the work and taking more control and taking money from the people who helped them become powerful."
This is a pattern with every such environment I can think of. Most people are unlikely to stop at a random house on a street with a sign out front saying "Stuff for sale," and will instead meet that same seller with that same stuff at a flea market, because the flea market provides some small aura of respectability. But not a ton, so even more people will only shop at a "real store." The marginal cost of selling out of your house is essentially zero, but your market size is tiny. The flea market costs a little bit, but gives you a little bigger potential market. Getting into a retail store or a big online store like Amazon costs even more, but gives your a much bigger potential market. So as a seller, you do it, but of course all such outlets eventually try to maximize their own profits at the expense of the sellers, and so it continues.
You know, a lot of the amazing parts of the internet that people reminisce about are still there. The things that _have_ disappeared are often not technically complex or expensive to reproduce. Defeatism is boring, start building things and telling your friends about them.
That's exactly right! It's like the only stuff I can find anymore are ehow.com, pinterest, houzz, etc. I feel more and more like searching through google is like perusing the covers of the magazines at the checkout aisle. Lots of low quality recycled content, filled with ads and referencing other content also filled with ads.
It's a huge drink the google kool-aid cult.
If you want to be on Google, you need to have adwords bringing people to your site, ads on your content, popups for the ad-targeters, click-bait at the bottom, tons of overlays.
Why is that all there is anymore, I don't get it.
What happened to the good content? Why can't I find it anymore?
> What they should do is collectively take their content somewhere else.
This will have almost no effect. YouTube does not have a quantity problem. They have enough content that every YouTube user could watch YouTube 24 hours a day for the rest of their lives and never see the same video twice. They wouldn't even have to go deep into their back catalog.
Worse, viewers have relatively little attachment to any particular content producer. They obviously love some YouTube celebrities, but if a given artist disappeared, people would get over it quickly. It's not, like, say books where people really want access to the last Harry Potter book.
People ... or at least, the demographic attractive to advertisers, won't watch endless hours of dreck. That's what's streaming on OTA broadcast now, and the audience and advertisers are in an ever accelerating race to the bottom. YouTube knows network effects and virtual and vicious feedback cycles.
There is a wealth of content on YouTube, including a surprising amount of niche content. But there are a limited number of very high value creators -- a circumstance that's always the case. High-level creativity takes talent, time, some degree of money, and a network that's conducive to it -- which has an audience that can, will, and does find and view it.
Right now, that dynamic plays strongly to YouTube's benefit, though there are some extant alternatives -- Vimeo specialises in higher-quality content, Facebook and Reddit offer social "friends-and-family" or short-content platforms, and there are emerging platforms such as PeerTube which offer federated hosting options.
Mind: PeerTube presently has significant limitations, and I was discussing the issue with a video producer earlier this week:
But the content creators don’t use Youtube for engagement (except for some cases where video comments are used). The problem is that they aren’t sysadmins, and they have no idea if any change would lead to a long-term improvement (which won’t be hard since Google takes 45% (?) of ad revenues).
No, I'm certainly not. YouTube isn't anything like a conventional market:
* Consumers do not pay money for each transaction of content they consume. Instead, they pay with their attention. But that doesn't work like a currency because their goal is not to minimize the attention they spend. It's burning a hole in their pocket and they want to give their time to YouTube.
* YouTube spends next to no money on each unit of product they deliver. After they show a user a video, they still have it.
So looking at this as any kind of supply and demand situation is going to just completely muddle the economics. The supply is nearly infinite and the "demand" is hard to even define.
Fair enough. I mean to say that YouTubers have followings that are very strong and they have never had a coalition to test a mass strike or exodus. They have a unique product that can’t just be supplanted with an analog as if they are simply interchangeable.
Like, “oh we don’t have John Oliver anymore but here’s Redacted Tonight with Lee Camp! Everyone’s happy, right?”
I'm not sure why this is hard for you to understand. Is your contention that nobody popular has ever stopped making videos on YouTube? Or that YouTube has already lost a large chunk of viewers due to popular former-YouTubers no longer making videos?
Neither of those statements are true, but you seem to be commenting as if one or the other are.
I'm not arguing that the YouTube market is perfect, but that the gap between the average and most popular channels isn't so wide that the loss of some of the latter has a dramatic impact on their viewership. This is so manifestly and obviously true that I'm puzzled about any counter-examples you're envisioning.
The reason top YouTube content is so good is because creators have spent many years honing their skill and building relationships. That can’t be easily replaced and I also must say that the revenue of College Humors’s Dropout service is an indication of a lost opportunity for YouTube. If done in larger amounts, it could be death by a thousand cuts. Plenty of reason to come to the negotiating table.
Okay, I think you are now making what seems like a different argument, and I agree to an extent, but only an extent.
Top brands -- like College Humor -- are never going to be happy on YouTube forever. The cream of the crop cannot be kept happy forever. If CH decides they'd rather keep 100% of X ad revenue instead of smaller-percentage of Y ad revenue, and that the math will work out in their favor, they're gone, and there is nothing YouTube could do to keep them. After all, why should CH work as serfs on YouTube's property when they can be lords of their own?
There are very, very few people who can make the math work, given the expense of supplying streaming video (which fortunately, CH has been doing themselves for a very long time already) and building/keeping an audience, etc, but there will always be some.
And yet, to my point, YouTube doesn't seem to be suffering. There's no way for YouTube to keep 100% of all video revenue, and it's possible that enough popular YouTubers acting in concert via collective action might figure out how to extract slightly more from YouTube, but most popular YouTubers are making more money from Patreon than YouTube themselves, and YouTube is still a big enough player that they can afford to wait out quite a few high-profile defectors, most of whom will come limping back after things turn out to be harder elsewhere than they expect.
Google knows what percentage of time is spent on big high-profile YouTubers vs mid-range and lower. I suspect the long tail is very, very long indeed. A Logan Paul might want to believe he's crucial to YouTube's success, but I don't think he's more than a tiny blip.
For product searches, there's also Google Shopping-- this started out (as Froogle and Google Product Search) indexing any shopping sites Google found, but, as of the rebranding to Google Shopping in 2012, exclusively shows paid listings.
Google Shopping also gets more prominent placing in web searches for products than the actual web results do.
What I meant was that only websites that have google adwords embedded in their content show up in Google results. If you aren't generating revenue through google advertising blocks on your content, google doesn't show the content.
Google things new, updated content on large sites is more relevant, but it's not. That content is recreated from older content on the web that doesn't have ads on it.
I'm sure it's just that google requires more and more work from webmasters to easily find searchable content, meta tags, modern HTML, etc, but the way new content is being produced now is under the guise of ultimately getting the content reader to buy a product.
The old internet was, "Omg, I can share my knowledge with people." Now it's, "Omg, I can make money with ads."
I have been running an ad-free web site about a niche hobby since 2002. I've never attempted to do any optimization for search. My site still shows up in the first page of Google results for relevant search terms.
For you because you click on your links a lot. Your first page of relevancy is totally different for someone else -- from a different country, or county... or even just prior click history.
Google knows you want to click on that link. If your niche hobby had an ehow article how to do it, that'd be first for me I bet, unfortunately.
I tested again just now using the TOR browser bundle. After some tedious captcha-solving, the same search term again brings up my site in the first page of Google results.
> What they should do is collectively take their content somewhere else.
Everyone would have to coordinate it at the same time, and a massive capital outlay would be needed to create a service everyone could switch to at once. If it is done piecemeal Youtube's strong lock-in though things like driving traffic through recommendations on other videos etc. would win out and punish the early switchers too much.
> What they should do is collectively take their content somewhere else.
That's the only "strike action" they have, in fact; if they just stop producing, others will rise and they'll be forgotten. If they move, they might shed some audience but they have a chance at keeping enough to impact Google and making a non-YouTube platform a success.
>The internet has been ruined by the mainstream and the money grubbers.
Predatory practical monopolies and outdated labor laws functioning as intended.
This is one of the under-appreciated aspects of capitalism: the profit motive encourages the unscrupulous to surface ethical holes in the market. If only we were principled enough to do something with this information.
Yes! That's what I'm getting at! The reality of Youtube is that it made it easier to upload videos. The amount of time it takes to learn how to do that and build your own content distribution mechanism isn't really that hard. Most of us around here could do it in a day or two using FFMPEG and amazon buckets.
It actually does in fact take less time to build something to share your own content than it does to create the content itself.
That's why I don't understand why does airbnb take 10% of the transaction? They are just a website. Why does Apple take 30%? They are just a search engine.
And google makes something like $1.2 million per employee. How much of that on average does the google employee get to keep? Is it more or less than content creators?
> Now Youtube is doing the same. They used focus on being a search and distribution mechanism. Now they produce content, allow sponsorships, have more ads per minute of viewing then television, ... jobs there are again, repackaging jobs. Repackage scenes from movies, previews, upload documentaries, sports clips...
This. I remember when getting a single ad in YouTube was news. Or an unstoppable ad. Now I've bumped into videos that have close to an ad a minute.
Moreover, you can feel how in order to keep up with the algorithm YouTubers have forsaken creativity and landed in just clickbaity thumbnails and repeating their formulas. I know YouTubers have been saying this for years, but it finally hit me like cold water recently. There used to be so much clever, creative content on YouTube but now so much of what I see in my home page is content that's shallow and uninspired at best from channels I'm not subscribed to.
And YouTubers have to make this sort of content! If your lively-hood and/or relevance depends on putting videos out every day, you're just gonna find an idea that worked "well enough" and repeat it for weeks.
> They both grew through the expansion of the long tail. The reality is: where are people in the long tail going to go to sell their repackaged stuff?
I wish other platforms like IGTV or Vimeo had taken off. I think there's things Snapchat and Twitter could try for video. Snapchat could experiment with longer-form, edited content for blogs, as a compliment to stories. Twitter is already where personalities are and there's already plenty of video content uploaded there. Facebook seems to want to have a solid go at video, but it feels like they're completely lost. What is Facebook Watch? It has random content from pages but also shows trying to compete with Netflix?
> The internet has turned to garbage. You're better off going to the library like the old days. The internet has been ruined by the mainstream and the money grubbers.
As much as I dislike a lot of what the internet has become, I still don't think this is the case. I don't remember the time of old as better days, TV was (and kinda still is) pretty terrible. The internet is also for much more than just entertainment. Sure, read a book instead of going on YouTube, I agree with that. I'm also very thankful that I am not limited to what's in a library to learn about random topics because I can just click through science sites or Wikipedia.
Though there's certainly a lot the ambition for money and building empires has changed for the worse.
What is also both gross and sad is your contemptuous description of YouTube videos as being “Repackage scenes from movies, previews, upload documentaries, sport clips”
Setting aside derivative works, which it sounds like you are attacking the value of, there is shit tons of purely original content on YouTube that carries a lot of negotiating power.
Repackaged content a huge part of yt's bread and butter. I acknowledge there are excellent content creators at youtube making their own stuff. That's who I was talking about in the first sentence of my OP. They should go somewhere else.
It's the same thing with Uber and airbnb, etc. Big corporations are making billions while those doing the real work that is valuable to the consumer are making pennies.
Sharecropping. This is not a new concept. It wasn't ever an equitable model and yet, here we are right back in it.
It feels like a lot of big corporations are taking advantage of a lot of people who hope to change their lives. It's a fraud. It's not ... right.
I want it to be right. It takes hours of filming, lots of equipment, courage, etc.
Each one of the content creators -- those creating original content -- are taking as much risk as the founders of YouTube, even more really in the big scheme of things and yet they and now Google are making billions, while the people they make those billions off of are making pennies.
Why does it work this way? I don't know why it works this way.
I might be having a philosophical break down atm or something, idk, but it feels like there's a huge fraud being perpetrated out there in internet land and I don't like it one bit.
As an aside, I'm seeing the same pattern at Amazon. People thought they were opening a business on amazon selling retail. Then amazon started selling the profitable products themselves, storing the products themselves, ... basically doing more and more of the work and taking more control and taking money from the people who helped them become powerful. Businesses there are now devolving into repackaging jobs.
Now Youtube is doing the same. They used focus on being a search and distribution mechanism. Now they produce content, allow sponsorships, have more ads per minute of viewing then television, ... jobs there are again, repackaging jobs. Repackage scenes from movies, previews, upload documentaries, sports clips...
They both grew through the expansion of the long tail. The reality is: where are people in the long tail going to go to sell their repackaged stuff?
Nowhere. There's no other amazon. Ebay? The flea market of the internet? That's where people who wanted to sell to wal-mart go.
The only place for them to go would be to create their own online store, or their own website where people can watch their movies. Then you have to be found through...
... that's right, Google. Nope. That won't work either, because only AdWords sponsored content appears in Google searches anymore. Google wants you adding data snippets to google.com so people won't even visit your website.
The internet has turned to garbage. You're better off going to the library like the old days.
The internet has been ruined by the mainstream and the money grubbers.
It's just gross. So sad.