Youtube Money, Everyone is Lying to Themselves.

I'm gonna give you the disturbing
suggestion in this video that my role as a youtuber your role as a youtuber our role as youtubers is much closer to being an author for Wikipedia than it is to being a movie star or a news reader on a public broadcast network what I'm doing and what we're doing here falls into the same class of fundamentally unmonitored content creation but people are attached to a false analogy that somehow because it's a person talking into a camera because aesthetically it resembles a news broadcast that were entitled to the kind of payments of an employee of a TV station doesn't even matter if you reach a bigger audience than your local TV station if you reach 1 million viewers per video on YouTube you'd be making $4,000 for that video what we're doing here economically in terms of its value is more like Wikipedia than it is like the nightly news there are a non-specialists without any real depth and they just kind of go around and try to you know make a survey of secondary sources at a shallow level put together a YouTube video and reach a reach a mass audience and then they feel entitled to earn a living they think that has value and the free market is telling you very clearly that has no value it's very easy for a need sense of justice to interfere with our understanding of economics economics is not just significant as a social science economics is not just important as a practical tool for your own financial planning to figure out how much money you can earn and how much money could spend economics is really important as a kind of key to unlock social and political phenomena on a large scale and to figure out how those phenomena intersect with your own life on the small scale of one person struggling to survive struggling to lead a meeting life and what-have-you in terms of our innate sense of justice I think it's natural to sympathize with the clip I'm about to play you it's natural to sympathize sympathize the guy who comes on camera and tells you he makes history videos and if nobody wants to pay him a decent wage for making those videos then that's your problem it's natural to sympathize with a grape farmer in France who says hey his job is planting grapes and he's planting grapes on this land where other farmers have have planted grapes for 500 years or 2,000 years and if nobody wants to buy the grapes if nobody wants to drink the wine that's made from those grapes and that's your problem then the French taxpayer has to support his lifestyle he has to be he shouldn't have to change what it is he's farming or what is he's doing even if the wine he's producing is so worthless on the free market that it's more valuable being processed as garbage and recycled into industrial alcohol which is what happens with the French government wine subsidy schemes because they don't want to lower the value of the other one that's on the market they buy up these grapes turn them into garbage rate even in these circumstances it's easy for someone in that position to appeal to your sense of justice and for that emotion to override the kind of detached rational faculty that would lead you to question whether oh wait a minute what's the point of producing wine that nobody wants to drink what's the point of farming if it's not even on a break-even basis let alone a profitable basis what is the point of filmmaking for empty seats or what is the point of writing history in recording history videos if people do watch it but it doesn't generate any money on the free market for us to survive on I uploaded a video a couple weeks ago on the Battle of Dien Bien Phu it's a smaller conflict that happens so it doesn't have any anything to do with the Holocaust or anything like that so it's not necessarily controversial history if that is even a thing you can you guys can see here exactly where this got to monetized it's not just the the one dollar that I made I made one dollar on this video if I release two videos a month and two videos get to monetized I lose a whole month's worth of income and that is like really devastating just been happening to every release now that I'm doing it's just gonna keep happening and I'm gonna lose all the money that I'm investing into these episodes they're expensive to make and it's not just turning on the camera we've got to do animation and research and writing and make sure it's all the subjects are covered well I'm going to unlist all these videos I'm not going to make anything anymore so I'm done making content argument by analogy is inevitable and useful but we sometimes fall into the trap of being attached to an analogy that we haven't really announced or enunciated ourselves we didn't verbalize this analogy we just presume it without examining it so a lot of people here who come and talk on camera they may have in mind the analogy a news broadcaster someone who reads the news on CBS PBS NB C whatever on television that person earns a good living they put on a suit and tie and sit in front of a camera and this is how much money they're so if I come on YouTube and I reach an audience of 100,000 people I should earn as much money or more money than this person who maybe reads the the local news local town news local cities and they only reach 100,000 people also therefore I'm entitled to that wage right this is the sense of entitlement the sense of appealing to to justice and this is not true at all it's very easy for an historian to look at the the record of past authors who have been non-specialists waiting for a non specialist audience writing for the masked market they can look at the example of will Durham Will Durant Americans say will duro and his wife who published complete garbage on the history of Western civilization and the history of Asian civilization and they sold more than 2 million copies of big heavy hardcover nonfiction books and when you sell more than 2 million copies you make a lot more than two million dollars especially back in those days they had hit books from the 1930s to the 1960s and let me tell you something the quality of those books is much much much lower than what you can now find on Wikipedia but there's a hint when we look at Wikipedia that we might be attached to the wrong analogy yeah yeah yeah that's right some people sit in front of a camera and they they generate a news report for the nightly news and local TV and they earn a lot of money or they aren't a good living and some people in the past wrote non-specialists history books for a huge audience and they made millions dollars but you know what there are these other people and they create content for Wikipedia and they never earn a dime which one do I have more in common with which one which one is being a youtuber fundamentally economically similar to I'm going to give you the disturbing suggestion in this video that my role as a youtuber your role as a youtuber our role as youtubers he's much closer to being an author for Wikipedia than it is to being a movie star or a news reader on a public broadcast network what I'm doing and what we're doing here falls into the same class of fundamentally unmonitored content creation that wikipedia represents google it up how much money did even the founder and CEO of wikipedia make almost nothing there were two guys who were credited as a founder one of them is about a million dollars net worth the other about 650,000 both could have made far more money if they had taken their time and energy and gone into any other area of software development any other area of even website development during the same period of time and that net worth like Jimmy Wales founder of Wikipedia him having a million dollars to his name almost all of it comes from projects other than Wikipedia he has a long career of many projects the other guy - the less famous co-founder a university professor with a handsome salary interesting guys interesting careers they did not make much money out of Wikipedia and the people like you and I the content creators Wikipedia almost all of us made 0 and right here on YouTube it's the same thing but people are attached to a false analogy that somehow because it's a person talking into a camera because aesthetically it resembles a news broadcast that were entitled to the kind of payments of an employee of a TV station it doesn't even matter if you reach a bigger audience than your local TV station if you reach 1 million viewers per video on YouTube you'd be making $4,000 for that video if you're lucky and it's long and there's a lot of advertising could be 8,000 but guess what it could be 2000 also and it could be demonetized if you get 0 what we're doing here economically in terms of its value is more like Wikipedia than it is like the nightly news and it has nothing in common with the logic behind the multimillion-dollar hit success of will Durham raiding his garbage history of civilization starting in the 1930s let's move a little bit deeper here will de Rome the story of civilization non-specialists writing history for mass audience mass-market non-specialists readers what gets rewarded on YouTube specialization writing for an audience that's narrow but deep if what you do on YouTube is very particular and is appreciated by a particular group of people deeply then they will pay you money to pursue the kind of content you're creating to pursue the political activism you're trying to do to chase your dreams whatever your dreams may be and when you scale it up socially this probably does more harm than good who does this reward it doesn't reward a non-specialist a guy who no offense but that guy doesn't know Vietnamese that guy doesn't have a deep understanding of your Vietnam and I'm gonna lose all the money that I'm investing into these episodes they're expensive to make and it's not just turning on the camera we've got to do animation and research and writing shoot who's who should make that video not you a specialist should make it for its specialized audience you should appreciate somebody doing active research presenting an informed opinion maybe if they do that maybe they'll reach a much smaller audience that audience is gonna appreciate it's gonna it's gonna pay for it especially if it's connected to something that can make the world a better place some kind of real world outcomes some kind of some kind of activism this rewards specialists like the flat earth people write all kinds of crazy kooky scientifically false and fraudulent movements get rewarded but the underlying logic of how YouTube works and how Wikipedia works and how in general the new era of internet media all right and again you may feel a sense of injustice you may look at some ridiculous conspiracy theory YouTube channel that's out there supporting a 100% meat diet and think how is it that this guy is making money and flying around the world and holding conferences to promote totally irresponsible hundred percent meat diet and then you look over at some relative the virtuous Channel that may be again producing for a mass market may even be getting a hundred thousand viewers per video but this guy can't earn a living this guy can't survive whereas the person presenting specialized content for an audience that's narrow but deep for an audience that cares enough to support it he's successful in another way you scale that up the problem isn't just a few little comparisons a few little examples like Flat Earth and carnivore diet and it's Gotham you're aware this is part of the eccentric ation of mass media the breaking of mass media into these small little islands of social media and they're rewarding the most extreme the most narrow the most highly specialized voices and all of it ultimately relies on you the viewer to voluntarily pony up the money but think about how little money it is that's being asked for from you right think about how much money it would have cost you in 1935 to buy the first volume of will Durant's garbage book a story of civilization vol 1 are oriental heritage you know nobody is even asking the question sorry how many Asian languages does this guy know how many years did he knew nothing I mean he knew less than an editor on Wikipedia this is a non specialist going around doing a very casual scanning of secondary sources and putting them together an impressive looking book and that's what a lot of people are trying to do here on YouTube there are a non-specialists without any real depth and they just kind of go around and try to you know make a survey of secondary sources at a shallow level put together a YouTube video and reach a reach a mass audience and then they feel entitled to earn a living they think that has value and the free market is telling you very clearly that has no value what has value now on you and I think also objectively when you think about the meaning and significance of research is to do research that as real depth to do research that comes to original findings new conclusions push back the frontiers of human knowledge abet to do research that's actionable to find out things and communicate things to your audience that could actually make the world a better place through activism of some kind through government policy through changing how we live and what we do right not just stuff that's for discussion in a parlor room not just stuff that's informing someone who starts at level zero awareness of the issue to get them up to level two or three but something that's going to be deeply appreciated by some audience it's completely false to respond to this like the wine farmer in France and say hey my job is growing these grapes and if nobody wants to eat them nobody wants to drink the wine if nobody wants to pay me so I can have the kind of lifestyle I aspire to then that's your [Music]