[richsherwood]

It’s getting cheaper and cheaper to produce videos these days though. We’re kind of in the place that graphic design was in 10 years ago. As the equipment gets better, software more powerful, and generations of younger folks with substantial knowledge in the subject, the costs are going to go way down.

[toasterlovin]

I’d say we’re at the end of the cost reduction curve. Capital requirements for video production have been minimal for a while. Costs are overwhelmingly people. People don’t get cheaper.

[mistermann]

With the number of totally independent content producers on YouTube with extremely high production quality (often indistinguishable from professional TV shows), I honestly don't think cost/people is a big factor anymore, at all.

[katzgrau]

But a publisher is paying people to produce the content - so I'm saying after the planning, shooting and producing, the cost at probably a few thousand for a publisher. Supporting that with video ad Rev is really, really hard if you're like the typical online magazine that doesn't have a look at T of scale.

[mistermann]

> after the planning, shooting and producing, the cost at probably a few thousand for a publisher.

There are all sorts of YouTube content creators who do everything for their channel, had no noteworthy background in any of it, and turn out several videos a week with broadcast TV levels of quality, in addition to holding down full time regular jobs.

You could spend several thousand per episode, but you no longer have* to.

I agree though, covering these now minimal costs with ad revenue is something else entirely.

[toasterlovin]

> You could spend several thousand per episode, but you no longer have* to.

You don’t have to if you know how to do the work. It’s like making apps. It’s cheap to make an app and get it on the App Store if you’re an app developer. But if you need to hire somebody, suddenly you’re looking at multiple tens of thousands of dollars, at a bare minimum. The fact that there are all sorts of content creators doing video work for themselves doesn’t mean that doing video work is somehow cheap. They’re just working for themselves on spec.

[mistermann]

This doesn't make logical sense to me....a lot of these skilled people run channels with next to no income, I would think only would many of them gladly take on some side work for multiple tens of thousands of dollars, at a bare minimum, but would fight over it, bidding it down to way less than that.

To me this seems like basic supply and demand in action, I'm curious which aspects of this scenario we disagree on to come to such a wide disagreement?

[mark_l_watson]

I agree with you. In addition to many more people saavy at generating and editing content, modern cell phones with motion stabilization and better editing tools make anyone a reporter/cinematographer if they are lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time to capture something interesting or otherwise news worthy.