[pwinnski]

This doesn't match the original statement, and doesn't reflect reality.

People leave YouTube all the time, and crowds don't tend to follow them anywhere. They just watch different YouTubers who fill a similar niche.

It's as if the cloud you were really enjoying blew away, but there were plenty of new clouds, so you didn't get into a car to follow the old ones.

[patrioticaction]

You are arguing that there is anything resembling a perfect market for YouTube video content. Talk about a departure from reality.

[munificent]

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.

[patrioticaction]

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?”

[pwinnski]

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.

[patrioticaction]

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.

[pwinnski]

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.