[lucas_membrane]

Here I see 116 writers complaining about the near-impossibility of making a living via youtube, a property of one of the biggest big dogs in the technological world. Consider the following:

1. Youtube is a monopoly. 2. Youtube is obtaining unfair advantages from its monopoly status to the disadvantage of content creators, producing woesome despair and exasperation. 3. There are laws that are supposed to prevent this in the U.S. and other large jurisdictions. 4. Preventing this is even one of the rare issues that has visible political support in each of the major political parties of the U.S. 5. Dysfunctional democracies are not. Make them work.

If this problem could be resolved without politics, I would recommend that. If youtube had 4 or 5 significant competitors with competitive markets for both creators and eyeballs, the problem would be minimal. But there is about zero chance that even a single youtube competitor will arise before 99.99% of those now watching their funds dwindle as they produce videos will have given up, despairing and exasperated.

[e63f67dd-065b]

What’s the alternative that you’re proposing? From what Google has published, YT barely makes money even at the current 55/45 cut. Consider what they’re doing —- hosting billions of hours of video, at global scale, 365 days a year, for free. Nobody wants this business because it’s a terrible business.

Despite all the above, YT is still the primary platform, along with Instagram, to which content creators and influencers flock. People that “make it” on TikTok launch YT channels, for example.

Not making a living on YT is not because of YT’s monopolistic status; YT video creation is the best of a bad bunch. The same way most actors go to Hollywood and end up in poverty, most aspiring YouTubers end up with time spent and not much earns.

All the truly big creators make, from what I recall, roughly a third to half the money on Adsense, with the rest coming from other sources (embedded ads, merch, Patreon, donations, etc).

[lucas_membrane]

> YT barely makes money

Sure. And the same has been about Amazon in retail. But the scoreboard for the tech companies is not earnings; it is return to shareholders, mostly share price appreciation. If the stock prices are high in relation to income, that suggests that the monopoly power is somehow valuable, probably in expectation that the monopoly can be significantly monetized in the future or used to help other parts of the business.

Monopolies may have multiple downsides even when they do not extract extortionate profits. Google must obtain plenty of positive feelings from the public for providing so much amusement via youtube, maybe so much good feeling that no one even tries to assess the consequences of their other monopoly (search).

Somehow, when I see a huge company like Alphabet (Google) based on a niche like search, which has a single winner, and they offer a service like youtube that looks so grass-roots inclusive inviting everyone to join in and get happy, rich and famous, but only a very small fraction do, where success is based so much on what youtube itself recommends, I suspect that there may be some implicit bias working in favor of unequal results that maybe google has something to do with.

We should be looking for alternative models and finding ways to reverse the trend to single-winner markets. I grew up when all the significant cities in the USA had multiple local newspapers, all of which hired writers, and when very many more musicians made a living than do so now. I cannot think of a good reason why anyone should have expected that vast improvements in communications technology would destroy that or why we should just let that go. Monocultures do not find global optimums.