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by rors 530 days ago
The value of content creators on YouTube will follow a power law distribution. There will be a very small number of hugely profitable creators and a vast sea of people who do ok. This power law distribution makes YouTube very different to setting up a physical retail store in London. Even if I do well with my shop, I won't outperform my neighbour 1000x.

If anything Mr Beast is an argument for not using YouTube. Alphabet is incentivised to keep him happy so that he doesn't move to X. I'm sure they consider his needs before they change their algorithm, at the expense of almost all other creators on YouTube.
1 comments
LittleTimothy 530 days ago
Again you've gone straight back to zero sum thinking. There's no reason Alphabet keeping Mr Beast happy has to be bad for you! It might be good for you! It might be - in fact it almost certainly is true - that the changes that Mr Beast gets youtube to make might be good for everyone.

The network effects of the platform are massive. 90% of that surplus can go to Alphabet and it still be a good deal for average creators. Mr Beast, you, me anyone can go and rent a server tomorrow and start serving their own videos. People still choose to go to youtube because there's just so much surplus value there.

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rors 529 days ago
My statement did not imply zero sum thinking. The pie can get bigger and the bigger slices can get disproportionately bigger.

As an analogy, economies can increase their GDP and inequality can also increase. Just because something is getting bigger doesn't mean it's getting fairer.

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LittleTimothy 529 days ago
What I'm saying is the pie is getting bigger, inequality can increase too and that you probably are still better off. If Youtube doubles in size next year, and Mr Beast increases his share of that from let's say 1% to 2%, the remaining 98% is still bigger than the 99% that was shared amongst everyone else last year.

You may look at that and say well that's not fair, most of the benefits are going to Mr Beast - and they are, Mr Beast would have done very well in that scenario. But you're still better off than before. Are you better off relative to Mr Beast? No. But Youtube doesn't owe you that, that's not a reasonable benchmark. If it gets to the point that you're getting worse off, then maybe move to somewhere else, but expecting these places to be good for you in perpetuity is a mistake, and refusing to engage because you fear they won't be good for you in perpetuity is also a mistake. The total benefit of us all engaging makes the pie much bigger, and you almost certainly will get a bigger share of that than by refusing to partake in the pie at all.

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