I suspect that if you add up all the money Youtubers make, and you divide it by all of the man hours people spent trying to make a living off of Youtube, “poverty stricken PhD candidate” would start to seem like a good financial decision.
Yeah becoming popular enough on YouTube to be able to have it be your full time job is like winning the lottery in terms of how many people have tried vs how many have succeeded.
It seems to rise to the top of YouTube, you have to be a crazed sociopath or just plain idiotic to engage enough people to be able to afford a house. I think college is overrated but still think those that try are better off. Youtubers are not in anyway contributing to the betterment of our world. It’s sad how crap content is the driving force for getting monetized.
College is overrated? How so?
I think it does depend on the degree but at least here it leaves you with a far better prospect.
Sadly, the sociopath/idiotic formula does seem to resonate with the algorithms and/or the public. There is a local creator that I know to be a thoughtful, well-rounded person, yet they had to reduce themselves to a cartoon caricature in order to get traction. But that approach seems to have worked out for them, at least initially through Tik Tok and YouTube. Now I see them taking on increasingly sketchy sponsorships as their 15 minutes fades. And of course audience capture indisputably steers media makers into conspiratorial niches they can’t escape without sacrificing views/payout. Authenticity be damned.
I think this says more about the dross you watch than anything else. Surely you’re not going to argue that someone like Tom Scott, Project Farm, or Torque Test Channel don’t add something of value to the world?
Yep, a close friend of mine managed to be an established content creator with brand deals. I won’t go into specifics as it’s quite easy to extrapolate who the person are, but many people that are our mutual friends already started to think that “If [redacted] can manage to be a content creator then I must too” and started to clout chase.
Does your friend enjoy the work? People don’t appreciate how much work it is, and how difficult it can be to have your channel become successful enough to be a job (especially if you start out making stuff that you enjoy)
It’s just like any other fame/luck based career. The top 2% make 98% of the money. Back when blogging was the new hotness, I read that 98% of bloggers would never make a single penny off their efforts. Which seems crazy to me considering how easy it was to build a quality blog and throw AdSense on it, but that was the statistic.
That’s why, with any potentially lucrative hobby where success is based mostly on luck, you should only do it for fun while you save enough money to try it out for a month or two to see how you like it as a job. But you shouldn’t quit your day job until you have some GOOD evidence that you’re not going to be dirt poor if you pivot to doing your hobby full-time. You need a good following and a GREAT safety net before you make the jump.
It was possible to make money with a blog. I had a niche one for years, I didn’t make much, but nonetheless I got money from it.
Then Google changed how Adsense worked and paid.
It then became impossible to make money unless, you guessed it, you were the top x% of bloggers.
I supported my family with my blogs for around 6 years. Then things started changing, and I didn’t like what they were changing to. I have zero interest in creating vapid bite-sized blurbs, or YouTube videos. So, I sold the sites and moved on with my life. Granted, the transition wasn’t as seamless as I made it sound just now. It got hard, and I was broke as fuck for a while. It ended up working out well for us in the end though.
Our society rewards fucked up behavior if you are a celebrity or if you are rich or good looking. Then you get a pass.
Others are expected to do what they are told.
Blame the algorithms, but yes otherwise you are correct. Being an intransigent shithead is a pathway to success in this world. The bully is rewarded endlessly while the victim is stigmatized.
All of history’s greatest figures in our mind are people with the biggest body counts. Napoleon killed a whole generation of young men in Europe and was basically his era’s Hitler. Today he has Fanboys who rush to defend him online.
That’s why Putin invades Ukraine and dgaf about bodies because he’s playing to an audience 300 years in the future who also dgaf about the victims anymore than we care about Napoleonic war casualties.
We are a species of savage assholes and we survive today as the beneficiary’s of that legacy.
Welcome to the academic precariat.
Read this paper the other day which is basically this meme and your comment combined.
Ha. Wait until you are the unpaid reviewer struggling to pay mortgage on first house and still paying off student debt. You’ll start to understand why reviewers can be such dicks.
I was expecting Toby McGwire. I’m pleased with the switcheroo.
