This is exactly the story behind Hot Ones and I disliked it from first view. Commenters like ‘OMG how does he get these guests. So glad he’s succeeding.’ Dude it’s literally a corporation.
Just a ‘late night show’ format for celebrities to sell their latest book/movie in gen Z format.
Chris Spargo is one of the few I think is legit. Least I hope so
is this real
wow i did not expect mr beast to do that. i thought he was a good guy
It’s kinda expected. Just look at Mr. Beast’s eyes, completely devoid of humanity.
yes
Those dull cow eyes with nothing behind them…
Sometimes I get the impression that social media fame is continuing the narrative of the American dream worldwide: strangely enough, many people assume that it happens regularly that someone steps out of their parent’s bedroom, records a few videos, and overnight, without much effort, becomes a multimillionaire – just like that.
This is the absolute exception and has hardly happened at all for a long time. Online, it’s long been like the real world economy: without the support of powerful players, it’s basically impossible for anyone to become successful. It’s a tough business with an endless number of competing content producers, from whom influential financiers can choose the content and the faces to go with it and pocket the lion’s share.
And there is yet another misconception underlying the illusion of quick money: you only earn enough to live on once you have a certain reach – something very few people achieve. Most work hard for ridiculously low income, if they earn anything at all.
Consumers, on the other hand, persist in the attitude that the internet has taught them over the last twenty years: they expect high-quality content on a daily basis without having to pay anything for that. They assume that the producers of this content earn good money from it, but in the vast majority of cases - and if there is any money made in the first place - this is not true at all, because it is not the creative people who earn big, but those who exploit them.
Anyone who believes that content producers can finance themselves through voluntary donations is usually completely wrong — Wikipedia’s fundraising campaigns, in which only a tiny percentage of users contribute anything, are just one example of many, even though Wikipedia is one of the most visited websites in many countries around the world.
It’s like the gold diggers and the shovel sellers, guess who came out on top…
Exactly, it’s the American dream that has always been propagated to conceal the true circumstances and thus ensure that everything stays the same.
What is interesting is that when you stream on twitch and you have 25 viewers, you are in the 1% of twitch streamers.
Yes, successful streamers are literally one in a million, if that’s even enough.
Anyone who believes that content producers can finance themselves through voluntary donations is usually completely wrong
It works quite well on Twitch - if you have a lot of viewers on Twitch, you usually get enough donations to live off of. YouTube just never managed to find a good way to make creators profit directly from their content.
Yes, having a large audience is the problem. If you have that, you can earn good money on YouTube too, especially since you can sign additional marketing deals. The thing is, though, that getting a large audience is anything but easy—most people who try fail.
The audience you need to make good money on YouTube, without external deals, is orders of magnitudes larger than on Twitch, though.
It’s true that getting a large audience on Twitch is really hard nowadays, though. Seems like it was a lot easier a couple of years ago, not sure if it’s just because of changed algorithms or because of market saturation.
Yes, that may be true. I can’t say much about Twitch because I don’t know anything about it.
Once again, everything revolves around 'Murica
Hopefully that era will finally be coming to a close soon.
from whom influential financiers can choose the content and the faces to go with it and pocket the lion’s share.
How? This kind of doesn’t make sense to me because it seems like some kind of talent manager wouldn’t have a lot to offer in terms of actually increasing someone’s chances of making it big on social media, if it’s a type of content that doesn’t require any special resources to produce and is suited to being made by one person.
There are basically two approaches:
- Social media agencies that manage company accounts on behalf of their clients and have their employees produce content for them.
- Agencies that operate their own accounts, which are financed through product placement, e-commerce (mostly dropshipping), or affiliate marketing.
Typically, these companies pursue both approaches simultaneously.
What they offer the actual content producers, i.e., the (sometimes even pseudo-self-employed) employees, is the following:
- A salary or at least project-based remuneration
- A network of contacts to advertising customers and thus lucrative sources of revenue that are pretty much unattainable for individuals without significant reach (they have sales people to protect those contracts from the people that do the content of course - usually these people are called account managers or something tacky along those lines)
- A network of contacts to other “influencers” in order to gain subscribers, etc. through strategic cooperation
- Know-how on how to build up accounts
- Professional equipment (cameras, dongles, drones, video editing applications and so on) as well as social media marketing tools for reporting, planning, and automation, which are not exactly cheap
- In some cases, substantial advertising budgets for ads to promote new accounts (performance marketing) and, in the case of campaigns for external clients, “seals of approval” from meta and other Plattforms (meta, Google or TikTok “Business Partner” for example — these seals are exclusively issued to companies who spend a significant amount on ads on the respective platform)
- Opportunities to collaborate with other employees of the company, which can also create network effects.
There are certainly other advantages, but the key point is the contact with advertising customers, i.e., companies that want to engage in social media marketing. These contacts are only accessible to private individuals if they already have one or multiple successful accounts, which unfortunately only very few of those aspiring to a professional career in this field ever achieve.
but the key point is the contact with advertising customers, i.e., companies that want to engage in social media marketing. These contacts are only accessible to private individuals if they already have one or multiple successful accounts, which unfortunately only very few of those aspiring to a professional career in this field ever achieve.
I get the impression that you also generally have to already have a successful account to be considered by agencies, which would defeat the point somewhat of it being a way to get over the initial hurdle. I watch vtubers on Twitch and from what they sometimes say about how sponsorships work, much of it is somewhat automated and gated mainly by account popularity metrics, which makes sense because why would advertisers want to pay a premium to another middleman if they didn’t have to? There was a vtuber agency that collapsed recently when it came out that they were insolvent and had been defrauding many people they worked with along with various other corruption and abuse, and given how similar scandals aren’t uncommon and the need for creators to be doing the work of building themselves up as a business regardless, makes it seem like a pretty bad deal to have an all inclusive sort of contract with agencies.
Most youtubers are businesses owned by corporate networks. The person on screen is just the talent pretending to be an organic channel.
Obligatory Micro video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJ-rRXWhElI
I don’t understand why people are so shocked and horrified when it turns out that people who do entertainment for a living have been professional entertainers the whole time.
It’s because YouTube used to be mostly independent creators, even when people first started making money off it. That was the sales pitch.
I really honestly do miss youtube before it got monetised. Yeah the content overall was probably worse, but it was also in it’s baby shoes, but only seeing videos because beople wanted to make the video hit so different. Now it’s all commercials and talking about possible commercials, don’t say the nono words. And don’t talk bad about anyone, because maybe they’ll sponser them someday.
Oldtube is still there, if you know where to look. Independent creators in the unfiction genre are still putting out gold that beats the hell out of the mass-produced FNAF/mascot horror/Scrimblo Files knock-offs. Kane Parsons, Alex Archives, Alex Kister, Mister Manticore, Remy Abode, Kris Straub, the list goes on. Alex Archives even stated that his entire body of work, both Ted’s Caving Journal and Hollow Birds, uses practical effects, free software, and free tutorials.
Most of them are pretending that they aren’t corporate. YouTubers are generally trying to keep up the illusion of authenticity, which on YouTube usually includes pretending that you’re on your own.
I mean, the vast, vast majority of entertainment media is an act. Do you watch Top Gear and assume that everything they did happened organically?
No, but the point is that tv shows or movies generally don’t pretend like that.
I dont care if they are a 1 person business or a small team. What im talking about is when a Giant multinational corporation buys up 1000s of youtube channels. I want to watch 1 person or a small team not a big talent corp
Veritasium is partially owned by Vulture Capitalists.
Is that a true fact?
Most?
Yeah, was gonna say this. Like what YTs are y’all watching? My subscriptions and recommendations are randos playing games with their friends, memes, cat vids, and randos talking about interesting topics or the latest shitty Tiktok trend that I can be horrified by. I’m very lost as to everyone only finding these talent/corporate YTs.
I definitely have encountered the corporate YTs in the VTuber community, and I honestly think that’s why I hate Agency VTs so much compared to indie VTs. Watching Hololive/Kurosanji is like watching a bunch of coworkers play Mario Kart. Yeah, you “know” them and “get along”, but only in the superficial sense, cause you have to pay your bills. The shit always blows up later on anyway. Way more fun to watch some random with a mid setup play some obscure horror game by themselves or with actual friends.
99.9999999% of stats are made up.
OOP found out his favorite Vtuber is actually a corpo ad platform.
Even then, it’s probably a fancy word for buying stats from some shady website.
what why would you link to it
I was linking to it to show all sorts of things that can be manipulated, but now that I look back to it, it does look like I’m promoting it. Yeah, I’ll remove it.
Don’t be jelly bc you can’t afford a talent agent
Removed by mod
You and your yes states
Currently watching a bunch of videos detailing the fall of PirateSoftware. Such a sad person.
No one actually succeeds on YouTube. They’re all just industry plants.
deleted by creator
Stopped reading after “if it’s promoted by YT it’s not worth watching”, that shit is based on your recently watched channels if your account settings aren’t all fucked up.
If you turn off history - yeah, you’ll get default recommendations and those are cancer. Probably the only good reason to turn history on. Even then, it’s a bandaid on a horrible UI that gets worse every update.I use YT in the weirdest way possible. I’m not subscribed to anyone and my feed and recommendations do all the lifting. It works really well for my needs. I hardly ever see shit i’m absolutely not interested in, and i find new thimgs that i am interested in. But when it logged me out and i saw the default youtube recommendations… Holy shit that is some nightmare shit. It’s just absolute clickbait ass content for children or tiktok adults.
You got lucky. In Germany it’s just right wing propaganda. It’s awful.
Pretty sure if you’re logged out every region will be like that by default. That, or at least full of news and questionable news “commentators”. YT loves that stuff.
