Free Content
This is something personal to me. I’m not going to say I make a living off of YouTube, but a $100 check every few months certainly doesn’t hurt here or there. So, no, not a lot of YouTubers are rolling in it. Remember that self-employed individuals typically pay about 50% on taxes because they don’t break it up with regular pay checks. AdSense is currently split about 55-45, with content creators getting the short end of the stick. Not to mention, if you promote a company or a game, your audience is going to call you a sellout. So, if you want to make a living off of YouTube, you’re just going to have to expect to make people angry along the road.
Is that fair, though? Even with the ads rolling, it’s not like watching YouTube videos has to cost you anything. YouTube is a free platform. Yes, they have monetizing options now with things like YouTube Red. And once you get up to 1,000 subscribers, channels can put certain videos behind paywalls. But eventually, basically everything is going to be free. YouTubing isn’t a job you can take a holiday from either. Leaving a channel without any content for more than a week can result in massive unsubscription rates. Of course, this scales based on how often a channel typically uploads content, but that’s generally the number for most channels that upload on a regular basis. You don’t get to take a break from being a YouTuber if you make it your career, and straying ever so slightly from that schedule can damage a channel massively.
This is an attitude that the immediate nature of the Internet has cultivated through its typical ease of access to content. In living with the ready accessibility of everything else on the internet in any other platform, why wouldn’t viewers also make this assumption about their viewing content on YouTube? But it’s free. Is it inherently right to be critical of work that is entirely free? I don’t mean that free work should not be criticized; it definitely should. But is it fair that people who make content with little return for free consumption are forced into a brutal system of largely anonymous critiques and systematic judgement developed over years of watching existing and older creators already being somewhere better?
If this were a freeware program or open source software, the developer would hardly be getting the same reaction. Even if the program was doing poorly, the developer would still not be getting that reaction because they are offering a commodity to the public for free. Where, then, is the difference between offering a program and offering a source of entertainment? What have we trained ourselves into doing on YouTube that is different from any other source of free content?