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kleinbl00  ·  2332 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Something is Wrong on the Internet

It totally would be. Check this out:

The first three lines make money. the rest never do. Youtube sells ad content on it but you get zero remuneration for a video with less than a million views. For a million views, you get a thousand bucks. Now watch this:

Let's hire an intern. Let's pay her a decent wage - call it $20 an hour. Let's throw some overhead on her ass - Let's call it 100%. Now let's assume that she can spend half her hour watching videos, and half her hour reporting on and categorizing the videos she's watched. My girl costs me $80 an hour to curate Youtube videos. Know what, though? I'm gonna shoot the moon. I'm going to give her a boss who manages nine of her friends, and I'm going to pay her boss $50 an hour. She's going to spot-check and silo the stuff her interns watch. She's got 100% overhead, too, and adds nothing to the process, but she's only 1/10th of the cost. My intern and her boss together can crank through 30 minutes of content an hour at a cost of about $90.

Now, producer-of-children's-videos. I'm going to charge you $3 a minute for every video you upload to my service. Remember, I'm paying out better - rather than $1000 for a million views, I'm paying out $1000 for 100,000 views. Hey, just to not be a dick how 'bout I reimburse you your review fees when you cross 10,000 views? That's a third of the way into the tail on my graph, deep in the nobody-cares-about-it corner of Youtube but you're break-even, even on your shittiest product. So. Is your 3 minute video worth $9? Is your 20 minute video worth $60?

If you're a human, fuck yeah it is. You spent all goddamn day on it. I've worked on professional channels (Smosh etc) where the burn rate is closer to $3k a minute. You wanna charge me $12 to upload that thing? take my money. But if you're a machine?

Poof. There goes the tail. There goes your algorithmic weirdness. And fuckin'A you just created jobs. You're not claiming one video is better than any other, you're just vouchsafing them against weirdness and copywright infringement.

You know, that shit you used to get from basic goddamn public access television before the Aynrandians took over entertainment.