Shira ovide
08/06/2021 15:54
Clarín.com
The New York Times International Weekly
Updated 08/06/2021 3:54 PM
This question will sound ridiculous, but it isn't:
Is YouTube a hit?
Please hold back the boos.
It's hard to imagine the Internet without
YouTube.
Youtube blog (Illustrations: Christopher DeLorenzo / Google)
Buying the video site in its relative infancy was one of the smartest things
Google ever
did
.
But after almost 15 years of being a part of Google, the most successful money machine in the history of the Internet, it is still not clear that YouTube has reached its financial potential, both for itself and for everyone involved in its vast economy. digital.
Two facts:
The money YouTube keeps from selling ads - its main source of income - was about
$ 11.2 billion
last year, not much more than the advertising revenue of
ViacomCBS
, a mid-level American television company that owns the CBS television network.
Twitter
, which is not that good of money, gets about
twice the
average ad sales of each of its users compared to YouTube.
No one should feel bad about YouTube.
Yes that's fine.
But it says something about the vibrancy of the internet that YouTube is probably the most vibrant economy online and that it's still hard to call it an unreserved financial winner.
And if YouTube doesn't win, its masses of video creators won't either.
The great promise of the
Internet
was to give anyone the opportunity to earn a living doing what they love, but YouTube shows how difficult that dream was.
If YouTube isn't living up to expectations, it means the internet isn't either.
Let me dig a little deeper into how weird YouTube is in one important respect:
It pays some of the people and companies that stock its virtual shelves with products.
On
Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, and Twitter
, their products are free - with a few exceptions - in the form of our goofy memes, engagement party photos, and beauty tutorials that we post.
For YouTube compliant video creators, the site typically gives these individuals and organizations about
55%
of the money from the ads that appear in or around their videos.
Thanks to
YouTube's
revenue
sharing
and other ways that content creators make money from videos, it has most likely brought more income to people online than any other site on the Internet.
This is impossible to prove.
People make money less directly by building an audience on sites like Instagram and TikTok, but
YouTube
is still the place people turn for income online.
Perhaps YouTube, especially after revelations several years ago that company ads were appearing in videos promoting anti-Semitism and other horrible views, has been less aggressive than companies like
and
when it comes to posting commercial messages. everywhere.
This is a good thing, even if they are missed opportunities for YouTube and video creators to make more money.
The bottom line is that
YouTube
makes a lot of money for itself and for video creators, and its revenue is growing very rapidly, but the numbers are still mediocre relative to its size and influence.
The fact that I mention YouTube in the same paragraph as midsize TV company ViacomCBS and Twitter ... well, that says something about how YouTube has disappointed for some time.
YouTube's share of ad revenue is also less than half of
Netflix's
annual revenue
.
Those figures don't count YouTube's revenue from other sources, including subscriptions, which the company doesn't regularly disclose.
If YouTube hasn't reached its financial potential so far, what does that say about the rest of the digital world?
If the work of people reads like my colleague from
The
New York Times
Taylor Lorenz, who chronicles labor Internet, it
is easy to
see that there
may be a mismatch between the promise of the Internet economy and reality.
Some people make a good living from their creations on YouTube or other apps, but many others are
constantly struggling
to earn money and burn out.
It's hard to stand out in the sea of people making dance videos on
TikTok
, streaming video games on
Twitch,
or
hosting
talk shows on
YouTube
, and it's always been that way for the creative professions.
Except that digital optimists wanted to believe that the Internet would make it easier and democratized for anyone to find their fans and their calling.
That's why YouTube finances matter to the rest of us.
If YouTube isn't quite working, then neither is the promise of the internet.
c.2021 The New York Times Company
Look also
The White House recruits an army of influencers to fight the anti-vaccines
A doctor is the most influential disseminator of fake news about the coronavirus
