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Comment by manicdee | Hacker News Reader

I am fully dependent on my employer’s ability to find repeat business. I have personally suffered when one of the principals of a business that employed me upset one of their main suppliers/licensors and our ability to run the business was withdrawn overnight.

The same holds true for retailers in malls, or property managers. There are many lines of work where you are entirely reliant on things that you can’t reasonably have second sources for.

Blaming people for deriving significant income from YouTube is putting the cart well and truly before the horse.

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You cannot compare "content creation" on Youtube with entrepreneurship. There are different sets of rules.

Youtube does not employ "creators". Creators suffering from anxiety because of endangered income should first get help and then get a real job. Youtube is just another "get rich quick" scheme if done irresponsibly.

What!? How the heck do you think YouTube even makes money? It's exclusively through the content their users create, so they should treat them with some fucking decency. Not communicating with your users, or sending some canned responses at best is not. Just because they don't sign a formal work contract doesn't mean they can treat the users like complete shit.

Youtube is just another "get rich quick" scheme if done irresponsibly.

Most non-professional YouTube channels start as a side project. Someone thinks of something they'd like to make videos about, starts in their spare time, and grows a following. Then the money starts to come in, and eventually it's enough for them to quit their day job and work on their YouTube channel full time. Sometimes they start a business and employ people to help along the way.

If that was a SaaS app instead of a video channel there'd be no question about whether or not it's entrepreneurial. The fact they're making videos instead of code doesn't change anything.

I agree that if your hobby starts making more money than your actual job it's really attractive to think of a media startup then. It doesn't mean though that you just switch. You have to know how volatile it might be. You have to consider possibilities of outcomes. You have to calculate risks. If you want to let your hobby make money for you then you have to do it professionally. And for that you need major investments and a business model. Completely relying on views count is a bad business model. Being paid for writing actual code is different to talking about writing code in videos and being paid eventually.

I don't think you understand the amount of money we're talking about here. There are YouTube channels that started as side projects that have grown in to multi-million dollar profit businesses. Keeping that as a side project because "views count is a bad business model" would be completely crazy.

Relying on YouTube is no different to relying on Google, or Amazon, or any service that people build successful businesses on. Yes, there's a risk having a single critical factor, but that doesn't automatically mean the risk is too great to still be worthwhile.

The real problem here is that YouTube has an effective monopoly as the only working platform for monetized online video. If that's the business you're in then you have to use YouTube.

> The real problem here is that YouTube has an effective monopoly as the only working platform for monetized online video.

Vimeo has their VOD service. It works very differently, but still...

Vimeo and Youtube are two very different things, like a sniper rifle and a machine-gun is. Vimeo is primarily a video hosting service, whereas Youtube is a publishing hub.

> Vimeo and Youtube are two very different things, like a sniper rifle and a machine-gun is.

That is actually a great simile. :)

YouTube creators have built those multi-million dollar businesses on top of a free service, you can't expect many rights when you don't pay to use the product, regardless of whether or not you're making money for the host.

I can see both sides of the argument, but developing an application and paying to host it on AWS or GCP is different to creating A video and uploading it somewhere for free.

So you are somehow claiming that YouTube offered these services purely out of the kindness of their hearts and didn't receive any form of revenue whatsoever?

How many youtubers are "multi million dollar businesses"?

I imagine a there are a fair number of them, all of the top ten are earning over $10M per year.

http://uk.businessinsider.com/highest-paid-youtube-stars-201...

What are “the rules”?

Who employs entrepreneurs?

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