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Comment by WJW | Hacker News Reader

It's already free to watch even the smallest channel on youtube, the income from the largest channels subsidizes the servers needed to transcode the millions of videos that will only ever get a single view.

The "problem" is that most creators have miniscule audiences. The "transparent and fairly" returned ad profits for someone with ten viewers is never going to be very large. The power law in entertainment has always been large; the big artists make tens of millions and everyone else scrapes by. The internet has not changed that dynamic.

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> the income from the largest channels subsidizes the servers needed to transcode the millions of videos that will only ever get a single view.

Exactly. I had 3 different channels, in different points in my life, but the fact that I could, for free, upload a video and have it hosted and then (possibly) watched worldwide on almost any device, it's bonkers. If I had to create an app or pay for storage/upload/etc, it would be impossible.

It wouldn't be impossible. You could rent a VPS for $20/month and serve thousands of people your videos

A lot of coders tend to think of videos as being these big, unwieldy things since we used to download them when computers and the internet were a lot weaker. An hour of 480p video is about a gig, 1080p is only about 3 gigs

> You could rent a VPS for $20/month and serve thousands of people your videos

That's considering:

- Transcoding for all types of devices

- Having apps that work on all those devices

- Being one app that people already use/already have an account to it to reduce friction

- Being in an environment where people already are, and where they can discover your content without you telling them about it

Sounds kind of ok-ish to me. But for MANY people (most, I would say), $20 bucks is multiple meals, and is a significant spending considering for quite a while, nobody is going to see the content.

If I pay $0 to upload and nobody sees it, I don't lose much.

Yeah, you give up a lot of those bonuses (but not all of them, considering the state of web video..)

On the plus side, though, if your videos start pulling in ad money, you keep all of it. And you don't have to worry about getting locked out of your Google account because of some overzealous bot misinterpreting a tiny scrap of background music or conversation about chess piece colors

Of course! I absolutely agree with you on those points.

Except that it's not about profits, it's about culture and quality of life. And pursuit of profit at the expense of everything else reliably destroys both.

It's also about closing one of the few paths that the poor can use to stop being poor.

Creating video content for others to consume is one of the least likely to succeed avenues for a poor person to stop being poor, even if YouTube handed over every cent of advertising revenue to the video’s creators.

reading between the lines, it seems like the OP's idea is basically a form of UBI that allows creatives to engage in content creation regardless of the market-fit and commercial viability of the content.

While I like the principal of a UBI, people not living in poverty, it strikes me that OP's reasoning is one of the reasons why I see issues with a UBI. Who is going to want to work a factory/service job when you can live comfortably pumping out low quality videos that average 10 views?

Maybe it would drive income equality and better remuneration for those roles. Maybe we'd simply lose a lot of productivity. Who knows?

That’s the point of UBI. Currently, the wages for those roles are low because they were born to poorer parents. But if given the opportunity not to, then the wages for those roles would go up so that there aren’t so low simply because people lost the ovarian lottery.

no, more like state-subsidised highbrow-culture-focused TV channel, which will have to be heavily curated and hard to get into, but which will pay reasonable money to the lucky ones who managed to get commissioned

UBI would provide peanuts for everyone and devalue the content even more. Everybody and the fleas on the backs of their dogs will be streaming and influencing.

> And pursuit of profit at the expense of everything else reliably destroys both.

So who decides which artists are about "culture and quality of life" and should be paid to do whatever they like doing? You? Some committee? The population?

Because right now it's the population. You might not agree with the choices they make, but that's a different issue.

I'm not sure I'm following how what you're saying is applicable to people making money making videos on YouTube?

I’m guessing sites like YouTube could use their machine learning army to make it all a bit more meritocratic. In the last there were big logistical challenges and costs to making a movie. In YT there are no real costs. I’m not sure the power law has to exist on a place like YT.

> make it all a bit more meritocratic

The only way to make it more meritocratic is to completely remove algorithms. But that could make it even harder for smaller channels to grow.

> In the last there were big logistical challenges and costs to making a movie. In YT there are no real costs.

Exactly, anyone who has a good idea and a smartphone can record and upload to Youtube. Can it be simpler than that? Of course, in some places people don't have internet/smartphones, but that's not something that it's up for Youtube to fix

I assume YouTube is already rewarding content creators based on how much the world’s people watch them. If so, can it get more meritocratic?

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