Internet was supposed to enable individual authors to reach an audience and get paid. For example, see this distributed system conceived by Robert Kahn, of TCP/IP fame, in a patent filed in 1993 (6,135,646).
The technology that was supposed to decentralize commerce and media instead led to a much tighter concentration. Most ad revenue goes through Google or Facebook. The local newspaper has died while the New York Times captures a larger (and ever-more-outraged?) national audience. Nasim Aghdam had no practical way of getting paid for her media productions other than going through YouTube. When the righteous folks at YouTube decided that they didn’t like her content and “demonetized” her, the Iranian refugee went on a shooting spree at the YouTube HQ.
In a world where robots, perhaps overseen by a few low-wage humans in countries where their understanding of English and American culture is limited, can demonetize, doesn’t the long-term trend favor the biggest publishers? A traditional big media newspaper or TV station won’t be demonetized because there is too much at stake for a Google, Facebook, YouTube, et al. They can write something inflammatory or edgy and even if a robot misinterprets it the ads still display. But there is no real financial consequence to Google from demonetizing an individual author (see Ann Althouse’s personal tale, for example).
Except maybe for people whose production is limited to cat videos, does this mean that in the long run we will only be able to see material that has been filtered through the biggest (and primarily the traditional) media outlets?
Related:
Close, it’s actually the advertisers that do the filtering and always have done the filtering.
There’s also the Patreon/make your living elsewhere arrangement.
Be it the advertisers or YouTube, the decision to back the PC “mainstream” media over independent creators — the decision to back censorship and suppression over free expression — is a decision to their own detriment. Anyone who wanted to want Fake News CNN, MS Nothing But Crap or the Always Bullshit Channel, would already be watching cable news or going to those organization’s websites for recaps on demand.
YouTube was built on being a vehicle for the every man to have a direct outlet for videos — the very namesake You and Tube denotes that. It grew to what it is today because it was just that. People go on YouTube for independent commentary, DIY food reviews, nasty stuff, weird stuff, stupid stuff, cat videos, shit videos, real stuff and everything that they don’t get and cannot get on the dinosaur media. Well… that and illegally streamed (pirated) movies — especially in the early days. Nobody goes on YouTube for cable news. And, their legacy advertisers need to decide if they want to reach the consumers of new media which is fast eclipsing the cable dinosaurs. Nobody is going to love YouTube more because of their censorship and suppression of edgy, sensitive or offensive material. Their advertisements won’t be any good when they are pegged to content nobody wants to watch whether YouTube favors them or not.
The morons running YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and all the others need understand two things. #1 No social media company is too big to fail. You’ll go away faster than you can blink as soon as you are no longer cool — no matter how much praise the establishment sings of you. Just look at Myspace. Oh, and did Facebook’s stock just lose 25% of it’s value? #2 Betting on the dying legacy media and their cheer leaders is betting on the wrong horse. In 20 years, I guarantee there won’t be CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, PBS and FOX. There will likely be two of those left to share a shrinking pond. Cable News had their heyday just like William Randolph Hearst’s newspapers had their heyday. It’s the late Cretaceous, the asteroid has already hit the Yucatan and you are betting on the Dinosaurs? Like it or not it is the tiny little mammalian critters’ time now!
Meanwhile, for the rest of us outside the jester filled boardrooms of Silicon Valley, here’s what we do when we go search for anything on YouTube. We paste the following behind every single search string.
-cnn -NYT -nytimes –msnbc –nbc -abc –cbs –pbs –bbc –fox -breitbart –today –guardian –time –euronews –cbc –bloomberg -dailymail -post -view – kimmel -guardian -jazeera -colbert -fallon -bet -salon -deadline
dwight–take heart! and check out The Young Turks on Youtube. The truth is getting out!
@zzazz: why would anyone watch a YouTube channel named after the group of mohamheadist fanatics that killed 1.5M Christians in the early 1900s? Yikes.
@zzazz: I totally enjoyed the Cenk & company’s meltdown after the 2016 elections. Puts a smile on my face every time I watch the replay.
@anon: Because they are so silly and so wrong it’s funny.
A WARNING TO YOUTUBE… the only reason you made it is because people flock there for cool stuff. The only reason stuff on your platform is cool is because the independent creator made independent videos for your platform and people can watch them uncensored. The only reason independent creators made shit for your platform is because their shit can go viral and they can become someone. When you start burying their shit beneath 50 pages of “authoritative” and “trusted” FAKE NEWS that you favor your creators and your users are going to FLEE YOUR PLATFORM.
If you want to be MySpace, you keep it up!
The web ad economy is bullshit and destined to fail. So is the surveillance economy. Don’t rely on ads for your income, get real cash for your work instead. Then you’ll be fine.
If ads were eliminated overnight and all web content-for-profit was put behind paywalls, new solutions would appear to make it easier to for people to pay with micro-payments. I won’t pay hundreds of dollars a year in subscriptions, but if there was an easy way to pay 1c or whatever Google pays per view to the author of an article/video, I’d gladly do it.
@Tiago: The web ad economy has already failed. Why do you think social media companies like Facebook sells user information and interest statistics for a living? You don’t pay to use FB. Nobody looks at ads pushed by FB. But a lot of companies will pay a lot of money to get a glimpse on the interests, habits and trends of 2.2 billion users.