Living off your content creation in 2019, is it still manageable?
The emergence of sharing platforms such as Youtube for videos, Instagram for photos or Medium for writings enabled the propagation and made it easier to create content.
Today, 95 millions pictures are uploaded every day on Instagram and 300 hours of videos are uploaded every minute on Youtube.
And this tendency is not yet to stop, in a world where the dream job of an astronaut is now making place for the one of a Youtuber.
However, more and more polemics are arising from the use of these platforms, as we could have heard angry voices concerning demonetization of video content, the lack of privacy or the surge of fake news and filter bubbles on prominent social media.
These sources of frustration trigger new debates on the viability of these tools, for the future creators as long as for the ones historically present from the birth of such platforms.
I will therefore try to synthesize the main challenges creators are facing on these mainstream sharing networks.
1. Creators only get a fraction of the advertisement revenue.
First of all, it is necessary to understand the economical model that these networks rely on.
I will take the example of Youtube for this part which is, from my point of view, the most evocative of the current situation.
Initially, Youtube has been thought out to become THE ultimate video hosting platform, with a hint of social networking features such as the use of comments, likes and shares. The why hidden behind the second most visited website on the planet after Facebook being that everyone should be able to upload and share their creations to the world. After almost 15 years of existence, we can say with complete objectivity that this bet has been won. This can be partly explained by the support of Google who, in order to improve the profitability of their services (the majority of them being free) have created a tool allowing publishers to target a certain audience with surgical precision.
I am of course referring to Google Ads (formerly Google Adwords).
For information, Google is not the only one to use this business model. Instagram also has its own advertising agency, allowing announcers to promote their products or services in the News Feeds of a predefined population via discriminating factors such as age, gender, location etc…
The retribution model of these tools is fundamentally pyramidal, where the advertisement revenues are drained by the platforms to be partly redistributed to the creators.
Besides the fact that part of the initial revenue is being amputated to the detriment of the creators, it’s also possible for their content to be demonetized for copyrights and right holding issues.
In Europe, with the imminent arrival of Article 13. — well explained by Youtube Creators in this video, those acts of demonetization should be more frequent. Indeed, the Youtube algorithm filtering content won’t be able to distinguish between the critique of a movie or the review of a song for example, and the intended sharing of the full work.
Consequently, the video will be either partly demonetized, lose all associated revenue or even not allowed to be published in the first place. This alone rises the question of the exception of the quotation right, that we will mention in a future article.
In this video, BrainStuff — HowStuffWorks addresses what we will discuss next: product placement allowing creators to live from their productions, without the support of traditional ads.
2. Is product placement viable and not too elitist?
Product placement is a marketing technique that uses the display of one or many products on different supports, mainly visual, such as pushing forward a certain model of car or a particular watch in a film or a tv show.
Overall, it seems like an interesting measure as it insures the influencer a guaranteed source of income in exchange of a personalized message on the said product or brand. The clear advantage for the latter resides in the very receptive audience because the brand is not promoting its product itself but via the special relationship the influencer has with his/her public. The propagation of the sponsoring message won’t be impeded by the use of an ad-blocker or by a restrictive policy on copyrights by the platforms either because of the direct bi-lateral relationship between the brand and the influencer. Finally, the brand can ride on the gain of popularity that is associated with the influencer in the future. What else?
But unfortunately, it is not all so shiny for everyone. As announcers are more and more demanding towards the audience, they can send partnership offers that have little or no link between the creators and their activity/industry. This can be detrimental for them if they accept the offer nonetheless in order to insure some revenue.
Furthermore, in 2017, close to 60% of influencers were paid less than $100 per collaboration and 90% were winning less than $5000 per year via partnering with brands this way. One has to beware of the survival bias taking place in this particular industry, letting you think that partnering with brands will also be an easy solution, where the activity of creating content is already highly elitist. As the famous saying goes, many are called but few are chosen.
Lots of people forget that being a creator doesn’t always mean being an influencer. An influencer is an active person on social networks who, by their status, their position or their media exposition is capable of influencing opinions and consuming habits in a marketing goal. To be an influencer, it is necessary to dispose of a large enough audience in order to attract announcers, which definitely takes a lot of time and effort to do so.
Finally, being an influencer is a job in itself, asking for a certain professionalism behind cameras to manage important tasks such as accounting, public relations or even political correctness.
3. Tipping platforms, what are their limits?
In 2013, a new type of crowdfunding platforms arose. The main one coming to mind being Patreon, where creators can be supported by what we call “tippers”. This tipper will have the option, every month, to give a few bucks to the creators(s) of their choice so they can rely on this income as well to ensure their activities. This is even more possible thanks to a kind of snowball effect where many people will pledge a few dollars each month, amounting sometimes to the equivalent of a salary that is redistributed to their favorite person.
Platforms like Youtube or Twitch feature their own donation-based models where you can subscribe for a ~$5 donation every month but this system is leaning more towards streamers (people broadcasting their activities live through video).
This system is in theory very interesting and as all work deserves a reward, this gives the liberty to the viewer to set himself how much this work is worth. Earning your life through your own creation is the ultimate goal of the content creator but in practice, it’s a different story. In effect, these platforms also act as intermediaries and usually take a commission from the money earned by the creators. As of 2019, Patreon and similar tipping platforms take around 5% of direct payments made by tippers and a few options are available once the creator wishes to cash out the money he accumulated on his Patreon creator account via payment processing services like banks, Paypal, Stripe etc.. The ideal situation would be for the integrality of the revenues to be redistributed to the creators, without any intermediary taking a cut.
The other issue with revenues stemming from this kind of system is the dependency that the creator develops for the tips. If for any reason people stop their monthly payments or if his account is deleted/put on hold, he very well might be in a difficult stance. This happened many times and raised the question of censorship applied by the platform on some of their creators where their supposed neutrality can be debatable.
Besides, millenials, students and new generations coming into the digital space dispose of limited financial resources and donating even the smallest sums every month to dozens of their favorite creators is hardly imaginable.
Thus, they would have to make concessions which is also a hard choice in itself. The creators living off those platforms are therefore relying and targeting a more mature audience, which in turn can orientate the way they create content to favor a certain demographic, limiting the array of content they would have created in the first place if finances were not a problem.
At last, the high correlation between the size of a creator’s community and the number of tips they will earn every month sends us to a non-egalitarian system where small creators hardly benefit from the notoriety and attraction that more famous people get, as they usually get the majority of the tips.
Conclusion
Living from your content creation in 2019 is possible but can still be a difficult journey. Historically, hosting platforms have been thought out to share digital content and were not exclusively destined to content creators or at least in the modern sense of the term as they became a class in their own right in this ecosystem. This means that the model initially imagined by these platforms is now being confronted with new expectations from their users.
The current system, increasingly modeled on the television one, seems to favor mainly advertisers and giving too little power to the end user. This difference between what’s delivered and what’s expected translates into a rise in the use of ad-blockers (in 2016, more than 20% of 16 to 34 years old were using one) and the search for alternatives to consume, share and monetize digital content. This is particularly the case with the emergence of the tipping and crowdfunding platforms that we mentioned earlier. Unfortunately, these standards all apply commissions and intermediary fees altering the revenue that’s being generated by the solely presence of the content creators in the first place and only a fraction of people actually succeed in making a stable revenue out of it.
With Sinaps, we tried to implement a system that is tackling these issues thanks to the introduction of a peer-to-peer retribution architecture, allowing for the majority of the revenue and its generation to be the decision of the end user.
In our next article, we will explore the complex question of the functioning of content suggesting algorithms.
A small sharing of this article is, in the end, the only tip I am asking from you :)
Thank you for your time.
Thomas, founder @ Sinaps
