CaPitalizm and ARt
The more I read up on Youtube and how it’s changed since the beginning, the more I realize how much of life is just about business.
There are so few people at the top of the food chain in terms of economics, but the rest of the world works entirely, and tirelessly, for those people at the top. Even for something like Youtube that is masked by an entreprenaurial facade, is completely controlled by others. While everyone who is doing the work that keeps the system going is wading around at the bottom seeing little to no profit, the people at the top are rolling in cash simply because they were on the inside when the deals were made.
Youtube isn’t even about the actual videos that are posted, it’s about ad revenue. The more videos posted, the more opportunity for ads, the more money Youtube makes off the companies trying to sell their goods. If you notice, all the ads on Youtube are for major corporations, there aren’t local ads being posted up there, even if it is a lot cheaper than getting a spot on television.
When there was a demand for the breakup of the oligarchical studio system in Hollywood, Youtube stepped up. Now that they’ve been around for years, businessmen have capitalized on it and turned it into a money making machine that is no longer about the individual but about the system that supports the channels. Multi-channel networks are the same to Youtube artists as agents are to actors and directors.
At the same time, when there are 600,000 videos being posted everyday on the international website that is Youtube, it is extremely difficult, on your own, to get noticed by the high volume of viewers. It seems so backwards to me that the artists are not the actual people making any good money — even though they are the ones being watched. The people making money are their economically trained counter parts who set up the platform for the artists to show their work. Why is it this way?
What is great in this day and age is that we have unions and guilds. The Internet Creators Guild is attempting to unionize all the people who work tirelessly to make a living as artists so that they actually get credit and money for the work they do. If they can manage to get ahold of the executives at Youtube and start resisting unethical treatment, fair wages for those working in the system might be a possibility. It worked with the auto industry in Michigan, why can’t it work in cyberspace? At the same time, it ended in Michigan very quickly and the whole place shut down because the executives figured out a way to make more money: move to Mexico where unions don’t exist yet. I trust that this program will take the reins on getting fair wages for people in internet content creation. Working for them would be a smart place to begin as an aspiring creator.
