Forbes' recent list of the richest YouTubers is
proof: It's filled with people who post clips about playing video
games or kids playing with toys. The top spot went to Daniel
Middleton, known as DanTDM. He's a 26-year-old British gamer - and he
earned $16.5 million (approximately Rs. 100.7 crores) last year.
But a new study finds that the odds of striking it
rich on Google-owned YouTube - or even making a modest living - are
vanishingly small.
Reaching the top 3.5 percent of YouTube's
most-viewed channels - hich means at least 1 million video views a
month - is worth only about $12,000 (roughly Rs. 7.82 lakhs) to
$16,000 (approximately Rs. 10.4 lakhs) a year in advertising revenue,
according to Mathias Bartl, a professor at the Offenburg University
of Applied Sciences in Germany, whose study is one of the first to
probe YouTube data for clues about how it works for creators.
Bartl found that it's gotten harder for new
creators to reach the top, as YouTube alone adds 300 hours of video
every minute and the biggest stars become more successful. The median
views per video has plummeted to 89 in 2016 from 10,262 a decade
earlier. At the same time, YouTube's biggest channels are gobbling up
more eyeballs. The top three percent of channels got 64 percent of
all views in 2006. A decade later, the top channels took 90 percent.
YouTube did not immediately respond to a request
to comment on the study.
What's happening on YouTube is occurring across
the Internet, where creators are finding that long odds of success in
the online world are not so different from IRL (Internet-speak for
"in real life").
In fact, they might be worse.
In music, song streaming services like Spotify and
Apple Music have mostly benefited superstar acts. No one needs to
fight a music label to get their song distributed, but getting
listeners is a different problem. Less than one percent of songs
represented 86 percent of the music streamed last year, according to
the market research firm Nielsen.
And since no one buys music these days, making
even a little money from streaming requires songs to be played
millions of times. That's hurt the music industry's
middle-of-the-road acts the most, the kind of musician who once could
eke out a decent living selling several thousand albums a year and
touring the nation without ever breaking into the mainstream.
Increasingly, such acts face the pressure of going viral or going
home.
In television, so many new shows are being made
that no one can watch them all; nearly 500 scripted original series
were aired last year. The traditional networks are being challenged
by cable outlets and streaming services. That's led to plenty of new
opportunities for actors and writers. But the new era has some
distinct challenges, including shorter seasons and less predictable
schedules that make it harder for many to make ends meet.
Competition among creators on YouTube is fierce,
and that's also led to trouble.
In February, YouTube suspended all advertising on
channels run by Logan Paul, one of its biggest stars, after a series
of controversies, including videos he made showing his visit to a
so-called suicide forest in Japan and jokes about eating Tide
detergent pods.
Another star, Felix Kjellberg, known as PewDiePie,
was found to have used a racial epithet and made anti-Semitic jokes
in some of his gaming videos. He was dropped from Google's lucrative
ad service for high-performing videos, and his planned series on the
pay channel YouTube Red was canceled.
Now, YouTube is taking steps that make it even
harder for creators at the bottom. The company recently said channels
need to reach 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 hours of watch time over
the last 12 months before they can start to earn money from ads.
YouTube said the change is aimed at discouraging videos with
objectionable or offensive content and that it would "affect a
significant number of channels."
Bartl's study did offer some hope for YouTube
aspirants - hints on how to boost the chances of financial success.
YouTube offers 18 genre-like categories, and selecting the right one
"is a highly significant predictor of channel success,"
Bartl wrote. The most popular categories over a decade were
entertainment videos, which took in 24 percent of all views, followed
by music and gaming categories.
But the chance of a channel making into the
rarefied top three percent was best for comedy; entertainment; how-to
and style; and gaming. It was worse for sports; education; nonprofits
and activism; and people and blogs.
Bartl also noted that YouTube's upper echelons
still featured a mix of both professional and user-generated videos,
writing that "it does give hope that YouTube's 'broadcast
yourself' rhetoric is not a complete fiction."
© The Washington Post 2018
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