And how creators make money.
Those shows live in their worlds. They usually have a person who is in charge of editorial, who is not necessarily writing most of this stuff, but doing the management of contract people. Then there is a production team that is in charge of turning it into something pretty. At Crash Course, the graphics are actually outsourced to an amazing company in Canada called Thought Café, so we don’t have to figure out how to do all of that.
I don’t suffer much in switching. I find that once I am in a meeting, as long as I can keep my fingers off of Twitter, I stay in the meeting. Then once I am out of the meeting and on unscheduled time, I sort of slip into creative mode. That might be an unproductive creative mode, where I am trying not to yell at somebody on Twitter. I have switched over to that by the way; that time used to be for yelling at people on Twitter, now it is for trying not to.
Oftentimes, I will be in a meeting where people are confused about what we should do, but it will be extraordinarily obvious to me because I’m thinking, “It doesn’t matter what that person or that advertiser wants. If we are going to lose credibility, support, and respect from the audience after this, then that costs way more than any mistake we could possibly make with an advertiser.” That is always the primary touch point for decisions — unless it’s family.Right. That makes sense to me.
In terms of money, it is also no. The monetization, AdSense, is really quite powerful. We get a lot of views and a lot of money comes in from those views. There are not platforms that share revenue like that. A lot of our traffic comes from the YouTube recommendation system and from search. There aren’t a lot of platforms outside of YouTube that drive traffic to videos with search. The 55 percent is a big deal.
I think that it is impossible to disentangle them. I think that a lot of YouTubers think of themselves as part of the YouTube community and not of YouTube the company. I think you can have that be a separation you make in your head, but I don’t think it is a separation that exists in the real world. The fact that it is our choice is what gives us a sense of freedom from the feeling of being in an actual autocracy, because we can always choose to leave. My businesses can’t choose to leave, but that is also kind of okay, in the same way that many people’s businesses couldn’t choose to leave a town. I try to understand the gravity and the significance of that relationship. It is bigger than most people think in terms of both business and our attention, which is the only thing that we have.
It is easier to see a shift when you look at two different platforms that have different algorithms, rather than YouTube alone. They may have different form factors or come into being at different moments in time. All that stuff tremendously impacts what kind of content gets made, what the culture of the platform is, how the creators behave, and what the creator’s incentives are., and in this case, the algorithm is a really important part of the medium.
One is the decisions of human beings, which is the only input that algorithms get. When you get a higher click-through rate and your video does better, that is not being determined by the algorithm, it is being determined by a bunch of human beings making decisions. As with all content creators — forever, because even magazine covers are like this — you have to market your content somehow.
It seems like you have to have a pretty analytical, logistical, and somewhat ruthless brain for all of this. You know what the algorithms want, you know what the platforms want, you know what the economics of the platforms are — because at the end of the day you are still trying to get paid, I assume — and you have to be a creative. You, in particular, have to manage 50 people through that process.
On that note, one of the worst aspects of journalism for me is that sometimes it feels like a zero-sum game. “Everyone is going to publish an iPhone review, and I have to make sure they pick mine.” Do you think about other science YouTubers as your competition, or that they are still in the community with you? What is that relationship like?
That is maybe the third time you have mentioned the algorithm as a sort of external force that will make a decision. I am picking up on that because I know you mentor a lot of creators, and you make a lot of videos about the platforms and the natures of the platforms. When I talk to folks, they really do see the algorithm as some external force that may or may not bless them. I’m always kind of like, “Yes, but no. There is a part of it that is in your control.
The main thing is, how do you select great topics? And then, how do you deal with success? It is easier to talk about because it is more transferable from person to person. Success is so different now than it was 10 years ago. I don’t have that experience. I don’t know what it would be like to try and start right now.
I try to talk about it in those terms. Also, if you go all in, you have to be able to come out, to some extent, whether that is every six months or every day. You have to have pieces of your self-worth and identity that are not connected to the 100,000 people that may love you, but who you have never met.
To talk about TikTok, let’s first talk about Instagram, because I think it is fascinating. Instagram never shared revenue with creators. Well, it has, but it has done it in weird little temporary ways. It has never been like YouTube in that, “We are going to create a stable economic ecosystem where you know how much you are making, and you are making that money based on how effectively we can sell ads against your content.
TikTok saw that and it was like, “Okay, why would we share a portion of our money with creators if Instagram figured out how to do it without sharing anything?” I think if you say that you are screwing yourself over, because you are saying only certain kinds of content that are good at selling stuff are going to be economically viable on your platform. At the same time, brand deals are working very well on TikTok. I don’t know if that is permanent. It seems it doesn’t need to be as aspirational.
TikTok is pretty good at converting. I get that. The success of YouTube just leads me to believe that the savvy move is to share revenue rather than create these static pools. But that is a very hard message to sell when you have gone from losing money every year to just printing cash. It is a hard sell to say, “Okay, we’re printing cash, but now we are going to give away half of it.”
That was a great episode with Neal. He’s great and I think he is very honest. But he only gets to say that because he already has the thing, and he can just promise the next thing forever. TikTok can’t say that because they don’t have the thing.They don’t have an AdSense model that shares revenue like that. They just have a creator fund. YouTube already has the model everyone wants.
That’s law. TikTok’s problem is, “Can we get shareholders on board with the idea that this would be a more dynamic, long-lasting ecosystem if we pay creators?” Not just putting the burden of monetization on them, but also doing some work to actually pay them more than 0.0000-whatever cents per view. There is just not enough infrastructure built up there. It feels more like the relationship between Facebook and its creators, where it is sort of like, “They are going to do whatever they are going to do.”
I remember that happening with YouTube, too. We loved YouTube early on. There was never any drama between YouTube and YouTubers in the beginning. I think it’s been interesting, because it isn’t really when creators start to feel that way, it’s when audiences start listening to them about it. They think that TikTok is a little company fighting with the big dogs. It’s like an underdog story, and that feels really good. They think, “Well, give them time and some slack. TikTok is a tiny, little company.” As an American, you just don’t have any other interactions with ByteDance.
I just realized I should say this. To the people I know at TikTok who are going to listen to the conversation, I want to say I’m sorry, this is how I feel. I would love to not feel this way. I would love to feel like you have the capacity to take on the complexity of the challenges you face. I would love to feel like you want to support creators the same way that YouTube does, but I don’t.Yes. I do feel like I love the TikTok community hugely, but this is where it gets complicated.
They all need to have midlife crises. The tech recommendation algorithm on YouTube needs to buy a convertible and be young again.with Marques [Brownlee], and I have talked to him about this as well. YouTube thinks that our videos should be shown to 97 percent men. When we look at the actual stats in the tech industry, 70 percent of purchase decisions in tech are made by women.
YouTube did this to TV. It was a much better user experience than TV, but now it has spent the last 10 years trying to create systems that make it not just pure Candyland, “We will promote whatever stuff does well even if it is extraordinarily destructive to society.” That leaves space open for somebody to come along with a set of features that is even better for users, that is also easy and fun to use.
I think that we all underestimate how powerful these platforms are. Generally, they don’t leverage that power for much more than increased revenue. The best actors out there try to use that power to bury misinformation. That is some of the work that they do, but almost all of it is, “how do we get people to stick to our platform to show them more ads.
This is my whole thing. We have talked about a lot of platforms. Twitter has never paid anybody a dime.Ultimately, if you believe that people are rationally, economically motivated, no one should tweet. Only disaster can befall you, and you will never make any money. Yet the whole media industry is like, “Let’s tweet!”Yes. None of this makes sense. We had
When Complexly and I have these conversations, which I even said in a meeting today, we are impact-focused. We would rather make a little bit of money from a lot of people, than a lot of money from a little bit of people. That is a reason why not to. Diversification feels very good though, and being able to make stuff you couldn’t otherwise also feels very good. There are a bunch of people in my company who want to do stuff we cannot afford, and we need to make more money for them.
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