This question will sound ridiculous, but it isn’t: Is YouTube a
success?
Please hold your boos. It’s hard to imagine the internet without
YouTube. Buying the video site in its relative infancy was one of the smartest
things Google ever did. But after nearly 15 years of being part of Google, the
most successful money machine in internet history, it’s still not clear that
YouTube has fulfilled its financial potential both for itself and everyone
involved in its vast digital economy.
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Two data points: The money that YouTube keeps from selling
advertisements — its main source of income — was about $11.2 billion in the
past year, not much more than the ad revenue of ViacomCBS, a mid-tier American
TV company that owns the CBS television network. Twitter, which is not so hot
at money, pulls in roughly double the ad sales on average from each of its
users compared with YouTube.
No one should feel bad about YouTube. Yeah, it’s fine. But it
says something about the vitality of the internet that YouTube is probably the
most vibrant economy online and it’s still hard to call it an unqualified
financial winner. And if YouTube isn’t winning, its masses of video creators
also won’t be.
The internet’s big promise was to give anyone a shot at making a
living from doing what they love, but YouTube shows just how elusive that dream
turned out to be. If YouTube isn’t quite living up to high hopes, that means
the internet isn’t, either.
Let me dig a little deeper into how odd YouTube is in one important
respect: It pays some of the people and companies that stock its virtual
shelves with products.
At Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat and Twitter, we make
their products for free — with some exceptions — in the form of our silly
memes, photos from engagement parties and beauty tutorials that we post. For
video-makers that meet YouTube’s standards, the site typically hands over to
those people and organizations about 55 percent of the money from ads that
appear in or around their videos.
Because of YouTube’s revenue sharing and other ways for content
creators to make money from videos, it most likely has delivered more income to
people online than any internet site ever. (This is impossible to prove. People
do make money in less-direct ways from building an audience on places such as
Instagram and TikTok, but YouTube remains a go-to spot for people to earn an
income online.)
Maybe YouTube, particularly after revelations several years ago
that companies’ advertisements were appearing in videos that promoted anti-Semitism
and other horrific views, has been less aggressive than companies such as
Facebook and Twitter about shoving commercial messages everywhere. This is a
good thing, even if those are missed opportunities for YouTube and video-makers
to earn more money.
The end result is that YouTube makes a lot of money for itself
and video-makers, and its revenue is growing very quickly, but the numbers
remain kind of meh relative to its size and influence.
The fact that I even mentioned YouTube in the same paragraph as
the middling TV company ViacomCBS and Twitter ... well, that says something
about how YouTube has underwhelmed for some time. YouTube’s cut of ad revenue
is also less than half the size of Netflix’s yearly revenue. (Those figures
don’t count YouTube’s income from other sources, including subscriptions, which
the company does not regularly disclose.)
If YouTube has so far fallen short of its financial potential,
what does that say about the rest of the digital world? If you read the work of
people such as my New York Times colleague Taylor Lorenz, who chronicles the
internet’s labor force, it’s easy to see that there may be a mismatch between
the promise of the internet economy and the reality.
Some people do earn a good living from their creations on
YouTube or other apps, but many others are constantly hustling for peanuts and
burning out.
It’s hard to stand out in the sea of people making dance videos
on
TikTok, livestreaming video games on
Twitch or hosting YouTube talk shows,
and it has always been that way for creative professions. Except digital
optimists wanted to believe that the internet would make it easier and more
democratic for anyone to find their fans and their calling.
That’s why YouTube’s finances matter to the rest of us. If
YouTube isn’t quite working out, then the promise of the internet isn’t,
either.
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