Some More News - SMN: The Fragile Creator Economy

Episode Date: December 6, 2023

Sources:

Got blasted out like a fleshy super soaker filled with blood. Boy, what a fun news story. A lot of lessons learned. And that really was… some more news. Hey everybody and everybody else, thank you so much for watching. If you'd like to support us, you can like and subscribe, order one of my custom made banana duck statues, very erotic, and sign up for our Patreon at patreon.com slash some more news. And this… this feels backwards, right?

Am I being mementoed? Why are we... to get the Patreon plug at the top of the episode so as to boost our subscription count because our entire existence is perpetually dependent on a single company and by extension our entire lives constantly hang in a cloud of doubt? That's fair, I guess. The Fragile Internet Economy.

Hey, there's a whole episode left. I was tricked. Also, here's some news. Today, we're talking about the internet or digital economy. Sounds rad and exciting, like a banana that's also a duck. Ooh, interested in that. So to define it, the internet economy is the financial activity surrounding our online interactions with each other.

That used to be simple in that a person or persons would make a webpage offering some form of entertainment or product or hamster that also dances and then establish a direct relationship with the consumer through the webpage. But as the internet evolves, we now have middlemen facilitating that same relationship, in theory, to streamline the process

and make it so anybody can start a business, in theory. Kickstarter and Indiegogo help inventors and entertainers sell their work, be it a portable cooler that's also a Bluetooth speaker or a giant inflatable sculpture of Lionel Richie, or I don't know, I guess the concept of satire. But that system soon evolved from being a tool for startups and struggling creatives into a mainstream tactic

for consumer funding. Zach Braff went to Kickstarter and reached out to his fan base of Braffigans, Scrub Nubs, and Zachoffs to fund his indie film, Wish I Was Here. In 2013, Rob Thomas, not Matchbox 20, this one, yeah, raised $5.7 million on Kickstarter to make the Veronica Mars movie for all of the marshmallows, Veronica-ks, and Kristen Bell-ens out there.

In 2014, Shaquille O'Neal crowdfunded a sequel to his 1994 video game flop, Shaq Fu on Indiegogo for his Shaq hacks. Only one nickname for them. Oh, also bro Neals. Mystery Science Theater, a show that used to be carried by networks, now has to fundraise their seasons.

So it's a lot of big projects, all being made under one fundraising website. Kickstarter, a company that has raised over $7 billion for the projects they host, has less than a thousand employees. Patreon, which is kind of the new Kickstarter, but also not, but kind of is, but also not really, has under 500 employees.

Meanwhile, they funnel about 100 to $150 million a month, more than the average Vegas casino. All of these sites combined, this is an economy that is ultimately controlled by a very small number of people, just a few faceless CEOs calling the shots. And so that raises the question, what the hell happens if one of these companies

does something bad? This could range from a few things. For example, Kickstarter has hastily changed their policies and pulled funding campaigns based on their own judgment. You may agree with their moral judgments, but should it be up to them to make those decisions? Or how about when the company gets hacked? Or how about the time the Kickstarter

almost switched their entire site over to some crypto blockchain platform and then reversed that when everybody got pissed. Hey, that would have been really, really bad. All my economy's gone. You see what we're getting at here. It used to be that when a company went under, it would cost the jobs of everybody working

for that company. Now we have this ripple effect. For some companies, if they go down, so does an entire sector of the economy. Companies that I would argue shouldn't be that important. Etsy is a great place for folks to make and sell crafts, clothing, banana duck statues, and other items either as a side hustle

or in a lot of cases, a full business. However, ever since the site went public in 2015, it became less interested in helping sellers compared to appeasing stockholders. They changed their policies to include new rules like Etsy automatically advertising any seller they want without their consent and collecting a percentage of any sale those ads create.

That's on top of the usual processing and transaction fees Etsy tacks on. Etsy also encourages their sellers to offer free shipping on orders over $35 so they could be more like Amazon, expecting sellers to raise their prices to offset their costs. But since the majority of sellers were just small business owners or just regular ass people

that wanted to sell off a few goddamn banana duck statues that they made one afternoon, possibly while high, but possibly not. It drove them away and opened Etsy up to scammers. The sellers that do remain and don't want to go to eBay or Amazon have to play ball. A varnished wicker ball, but still. You see, Etsy probably should be in service to their sellers

but decided to compete as a retail chain. And the problem is that there's just no other way to sell stuff, is there? Amazon pushed out all other forms of online retail. And so if you're a third party seller, you probably have to deal with them. You have to let Amazon host your products and dictate their terms, which when you think about it

is the opposite of a free marketplace, isn't it? You'd think the people who love free markets would have something to say about that, besides calling out Jeff Bozo for owning the Washington Post. Good one, sir. Mighty fine humor bone there, guy. Amazon is so anti-free market

that they actually fine their third-party sellers if they find their product listed cheaper on another site. They are required to set their prices as low as possible if they want to use the basic functions of Amazon, such as having that little buy box in the corner of your product. And that's on top of sudden and disruptive policy changes that throw these sellers into financial disarray.

There's at least some hope here in the fact that the FTC is finally getting around to suing Amazon over these practices. But you know, a bit late and we'll see. And so far, we're just talking about the very direct money changing hands type of websites that hold way too much power over other companies. There's a lot more to this extremely fragile economy

that we'll get to after the ads. Not to mention what happens when one of these sites comes crashing down. But first, the ads. Hopefully for my banana duck statues and not Patreon. We just did that. Hey folks, are you ready to laugh? Oh, okay.

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Hello? Sorry, just chatting with my grandma. She sucks. Anyway, we were talking about the internet economy and how the slightest changes impact millions of lives. We mentioned what happens when corporate interest comes into certain spaces and the horrors of online retail. But that's not the limit to this digital economy,

not even close. This isn't a 13th floor digital economy where the limits are just out of town. No, we're talking matrix, baby, a whole world. That's why I'm wearing a leather trench coat under this outfit. And yes, yes, I am currently experiencing heat stroke. Do you all remember Vine?

Sure you do. It was TikTok for millennials or five second films, the app. Folks would successfully make careers out of entertainment and advertising through the platform, much like TikTok today. It got to the point that even Hollywood and the music industry took notice in order to insert those stars into film projects,

TV shows and record deals. But then Twitter bought Vine in 2012, then ended it, and then fired 9% of its workforce along with it. This meant that those who used Vine as part of their career were just done. No more Vine for them. While some folks at the time were able to pivot

to Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter when they added video features, many others had to start their followings over from the ground up. All because a few people decided to sell it and shut it down before regretting that same decision. Seems like that's a lot of change resting on the whims of a few jerks.

And that's the thing about this internet economy. It's not just tied to a few retail sites, is it? Social media is now an extension of that, having gone far past simple self-promotion. TikTok pays on average about 20 to 40 bucks per million views someone gets. That doesn't sound like much until you make that a full-time job putting out several videos a day.

On top of that, a lot of creators do sponsored videos to add extra money to that pile. And that's going to work out great for them until it doesn't. Trends come and go. People like PewDiePie went from getting hundreds of millions of views four or five years ago to only a million or two today.

Same thing happened to the Minecraft player Dream in even less time. And while we're not exactly upset about PewDiePie and Dream, that trend goes for all Let's Play style videos as Twitch is beginning to decline in numbers. And popularity aside, this is all while trying to tap dance to YouTube's every whim.

The site generated nearly $30 billion in ad revenue last year and pays creators through its partnership program and AdSense. But these creators constantly have to alter their content and strategies due to the platform's changing algorithms. Not to mention that they have to have ads on their videos, whether they like it or are even being paid for them. This is partially why creators make sponsored content

and chug it all down, sometimes literally, so they can make ends meet. Larger companies are quick to leverage or abuse copyright strikes against smaller creators to demonetize their videos and channels when they aren't trying to get it on the success of YouTube's platform themselves. In a statement, a Disney spokesperson said, when they aren't trying to get it on the success of YouTube's platform themselves.

In a statement, a Disney spokesperson said, "'We are pleased to announce that after a brief disruption, "'we have reached a new distribution agreement "'with Google's YouTube TV for continued carriage "'of our portfolio of networks.'" So once again, how is that a free market when YouTube is actually serving its bigger partners? Not just corporations either.

For example, one of their bigger content creators flat out doxxed another one on social media and YouTube took about six days to finally do anything about that. And it was barely anything. This is all to say that the internet is very fickle and that's without the help of, let's call it outside influences.

Oh, good. This, look, I'm not gonna spend much time on X, but I will say that there's a reason a lot of us order internet folk were immediately wary of the bullshit Musk peddled when he bought Twitter. It represents a long history of clueless rich people demolishing entire economic sectors based on their shit whims.

Remember when he said that he was going to share ad revenue with people and then only sort of did that? And then a lot of shitty people got mad because he only gave money to the people he personally liked I guess? I would argue that anybody expecting to make a living from tweeting probably hasn't been paying enough attention to how the internet works,

because there is no online company that's too big to fall apart overnight due to some random asshole's decision. I should know I was there. Funny or Die, The Onion, and many other content-making websites, comedy and otherwise, benefited from having Facebook as a platform,

while Facebook also benefited from having content for people to see that wasn't just uncle yell stuffs rants. But after digital advertising methods shifted and Facebook encouraged a pivot toward video rather than written articles, websites got zucked. This pivot to video, the impetus for which was Facebook's self-admittedly inflated numbers about video, caused layoffs across these websites,

including one that seems very familiar. This wasn't just comedy, but sports, journalism, and other content that used Facebook as a delivery system, and that Facebook essentially used as a reason for people to log on. And of course, we're currently seeing Elon Musk entertain every half-baked idea he's had since purchasing Twitter.

X is now screwing with people's newsfeeds to include accounts that aren't followed, briefly preventing non-users from viewing content without an account, putting a cap on the number of posts a person can view, considering removing the ability to block accounts, charging users to post, charging subscriptions for everything else. With Vine, Facebook, and Twitter as platforms,

it took the decisions made by one guy to congle fuck people's ability to make money online, either through content creation, promotion of services, or networking with others in their field. And these Congo fuckers not understanding that those users caused their platforms to become popular in the first place. And none of this would be that much of a problem

if it weren't for the fact that the internet is slowly beginning to replace all other mainstream media sources. Obviously, retail has long since moved online, but also more people watch YouTube than traditional TV. And more people are starting to watch TikTok than traditional YouTube. This is the future that we are blasting into here.

And it's kind of wild that there's no structure to protect the people building the actual product. And we're gonna talk about that after the ad break, because we need ads, because of all the stuff I've been saying. Thanks. Toot toot, to quote William Shakespeare, "'All aboard my throat.'"

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Gulp, gulp, gulp. Yum, yum, yum. Hey, we're back. We were talking about how so many regular folks have turned to the internet for money and how established companies and powerful folks have ruined those platforms for those aforementioned regular folks.

And the obvious question is, hey, why can't we get a union or something? We love unions right now. So what's the dillo? Well, we've tried. Back in 2016, there was an attempt at unionizing YouTubers through the Internet Creators Guild, but it dissolved in 2019 due to lack of funding

and people not joining out of fear of biting the hand that barely feeds them. In 2022, Etsy sellers formed a union, but out of the 5 million sellers, it only had 30,000 shops sign up at the time. Ultimately, the problem is that, technically speaking, these people don't work for these or any company. It's a freelance world, and so it's very hard

to organize anything resembling a union. In a lot of cases, that's not a bad thing. The entire point of owning a business is to not have a boss. But also, why does it still feel like they have a boss? In 2023, the Creators Guild of America was formed to help internet creators advocate for fair pay and ownership of their content, but it flat out says they aren't a labor union.

They won't help with collective bargaining towards any platform, nor do they have any legal privileges that unions have. So yeah, what it comes down to is that the internet is very corporate. It's still very Wild Wild West only in the ways where the little folk get fucked over. It's a bad version of the Wild Wild West,

like the movie Wild Wild West. And that's really the big issue, something we've talked about so many other times on this show. The internet was supposed to be digital anarchy, but instead got hijacked by corporations using that legal gray area to exploit people. You know, like a libertarian paradise.

Don't tread on LLC, actually. You tread on me, not LLC. You can tread on me though. A very good example is the relationship between internet creators and entertainment guilds like SAG and the WGA. In short, they don't have one. Most internet content creators and social media influencers

don't qualify for those unions because they still haven't figured out how the larger internet fits with their organizations. Projects that do fall under their union do so under very specific conditions. Even though one can argue that a giant group of these internet creators do the same work for comparable sized audiences as SAG-AFTRA

and WGA members do in film and television. Remember when we made a movie on this channel? Well, that movie doesn't count toward membership in these guilds. Is that the union's fault? Absolutely not. I don't know if you've noticed, but they currently have bigger, greedier fish to fry. In fact, one of the reasons the internet economy is the way that it is has to do with all those bigger fish that need frying.

I don't know if you've noticed this, but our non-internet economy isn't great either. With inflation still high, a large number of Americans are taking on multiple full-time jobs at the same time. New data from job site Monster shows 37% of people are doing this. It's a trend now referred to as over-employed. While unemployment is the lowest it has been in 53 years, the actual issue isn't jobs, but wages. This has led more regular folks to online platforms

and internet-based gig work, side hustles, and sometimes even second full-time jobs to get extra money. See, the internet is still seen as supplemental income, something you do on the side because your regular job isn't paying enough. That regular job is most likely also kept for the healthcare benefits because the internet doesn't have healthcare,

unless you count GoFundMe, I guess, which a lot of people do actually. In fact, in 2021, roughly one third of all donations to GoFundMe went to pay medical bills. That's $650 million. That's also a bummer. Also, the vast majority of people raising medical related money on GoFundMe

don't actually reach their goal. So double bummer. So the fact that the internet economy is so fragile wouldn't be a big deal if it weren't for the fact that people actually rely on it. Sites like Etsy and TikTok and Twitch all present this as a fun way to monetize your hobbies and interests. But no one is doing this because they want

to monetize their hobbies and interests. They're doing it because in a lot of cases, they have to monetize their hobbies and interests. And this combined with hustle culture are all ways to implant the idea that we don't exist unless we're providing monetary value. And it wouldn't be so insidious if it weren't for the fact that the same companies

exploiting people in real life are the same companies exploiting people online, which is also real life. It's like if the cops were selling the illegal drugs, otherwise known as cops, a perfect cycle where corporations force people to take up multiple jobs online and then exploit those online jobs as well.

And any attempt for the average person to break that cycle can be easily tamped down because they own the market. You don't need to become an investor. You were born one, Robinhood. Hey, remember when the investment app and aggressively ironically named Robinhood blocked a bunch of Redditors from buying GameStop stock? Robinhood prevented these small retail investors

from purchasing more GameStop stock after it rose 400% in a week, which isn't really something stock trading companies do. Robinhood cited volatility in the market and clearing house issues as their reasoning for refusing purchases of GameStop stock, which in the end protected the hedge funds and arguably robbed Robinhood's users out of money. You know, because it was making the wrong people rich.

This is the cycle protecting itself. I would argue it's in part the reason why we're seeing fewer millennial entrepreneurs. Not because they're lazy, but because it's nearly impossible to succeed. I mentioned before that some people are forced to monetize their hobbies. Well, on the flip side, some people want to own a business.

They don't wanna work for a boss because that sucks, but because of this new system, they are still forced to have a corporate master. And that double sucks. The internet is the new frontier for business and creative growth, but the corporate gatekeepers have made it impossible to actually grow under their control.

They're actively punishing people who dare to be their own boss. It's anti-free market, as I keep saying. And it's caused by constant greed that creates an environment antithetical to how a small business is supposed to thrive. And it's caused by constant greed that creates an environment antithetical to how a small business is supposed to thrive. I'll give one last very clear example of this.

In the indie video game industry, many small creators use a program called Unity to make their games. In order for those games to go to the major consoles, Unity requires that they pay for Unity Pro, which ranges from 180 to $450 a month. Meanwhile, the console companies like PlayStation and Xbox heavily encourage indie games

to use their subscription models. Basically, indie games get a chance for more exposure if they're offered for free on these subscription plans. Now, sometimes they are paid to be on these plans. Sometimes they are not. The game companies have to hope that this will translate into a profit, but they don't have a choice if they want to succeed.

And now, just recently, Unity announced that along with making people pay for their pro service, they are charging the indie developers a fee for every time their game is downloaded. And yes, that includes the times these games are downloaded on these subscription services. That means the indie developers are making these games at a cost to themselves, then giving them away

for free to consoles, and then are charged extra for people downloading their free games. You tell me, how is anybody expected to thrive in that situation? How is so much consumer money going to the middlemen and not the actual creators? And as a consumer, don't you want these companies to actually get your money so they can make more games

about being bread or whatever the fuck the Stanley Parable was about. Also bread? I don't know if you realize this, but none of these companies really make anything. Yeah, I guess Amazon has some store brand products and there's some like YouTube Red shows, but for the most part, YouTube, Etsy, Twitter, Twitch,

Kickstarter, Patreon, please subscribe, and TikTok, don't actually create the product. We do, people. They are simply skimming a cut, suckling like leeches, and yet they have so much damn control over us and can make or break us, keep us under their thumbs up or down, it seems wrong.

Seems like the power is flowing the wrong way. And the change starts with embracing your new God, Banana Duck, who will not only come alive to fight your enemies if you offer enough blood, but will also give you sexual strength as well. On sale now on my Etsy store for $200. Oh my God.

That is, that is not worth it. Oh my God. Now that I look at the price, that is like, what? That is not worth it. Oh my God. Now that I look at the price, that is like, what? That is not worth the money. They're pretty small, honestly. I use lead paint too. Don't buy them. But maybe if I paint over the lead paint

with enough layers of other paint, it'll block the lead paint and make them appear bigger and they'll still be $200. Actually more probably, cause I'll have to get the new paint. Yeah, don't buy them. Hey everybody, thanks for watching. Please like and subscribe. As I mentioned in the video, it really helps us out.

You gotta like, you gotta subscribe, please. We've got a patreon.com, so some more news. I mentioned that in the episode two, please support us there. Oh, you gotta help us out. Oh, geez. We got a podcast called Even More News and you can listen to this show as a podcast called Some More News if you don't wanna watch it on YouTube. We got a merch store.

It's actually a new merch store. It's a different website where we've moved everything over because the old merch store that we were on took our Wormbo shirt down for no reason. They didn't let us know why. We kept asking, why did you take this down? It's available on other pages on the same website,

but not on ours. We made the shirt. It's absurd. Anyway, we moved to a different place because again, all the stuff I just said in this episode. So check out our merch store for all the Warmbo stuff that you can find until they decide that we can't sell it there either.

Thanks for watching.