Imo we should be lauding this brand new sector and the folks that made it in it. Twitch/YouTube/TikTok literally created a new kind of millionaire. Are we just upset we're also not uber rich for playing video games all day? It's the same with crypto, OnlyFans, and so on. It was the same in '99 with the dot coms.
Merely from an economic standpoint, it's interesting to see who these new industries are displacing (since this is a zero sum game). I'm sure having zillions of dollars doesn't make you happy, but there's so much unwarranted hate here on HN for new ventures and disruptive industries, it's kind of odd. It feels HN has become way more corporatist in the past few years -- everyone wants to work for FAANG, no one wants to do their own thing. "If it's popular, it must be bad" is a pretty myopic view.
You may have gotten bitten by a variant of the contrarian dynamic (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...) in which initial comments are shallow dismissals and then more substantive comments appear over time. The initial comments don't characterize the community. They just appear first because they're reflexive reactions (the fastest kind of reaction to have) and they're shallow (the fastest kind of comment to write).
The article mentions that Tyler makes $300k per year in merchandise alone (so excluding any actual sponsored content). Frankly I don't get why this can't be seen as a legitimate very successful business. Where is the line? Is entertainment only valid on TV? YouTube?
Some commenters here even said that it's all good now but that it won't work in his thirties or something as if there aren't a ton of jobs out there that feed on young blood that won't be able to keep up later in life.
I completely agree with you, this kind of "this is not a real job" attitude really comes off as people upset that they can't be millionaires at their job.
EDIT: A lot of the comments point out that most people on Twitch/YouTube/OnlyFans don't make money and would be better off getting a "real job". I am not trying to argue against that or say that Twitch is a good job prospect. My point is that if they do succeed in that niche, trying to segment money-making endeavour between "real jobs" and "just a kid playing video games" seems very vain to me. Tyler is making millions providing entertainment, to me that is very much a real job.
I knew G to PG-13 rated camgirls that were making six figures back in 1997 to 2000. They eventually got disrupted by the adult industry providing more explicit content for much less money upfront. OnlyFans seems to have reinvented this model at scale, but what's the average margin for an OnlyFans provider? $180/month.
I’m familiar with two women doing financial domination stuff. One of them is fully PG-13. It’s interesting there are still certain niches where you don’t have to go past R rates stuff and can bring in mid 5 figures or higher.
The sad part is that's only bringing in mid-5 figures which makes me think that findom is an efficient market and I await the Harvard Business Review case study of it with baited breath.
I was specifically speaking to PG-13-ish ones. Once you go nude and other elements go farther, the money presumably goes up a lot.
Hard to get accurate numbers for a lot of online hustle industries. There’s a lot of grandstanding, exaggerating, or laying really low about finances. Like say affiliate marketers or SEO people.
> I await the Harvard Business Review case study of it with baited breath.
>A lot of the comments point out that most people on Twitch/YouTube/OnlyFans don't make money and would be better off getting a "real job".
To support your point, acting, singing and writing are in a similar state, as are most media works. Creative media seems in particular its the area where the gulf between the successful and the well, not, is massive.
This is true, but I have to wonder whether those things are as grueling as streaming is.
I did some user interviews with streamers for a project. None were this successful; the people talked to ranged from making a decent living to having a day job and then doing streaming as a full-time second job.
Even the ones like Tyler were feeling the same strain he is. But the ones who seemed worst off were the ones who were putting in the same level of effort but making peanuts or were net negative on a cash basis. I remember one guy I talked to who said that he never talked to his old friends; everybody he spent time with now was a streamer because he didn't have time for anything else.
In contrast the actors I used to know seemed to have a much healthier relationship to their art. They were working hard and trying to make it, but I don't recall the same sense of ruthless grind I got from the streamers. Ditto the writers I know these days.
I don't think it's a case of gruelling, it's more that streaming is the social outcast version of acting. You have to interact with people to act else it doesn't work. Streaming can be entirely solo, even at the top end
Nobody is forcing you to be live 12 hours a day. Most of the super effort no reward streamers would benefit by cutting the live hours and working more on marketing anyway. Twitch in particular is terrible for organic growth
Not to imply any negativity in this comment if it reads that way, just shite at words. I've dabbled in streaming and realised I need to build up the audience first otherwise it's a massive timesink
> Twitch in particular is terrible for organic growth
Might be in part because the search function is so bad. I tried to use twitch to discover DJ slash electronic music streams, and had a really hard time finding what I wanted, though I could sometimes find them using other keywords.
Sorry, I don't understand this. I admittedly don't watch much streaming. But every streamer I've ever seen interacts constantly with their audience. And the ones I interviewed are intensely conscious of their audience and the need to make them feel special.
The actors I knew mainly focused on craft and collaboration with teams. If they dealt with the audience at all, it was in very controlled bursts in the minutes after a performance. So it seems to me that streaming is much more socially demanding.
Sitting at a computer interacting with a non-red HAL9000 and IRC is not the same as interacting with directors, producers, other actors.. people
There are more people in acting than the audience
POV: you're a streamer interacting with the audience https://cdn.imgy.org/j6km.jpg (chat unrelated, I just picked the one in my follows that would fill the screen quickest)
idk it just doesn't feel social to me at all, never mind socially demanding
Sorry, I'm not getting it. Are you a successful streamer and are offering your own experience as evidence? Or are you a non-streamer just giving your general take?
You make my point with that screenshot. The chat isn't unrelated. The chat is primary. The streamers I talked to and the streaming I've watched is a performance for an audience. It's way more interactive than most live theater, even the stuff with audience participation. And it's leaps and bounds more socially demanding than film work.
As an example, watch this video from a streamer with 120k followers on Twitch:
While playing the game she is deeply involved a conversation with the people watching. As streamers explained it to me, that's key to the economics of being a successful streamer, in that significant audience segments are buying a feeling of being in the in-group, and that feeling has to be supported with actual interaction with the streamer.
I agree that's not the same thing as being on the same stage with people. But it's still very social. Similarly, remote work is still social. I've never met any of my colleagues, for example, but they're still people to me.
It's very competitive and tends to follow the Pareto principle, i.e. 10% of the people making 90% of the money. Some of it is luck and timing, some of it is hard work. Some of it probably comes down to your taste being more aligned with a broader audience.
Not a real job is a quite good stance to take. Because there is an absurd power law at play here, the absolute top make a lot of money. In a "real job" you are paid a living wage, on twitch you are paid scraps if you don't make it to the top.
I am not saying this is a real job prospect. If a kid told me he wanted to be a Twitch streamer I'd say he can't be one, same as professional singer or musician in general.
What I am saying that what Tyler has very much is a real job and successful business. You wouldn't say Taylor Swift is jobless because very few people make it in the pop music world.
If my kid told me they wanted to be a twitch streamer I would advise them against investing a significant amount of time and effort building a business with a single gatekeeper.
If they wanted to be a famous personality, I would insist they start building a profile on every platform.
This isn't well known, but to monetize on Twitch (i.e. be able to receive subscriptions and bits), you have to sign an affiliate agreement[1], which includes a clause prohibiting you from multi-streaming, or putting your VODs up anywhere else for a full day after their conclusion. This severely limits your ability to cross platforms.
One is taken for granted, but I think it is a valid point. I share your opinion (bad to depend on platforms), but that never might have triggered the comment.
For some people never means usually not, and for some never means never :)
I'd advise them to dominate a new platform as an early adopter and then spread out from there. Or put out content very consistently on 2-3 platforms. But even spreading yourself between two accounts let alone multiple platforms is time consuming.
>If a kid told me he wanted to be a Twitch streamer I'd say he can't be one
You'd be lying though, and your kid would probably grow up to resent it. There are ways to educate kids about the relative risks of careers in good faith.
To give some numbers: There are more than 10 millions Streamers on Twitch, of which 5 millions are streaming regularly. The top 10_000 of them earns barely minimum wage or more. The Top 1000-5000 is earning some decent money on middle-class-level and the millionairs-club is around Top 100. And these numbers are globally, meaning all streamers from all countries.
So we are still talking about an absurd low number of people.
Now do the numbers with startups.
I thought the hackernews community embraces taking risk and doing your own thing. I am surprised to see the conservatism here.
A service that makes 100 users a millionaire is a low number? And by the way, there is no way to know how much people are really making because they not only get money through Twitch but also through tip systems, merchandise, promotion, sponsors and other revenue generating activities.
Yes, but the twitch-numbers reflect a streamers potential for earning money through merchandise, promotion, sponsors and other revenue generating activities. There usually is a direct enough link between them. Tipping is a bit more special, but it's quite unlikely that a small 20 viewer-streamer will get a million-dollar-tip regularly. So you can make an educated guess of the general income, at least regarding someone's success as a streamer.
Of course it's always possible that someone is far more successful outside of twitch. Like an established celeb who streams without monetization. But I don't think it makes sense to discuss those special cases here.
Yes, the viewer numbers are the direct link. But viewer numbers are not Twitch revenue. Subscriber are Twitch revenue. And it is not at all impossible to have a lot of viewers and not a lot of subscribers.
How are you going to know what the stream is earning the musician keeping contact with his fan base?
I think making it to top on Twitch/TikTok/SocialMedia is hard, just like it is hard to be a famous Hollywood star. But there are a lot of minor social media celebrities that make a middle class income or they do it as their second job but no one talks about them just like how no one talks about minor actors.
I know this because recently I ran into a few Instagram influencers with a low 6-figure followers, who get paid $1000+ per ad post. The ones I know have day jobs, Instagram is mostly extra income for them. I also know a blogger who is doing it fulltime and making upper middle class income from it.
The point is power law seems absurd because it is easy to start these things but very few people actually treat it like a job or a business. To me it seems those who treat it like a business have pretty high chance of making, at least, living wages from it.
What definition of "real job" are you using? By that definition, any kind of performer (music, sports, etc) is not a "real job". Hell, starting most businesses including startups would not be a "real job," since most fail. I guess you can definite it this way if you want, but I'm not sure what you're trying to communicate.
Hasn't it always been this way in music, art, writing, and media? Making a living doing any kind of art or media has always been brutal. How many rock bands made a decent living, let alone serious money?
Once you have a few millions secured, it is hard to blow it if you invest and save prudently. It's not like when he turns 30 he will be back to poverty. There is too much negativity and doom and gloom. These gamers, e-celebs are making a lot of money and will not be destitute when their star fades. Today's internet celebs are much better at saving and investing their money compared to celebs of decades ago, who blew their money on extravagant expenses and saved nothing.
Actually it's very easy to blow some millions. Sportspeople, lotto-winners and such are doing it all the time. Handling money wisely is a skill you need to learn and master.
That guy is in esports, so he is generally very risk-friendly, so chances are high that he is also investing and wasting his money on risky investments and potentially losing it.
I think these twitter gamers and celebs are smarter than mainstream athletes lotto winners in terms of higher IQ , and thus are better at personal finance and budgeting
Why would this group of people have higher IQs than mainstream athletes? Why would higher IQ lead to better personal finance and budgeting?
I’d think you childhood/background and your current environment would be the biggest factors.
Some mainstream athletes may feel the need to flex. So they may spend extra money. There’s also generally certain rituals or going with the crowd that means spending more money.
It feels elitist to call these gamers and celebs both smarter than mainstream athletes and label the latter as lotto winners. Unless you were talking about lotto winners as a separate group. Though that too appears problematic as you’re more closely associating them with mainstream athletes in a negative sense.
Lotto winners also have societal, environmental, and cultural issues many other wealthy people like streamers don’t. No one thinks the lotto winner deserves their money. People have far easier time coming out of the woodwork and hassling lotto winners. Asking for money and more.
All highly paid celebrities without managers, including many streamers, are effectively running marketing and PR campaigns for million-dollar brands. It's quite believable to me that the job would select for higher intelligence, or at least better cash flow management, than being an athlete who plays a team sport.
Your wording makes what streamers and other influencers have to do without managers as much harder and serious than it is.
Celebrity is already pushing it. In the scale of fame, someone doing all the work themselves likely is pretty down the list in terms of celebrity.
Many celebs without managers don’t need to do much marketing and PR for their brand. There’s countless YouTube or IG etc accounts with millions of subscribers that don’t have a concerted marketing and especially not PR campaign going on.
Many, possibly most, sports players do not have managers. Most have agents only.
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For cash flow. Leagues like the NBA and NFL have become more serious with helping out and making sure the players manage money better. Still a long way to go.
Overall, I don’t see any reason why streamers and online celebs would have higher intelligence. The reasons people are giving appear to be biased toward giving credence to tech white collar work.
Look at the number of online influencers peddling all sorts of scummy NFT and crypto stuff. If their PR was so important, these online celebs would have had to do major damage control. They largely haven’t. If at all. This makes it seem like there’s much less serious pressure and real stakes at play for online celebs. There’s other various things online celebs have done and continue to do that just is not done by the vast vast majority of athletes. The ones that do behave like divas are ostracized. This isn’t the case with online celebs.
I don’t think either selects for higher intelligence.
>Why would this group of people have higher IQs than mainstream athletes?
Though I disagree with the posters theory that twitch gamers are less susceptible to blowing their fortune than athletes, the fact that their job doesn't come with a high risk of head trauma is a reason they may be smarter.
Does this factor in with basketball, soccer (futbol), tennis, And many other sports?
Also, just my personal opinion. I’d rather make $10M over my 20s with some head trauma than have to slave away as a random cog employee. I know people can delude themselves into believing they aren’t. Some believe their work matters a lot. I doubt many would do the same work id they had millions in savings though.
This doesn’t make streamers any smarter to me. This posits that streamers would not be streamers if streaming entailed the same risk of head trauma as the NFL and hockey. I personally believe people would want the game and money so they’d still do it.
>Does this factor in with basketball, soccer (futbol), tennis, And many other sports?
My understanding is that though most of those sports have a lower rate of head trauma than football or hockey, they still have a far higher rate of head trauma than the general public. To the point where I doubt many professional soccer or basketball players haven't had at least one concussion like event from the sport.
If I were guaranteed $10m for a concussion I'd take that deal in a second. Having a high chance of a concussion for a very low chance of $10m is a different matter.
I only see streamers as smarter as their low chance of millions doesn't have the associated risk of head trauma, though I agree that it's unlikely anybody is picking their long shot based on the potential injury.
edit read your other reply and can sum up or difference in opinions easily.
>I don’t think either selects for higher intelligence
Neither do I, but I think the process for athletes has more of a negative effect on intelligence than streaming does. Purely due to injuries.
What do you think about the possibility of athletes are not sitting at a desk in front of their computer screen 10 hours a day like streamers? I’m generalizing with the numbers :). Instead they are exercising? That has to count for something, no? Maybe a few streamers are doing treadmill desks but I’d think that will always remain incredibly rare. Standing desks may be used a little more but I don’t know.
I understand streamers can exercise in their own time. It is debatable if exercising for an isolated one hour a day is any where close to the same as regular fitness.
General unhealthiness is probably common with streamers but though it may decrease their expected life span, but it's nowhere near as permanently hazardous as what head injuries can do to a person. Additionally, they just aren't dedicating enough free time to taking care of themselves while athletes need to put themselves in danger for part of their sport.
And as a related aside, I think many of the actual esports teams have realized the importance of health for competitions and devote a fair amount of time to it.
I'd be very interested for your evidence there. Both that streamers are higher IQ, and that high IQ means more responsible financial behaviors for people in power-law industries like this.
I've known plenty of smart people who were terrible with money, and plenty of average people who were very good at managing it. There's a huge gap between intellectual understanding and practical skill. And I've known some brilliant people whose brilliance made them confident the money would keep coming or that the usual dynamics didn't apply to them. Note, for example, that intelligent people are more likely to become addicts: https://bigthink.com/neuropsych/intelligent-people-drugs/
Competitive gamers - or at least the kind that get big Twitch viewership - aren't too far removed from athletes. They're used to the game giving reliable feedback and to getting as many tries as they need to perfect their skills, even if there are moments of high pressure to test them. They're rewarded by chasing a big audience and hustling to put up equally big and obvious leaderboard scores. Gamers have "tight grips" on their domain and optimize themselves heavily towards crushing the game. It's not just an IQ thing, but a personality type.
Finance tends to be the opposite - limited information, long time horizons, optimal risk/rewards by going into poorly understood niches, and permanent failure making loose attachment and adaptability preferable to optimizing. While you can make the competitive gaming mindset work, it's an "attack dog" way of running your life.
And you can see a contrast between session based online gaming - which is what gets most of the Twitch viewers as alluded earlier - and MMOs, in the types of playstyle that "make it" competitively. While MMOs often reward persistent grinds, they can also reward creative ways of redefining the game's goals and mechanics to develop the game in a pro-social direction. You want to be in an MMO with other people who know how to make the game lively, not 1000 angry sweatlords chasing after the same leaderboard stat. So there are typically more ways to measure oneself, and more opportunities to do things like item trading arbitrage, which is directly financial in nature.
>Frankly I don't get why this can't be seen as a legitimate very successful business.
This is going to sound glib, but I honestly think it's because Pinterest hasn't been able to create a comparable (or even marginally similar) business model for its users to capitalize on. Seriously, why isn't Pinterest a big shopping destination? The answer to that will tell us a lot about attitudes toward influencers and e-stars.
OK, so what's involved for a YouTube maker to allow their viewers to single-click something that takes them to a payment page for an item in the video? Is that even a thing that is possible? Didn't YouTube remove the ability for videomakers to add clickable hotspots to their videos?
IIRC you had to crack the top 2000 to hit $50k in a year, although I don't think the data showed streaming hours per year so it's hard to know how many earned something close to a living wage.
Should be noted the leak only contained money earned directly through twitch. But most income from bigger streamers is coming by other means and external services. Though, there is some correlation, so the twitch-only numbers can be still be used to make an educated guess. After all, if you are not making significant money via twitch, it also means your community is usually too small to bring you money through placements or other money flows.
I disagree. Twitch/YouTube/TikTok didn't create a new kind of millionaire. They're simply celebrities. The only thing that arguably changed is that content production is so cheap and saturated now that consumers get a lot more choice in terms of who they want to watch, without being constrained by TV schedules and other distribution/logistics limitations.
There is no "new industries", it all still falls under the entertainment industry umbrella, and even the monetization mechanisms are the same old ones (ads, sponsorships, merchandising). By "lauding celebrities", all we're accomplishing is consolidate consumer attention into fewer content production channels, solidifying the position of the platforms where these celebrities operate.
Arguably the only noteworthy thing here is that technology changes and companies that embrace innovation will eat the lunches of those that fail to keep up (e.g. Blockbuster). "Everyone wants to work for FAANG" because a good chunk of the entertainment industry money is flowing there.
> I disagree. Twitch/YouTube/TikTok didn't create a new kind of millionaire. They're simply celebrities.
Yes and no. They are celebs, but definitely a new style of celebs. They are your average Joe, with barely any special skill. They could be your neighbor or the dude next to you in a supermarket, and you wouldn't know. Furthermore, they are millionaire working from home, growing from home, with average equipment and average products. This is something which never happened before, not at this scale.
Though, to be fair, there are also some actual skilled people growing into this space and celebs from other areas are breaking in too.
> There is no "new industries", it all still falls under the entertainment industry umbrella,
Yes, obviously. But the type and quality is completely different to established entertainment. It started with people with the bare minimum of entertaining-skill who established this. People who wouldn't have been able to succeed in the classical entertainment-industry. And this absolutely is a change. For the industry itself, it also is a change, because those people are cheaper and have a different angle to play at. This is more on the quality-level of a tupperware-party that somehow went up to a global scale.
> They are your average Joe, with barely any special skill.
You've clearly never been to a restaurant in LA or NY. These are chock full of "average Joes" working as bartenders and waitresses just waiting to "make it" in movies, tvs, commercials.
Many of the top twitch streamers have legitimate "skill", it's just not the skill you might be referring to in classic entertainment. For example "360 no scope sniper kills" might be the equivalent of "funny one liner quips".
I think you're blurring some lines. I don't imagine Ben Levin (a friend of the much more famous Adam Neely) is a millionaire, and I certainly don't imagine either of them are anywhere on the same level as someone like MrBeast, who actually employs a crew much like a TV show might.
It certainly is as easy as ever to get started, but I think this idea that anyone can just pick up an iphone camera and become a millionaire is a bit disingenuous. As the article alludes, it does take effort, sacrifice and probably a healthy dose of luck to get somewhere in the industry, especially with how crowded it has become.
I don't know Ben Levin, but IIRC MrBeast did started as the average Joe and just grew big. And yes, of course the lines do blur over time. If the new creators become big, they start stepping into the realms of professionality and are beginning cooperations with old industry, creating content for the new and old spaces. But they usually still have the average joe-vibes, because that's how people grew with them, how they see and remember them. But also because they continue maintaining this vibes, as this is their habit of working.
> but I think this idea that anyone can just pick up an iphone camera and become a millionaire is a bit disingenuous.
Obviously not everyone can do that, but this is how almost everyone from the new industry started. I would say, it's simply the difference in culture, between old industry professionals trained schools and such, and the self learners of the new industry. Though, old industry is now moving in this space too, so it will change with time.
> They are your average Joe, with barely any special skill.
Absolutely, provably false.
It takes a lot of skill to constantly produce content at the rate that millionaire twitch streamers do. Most of them own youtube channels as well, which requires additional time to process, edit, and mix videos, depending on what they're doing with it.
It also takes a high level of creativity in order to come up with new ideas for streams, keep the audience engaged while playing the same game for hundreds of hours on end. This means doing giveaways, interacting with the audience without offending them, planning contests, negotiating advertising deals with game-makers for promo-streams, etc. etc.
It's an incredibly demanding gig, that, at the very least, requires a pretty insane schedule, or being really passionate about the job. Most people would burn-out at their rate, and a lot actually do.
Maybe some streamers get help in production and orchestrating their stream, but for most it's more than a full-time job commitment.
Those average Joes you mentioned? They get 1-2 viewers, who are usually their closest friends. This the skill ceiling for "barely any special skill" people. If they stream a game that just came out, they may break 10 viewers once in a while. That's about it.
> It takes a lot of skill to constantly produce content at the rate that millionaire twitch streamers do.
Well, that's disputable. Most content-sources are delivered externally, in form of games and stuff they can react too. It's not like they sit there and think up something fresh by themselves for 8 hours a day. Though, yes, they have some naturally skill in socializing which they hone over time. But still I would not say it goes beyond the skill of any other natural socializer which exists in any community.
> Most of them own youtube channels as well, which requires additional time to process, edit, and mix videos, depending on what they're doing with it.
Which is most of the time not done by them. Usually they pay people for this. And to be fair, Videos of streamers are usually not really masterpieces either. They are optimized versions of their streaming-content. A good youtube-creator has significant more skill there. They occasionally also create far higher quality of content than most streamers.
> It's an incredibly demanding gig, that, at the very least, requires a pretty insane schedule, or being really passionate about the job.
How many streamers do you actually know? Well scheduled is not really what I would call most streams I've seen.
> Maybe some streamers get help in production and orchestrating their stream, but for most it's more than a full-time job commitment.
If you are a fulltime-streamer, earning money, then they pretty much all get help to some degree.
> Those average Joes you mentioned? They get 1-2 viewers, who are usually their closest friends.
Not really. They are many dedicated hardworking people with similar skill-levels even on the lowest levels. Success in streaming depends far more on luck than skill. Though, luck is also a skill in some way, so hard to say...
But the skills I was talking about are not the ones you are getting naturally but being alive or just doing stuff long enough to acquire them. Obviously if you stream long enough you get a bunch of skills and knowledge automatically, which any non-streamer is missing yet. But that is nothing special.
Special is stuff not everyone has or can acquire on it's own. Like a professional who went through a long professional training, reaching a level of quality a normal selfmade-streamer never can reach. Or someone which a career outside of streaming. There are more and more people like that hitting the platforms. Many entertainers with decade-long careers came in the pandemia to twitch and youtube, searching for new playgrounds and displaying skills which leaves any big established streamer in the dust.
> They are your average Joe, with barely any special skill.
What's your evidence for this? I don't watch a ton of streaming, but to me it looks hard to do well. If they're truly average people, how do you explain the big differences in popularity?
> They are your average Joe, with barely any special skill.
This is not true. It is no more true for streaming then for acting, hosting tv show or entertaining in bar via magic tricks or playing music. The ability to produce entertaining streams is a separate skill. Not just in game skill.
> This is something which never happened before, not at this scale.
At the time when live music was a thing, there were definitely few thousands musicians able to live from it. Which is as large scale as successful streamers seem to be.
> growing from home, with average equipment and average products
Really, no more true then about musical instruments of the past.
In addition to what others have said, I think the fact that people can make a living from very very niche content is novel. Arguably, it works so differently that it could be considered a new sector.
> By "lauding celebrities", all we're accomplishing is consolidate consumer attention into fewer content production channels, solidifying the position of the platforms where these celebrities operate.
I think you're on point about the platforms, but not about the channels per se. In the past, you basically got to watch what 60-year old guys in the executive suite thought was appropriate, whereas now you can watch a lot more types of stuff. And I think people are wising up to the power platforms had. I think when OnlyFans said they were banning porn, people quite rapidly found new platforms to move to. Building these platforms has also become cheaper and easier, especially in the last 2-5 years IMO.
I mean, cable was already in the niche catering business in the 90s. Gordon Ramsay or Jacques Cousteau or Mythbusters are all quite niche IMHO. I'd be willing to acknowledge that the existence of gaming/mukbang/etc content creators nowadays is merely the entertainment industry catching up with the fact that the world is a lot more vast (and dare I say mundane) than TV would have you believe.
As for platform power and user choice, I think people have a misconception about how much "power" they have, considering that search results and recommendations are entirely at the mercy of the companies that provide them and they're very much aggregated by user profiles, much like cable had "hundreds of options" that are in actuality largely curated to target audiences.
There are a variety of niche old videos that I can no longer find on youtube. The long tail does disappear for no rhyme or reason (actually, if you understand the logistics of live/cold storage and the scale at which youtube operates at, it totally makes sense). It certainly isn't like the napster days where you could in fact find that one ultra rare file that only one person in the world was seeding.
As for content creator mobility, I don't consider twoset's presence on tiktok any more novel than hollywood getting into home video. Content creators and distributors interests' don't always align and there has never been an actual monopoly on distribution channels, even despite the existence of large media conglomerates. It's just the individual players that are different, IMHO.
yes, it's basically strips gate-keepers from parts of the entertainment industry.
Through it's still the entertainment industry as in: It requires a mixture of skill, hard work and luck to even just get to the point of earning more then just your basic-living expanses with it.
Through we also have seen such a disruption in the music industries where with modern music services people can reach some degree of success without any deals with any large publishers (through it's not easy).
That is partially true but not entirely. Twitch still has a somewhat strict TOS and regularly bans streamers. The audience is not always allowed to watch what they want. I'm guessing this is because Twitch needs to be advertiser friendly.
Youtube/Social Media has removed the filters and gatekeeping that happened in the legacy media. Of course there is a lot of noise. But what are the odds of a young MKBHD, DrDisrespect, Linus, etc, etc getting their own show in legacy media? Zero to none because we would've never heard about them.
Its glorious to see people who are truly brilliant at what they do getting a shot at the audience and owning everything they do. Its not just Twitch Streamers and 20 something influencers. There is a deep world of niche experts opening up all sorts of interesting topics to everyone and the best get to stand front and center.
My recent fav is Benn Jordan who breaks down a lot of the challenges of being an independent musician in a world of streaming. He recently did an incredible piece on how a NY Times reporter used his credentials to scam hundreds of musicians.
If you mean Linus from LTT, then wasn't he involved with some tech show which was "more legacy media-ish"?
But either-way, it's not really that legacy media has a lot of gatekeepers which are a mixture of "stuck in the past", "focused on questionable qualifications" and/or "not-impartial/corrupt".
I guess it's not surprising that such which benefit from being (with modern tech) unnecessary middle man and/or benefit from corruption are not happy about losing power and potentially becoming obsolete.
Linus got his start doing product review videos for NCIX which was an online computer hardware shop up here in Canada. He had a fairly severe disagreement about the future of the company (his idea was to compete against amazon with kiosk-style brick and mortar with minimal inventory) so he went independent with his videos. It wasn't really a traditional media thing. NCIX died a couple years ago.
Big corporations are paying more than ever, in addition to surging stock prices for even the biggest of companies, so working at a trillion dollar company is more lucrative than most startups. It did not always used to be that way.
Society is finding ways to value a wider range of talents. Different people are good at different things and, unfortunately, only a subset of those things are valued in the economy.
These technologies are allowing people to display their talents and allowing them to make money off of them. Back in the day being good at video games was a fun thing to do when you had free time. Now there is a small chance you can make a living off it.
I can't remember the quote but Warren Buffett once said that the only reason he is a billionaire is that he was born at the right time, with the right gender (back when women weren't allowed to do much), and with the right talents.
Valuing a wider range of talents allows more people to participate in the economy. Crypto for example allows developers to inject little bits of economy into apps. Perhaps in the future someone can make a living creating really good cat memes instead of a deadend job that is basically useless anyways.
If that last sentence offended you I'd suggest you checkout the book "Bullshit Jobs".
>These technologies are allowing people to display their talents and allowing them to make money off of them. Back in the day being good at video games was a fun thing to do when you had free time. Now there is a small chance you can make a living off it.
People have been making money from e-sports for a long time, at least two decades. it's not a new thing. The new platforms however allow gamers to reach large audiences without having to join a major gaming league.
The challenge is that many of them have unsustainable always-on relationships with their audience that seriously burn them out. Sure folks should be free to do what they want with their life but remember they're not the only ones getting the benefit, they're feeding a bunch of social and merchandising platforms that make big $ on their backs - so the question becomes, what responsibility does the platform have towards the health of its creators?
Yes, the new thing is the emergence of mega corporations that profit from platforms that are essentially manufacturing workaholics. Freewill notwithstanding, exploitative incentives are a real thing...
There's at least a potential moral responsibility (yes pls spare snark about banks and morals), and in some countries it can be a legal one, see eg emergence of the "right to disconnect"
Why is it laudable? Sure, we shouldn't be jealous of successful people, but why go to the other extreme? It surely won't help you have an unbiased stance on the phenomenon.
Exactly. Making money is fine as long as it is done in a moral and ethical way. Women showing their bodies on twitch and others so guys can drool over them? No thanks.
What's unethical about that? I don't participate in either side of the market, so maybe I'm missing something. But it seems like a pretty clear service-for-money deal, with consenting adults on all sides and transparent revenue models.
People are generally upset when people succeed with evil deeds. And those new millionaires are often walking a very fine line between good and evil. The amount of trash they sell and scams they do is insane. And even the good ones still play on psychological mechanism, which can be questionable.
Not saying that we should despise them all by default, but one should be very aware of the mechanism and plays of those people and not blindly accept everything. It's an entertaining space, but also a dangerous one. And that too many young people fuel this industry is a problem IMHO.
> It's the same with crypto, OnlyFans, and so on. It was the same in '99 with the dot coms.
Please don’t lump content creators in with crypto and dot bombs. The folks creating content on streaming platforms are providing entertainment and putting in real time doing a job. Equating them to what were/are more or less Ponzi schemes isn’t fair to them at all.
I don't see it that way. HN is many different things to many different people. Sure, there are a large number or corporate workers on HN, but given the number of people employed at the top 5 tech companies alone that shouldn't be a surprise.
But there are other substantial areas of interest and overlap: the creatives / makers, the one person businesses, the SMBs (both owner/operators and employees), the start-ups (founders, co-workers), the people pushing some agenda or other (those can be quite annoying) and finally the trolls and even some griefers, though the latter two groups usually find their accounts very short lived (with some regrettable exceptions).
HN has gotten large enough that it is no longer a niche player, but still small enough that it hasn't reached the 'everybody's on it' stage.
But I don't see that 'unwarranted hate for new ventures and disruptive industries'. What you do get is a crowd that isn't going to roll over right away at the first sign of a 'new thing'. In that sense we are probably becoming a bit jaded, having seen 25 years of one new thing after another.
> Are we just upset we're also not uber rich for playing video games all day? It's the same with crypto, OnlyFans, and so on. It was the same in '99 with the dot coms
Yes, that's literally it. This is the proper use of the term hater.
> It feels HN has become way more corporatist in the past few years -- everyone wants to work for FAANG, no one wants to do their own thing
Also agree. I liked HN better years ago. When I was younger.
> Are we just upset we're also not uber rich for playing video games all day?
There's envy involved but I do think a large contributing factor is also the fact that what streamers and influencers and the like do, and what their "influencees" do, tends to very much lean towards being very mindless. It's like celebrity worship, except there's this "they're just like you and me!" aspect to it that feels incredibly disingenuous.
Instead of going out and doing things, you have people sitting on their butts watching someone else sit on their butts and do that stuff. Instead of people bettering themselves and going out and getting a girlfriend, you have people paying to pretend those lewd photos of some random girl who mentioned your username on a stream once because you tipped her which means she totally knows you exist and is basically your girlfriend, were taken just for you.
On top of that one of the main goals for these people is to get you to buy products from their sponsors. They're like the used car salesmen who try to buddy up to you and flatter you so you'll buy one of their cars. Except people know used car salesmen are bullshitting them. And people know celebrities aren't like you and me. People connect to streamers and influencers and spend more time worshiping them on a different level that feels unhealthy.
Don't get me wrong, I do think they provide some benefits to society. You can say that these sort of people help others feel like part of a family or whatever, and helps those who have a hard time getting a girlfriend feel better. On the other hand, you could also just point to, for example, the suicide rates which have been trending upward pretty steadily, especially starting with the prevalence of smartphones and such. Or the fact that antidepressant usage has essentially doubled in the past two decades.
Overall, to me, it all just feels like a trend in the wrong direction.
I’m sure there are plenty of incoherent criticisms and not a small amount of envy at play, but there are more serious traditions of thought that are negative towards “culture industry,” writ large.
Yeah i agree, twitch and youtube are producing a new type of celebrity where the content can be created by anyone. Its build your own content, create your own community and do it all yourself. This is disrupting the old entertainment industry where you needed many well connected people to connect you to the audience, and your content was reviewed heavily by ‘experts’ before production.
The content is easier to produce due to technology, and this is personal opinion but its way better than what was made by television studios etc.
> Imo we should be lauding this brand new sector and the folks that made it in it. Twitch/YouTube/TikTok literally created a new kind of millionaire.
You provide no explanation as to why we should be lauding them. Or are you implying that because someone is a millionaire then we should automatically laud them? Is that what late stage capitalism looks like?
The output is not fixed. An economic system with a different distribution of resources, or different taxes and import restrictions can have a better outcome, or more economic output
I agree with everything you said except FAANG. To keep with the corporatist shill culture it is now technically MANGA instead of FAANG with Facebook’s rebranding to Meta.
The word "switch" kind of implies that it is zero sum; they're either watching one thing, or another. Entertainers and companies compete to monopolize attention.
Merely from an economic standpoint, it's interesting to see who these new industries are displacing (since this is a zero sum game). I'm sure having zillions of dollars doesn't make you happy, but there's so much unwarranted hate here on HN for new ventures and disruptive industries, it's kind of odd. It feels HN has become way more corporatist in the past few years -- everyone wants to work for FAANG, no one wants to do their own thing. "If it's popular, it must be bad" is a pretty myopic view.