When two twenty-somethings posted a home-made video on YouTube last week they initially attracted more than 1,3-million views, but they didn’t earn a cent for their efforts.
This didn’t matter to them because the two in question, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, owned the company and had just sold it to Google for $1,65-billion.
But the fact that they didn’t get paid is still a matter of some interest. We are at the start of a creative revolution on the web, enabling millions of people to publish their own videos, music, photographs, books, blogs or whatever, and it is important to make sure it doesn’t turn into a rip-off for a new breed of intermediaries. Content is king, but the king has yet to be voted a stipend.
The curious thing about YouTube is that the people who ought to be paid (individual content creators) aren’t actually campaigning for it, while corporate providers are threatening legal action over clips pirated on YouTube — even though normally they are only too happy to pay a media platform to show clips of films or TV shows to generate interest in watching the whole thing or buying it as a DVD.
The creators of YouTube have done a great service in bringing video creation to the masses. But it was not because their technology was superior to others in the field (it wasn’t), but because they were in the right place at the right time when, unpredictably, YouTube suddenly attracted critical mass. This was a huge victory for garage start-ups over the likes of Google, Microsoft and Yahoo!, which found to their cost that the mighty leverage arising from their big market shares in existing products buttered no parsnips in the new world of web creativity.
As a result YouTube, a company that has been mainstream for barely a year, attracted a price tag of $1,65-billion, equivalent to almost $25-million per employee (not that they will see much of it) or $123 for each of YouTube‘s unique monthly users. The figure for those who actually generate the content would be far higher than $123 because only a small proportion of users actually put their own videos up.
Yet without those content creators, YouTube — and Flickr, and all the others — would be nothing. Imagine what would happen if eBay tried to value itself on the basis of all the inventory it held on behalf of its sellers. It wouldn’t because it knows the inventory doesn’t belong to it.
Doubtless, Google will solve this problem by offering users a share in any revenues generated from clicking adverts at the start or (more likely) at the end of the clip as other video sites such as Revver already do (it offers a 50% share to creators). But this doesn’t obviate the need for some kind of social contract as the web’s creative revolution gathers pace.
Where all this is leading is anyone’s guess. In a debate in a recent issue of Harper’s Magazine, Thomas de Zengotita argues that since everyone can now have a creative life “everyone will be an artist, but the price is that no one will be a great artist” — since, he argues, there will no longer be a place for such a being. If that turns out to be true, then we should at least ensure everyone gets paid for what they do even if they don’t scale the great heights.
But it is surely more likely that more great artists will be produced in the new atmosphere. Under the old model, only a tiny fraction of potential Joyces or potential Beatles ever got noticed because they never managed to convince an agent, let alone a publisher, of their worth. Now, since everyone can submit their work to a pool to be assessed online by their peers, it is less likely that potentially great works will remain undiscovered, even though some may have to wait to be plucked from the “long tail” of works selling in small numbers. The revolution is well under way: it just needs to be monetised. – Guardian