Episode 60: YouTubers: Only Doing Your Job When You Feel Like It

"It's kinda funny how I paid for college/when YouTube was an option/but then I would've had to spend my best years/skipping ads and reading comments."

                                                 -AJR, "3 O'Clock Things"

  Ah, YouTube. Not just a place for videos of cats being weird, kids falling down, and school assignments, it's also a place where tons of people make their living. The YouTuber is just one variant of the internet personality species - one who makes and uploads videos to the internet and gets paid for it. Not only do they get paid for the videos alone, they also get maid from merchandise they sell, events they do, and donations they receive from streams (not all of them stream, but many of them do).

   Let me be clear: I'm not one of those people who say that YouTube is not a real job. It think it by all means is. I'm sure a lot of work goes into being a YouTuber, at least for some of them. The problem lies with the tons of YouTubers who clearly don't work all that much.

    You can get rich from YouTube. There are several YouTubers who are literal millionaires. Many YouTubers are rich enough to hire people to edit their videos for them, maybe even film them for them, maybe even come up with video ideas for them. When you make so much money, why bother putting forward effort when you can make someone else do it for you?

    Not to mention that many of these rich YouTubers are people who have that money because of things like prank videos, reactions to other people's content, and outright lying for clicks (clickbait). Tons of people whip up cookie-cutter effortless "content" and get thousands of dollars for one video. 

   Even as far as videos that are actual good content. They get paid so much for it. So when you get paid a lot for one video, why spend time making a lot of videos? This makes the good content on YouTube seem less available, because those who make good content are content (heh) with making it less frequently because they'll get a bunch of money for one video anyway.

   I love Drew Gooden. He's one of my favorite YouTubers. But he uploads like once or twice a month. Usually just once. I wish that at my job I could only have to produce fruits of my labor once a month. And get paid tons of money for that one project.

    I think Drew and others like him are good at recognizing how fortunate they are. They don't take their wealth for granted and they're thankful to their fans for giving it to them. However, not all YouTibers are like this. You'll see tons of videos of rich people complaining like their life is so hard, or putting out a half-assed apology video because they were actually called out for doing something bad. But even then, you get the hypebeasts (I've written a whole blog episode about them). People like the Paul brothers and RiceGum who wave their money around, flaunt their extravagant possessions, and "beef" with other rich YouTubers about who has our money or who has cooler things they bought with that money.

     Anyway. I know there are many good YouTubers. YouTubers who are good people. I only watch those ones. I just wish people like Drew Gooden would bother a little more. Look at Penguinz0; he has much more subscribers than Drew Gooden, does tons of events and streams, has his own comic series and beverage, as well as his own e-sports league, yet he still uploads much more often than Drew.

Anyway, see you next week!

^Popular YouTube content creator Drew Gooden