An 8-year-old made US$22 million on YouTube, but most social media influencers are like unpaid interns
While elite YouTubers earned up to US$22m in 2018, most influencers will be lucky to earn as much as someone working at a fast-food restaurant. Dr Natalya Saldanha explains why in this crossposting from The Conversation.
Like any eight-year-old, Ryan Kaji loves to play with toys. But when Ryan plays, millions watch.
Since the age of four he’s been the star of his own YouTube channel. All up his videos have gained more than 35 billion views. This helped make him YouTube’s highest-earning star in 2018, earning US$22 million, according to Forbes.
That’s more than actor Jake Paul (US$21 million), the trick-shot sports crew Dude Perfect (US$20 million), Minecraft player DanTDM (US$18.5 million) and make-up artist Jeffree Star (US$18 million).
A lot of fulltime youtubers have been saying its not the career it once was. Apparently it used to be normalish hours getting paid to do something fun, but since the algorithm began to reward frequent uploading its more like a 60hr week with less pay than you could get doing that in other industries, and no holidays.
The QMS Go Large “Be memorable” digital adverts on either side of this article are literally horrendous.
Which experience would you like your kids to undertake though – working at Maccas or building viable skills for future careers?
Full disclosure, I was a checkout operator at Coles all through high school.
But imagine if I’d been able to make that money in something more tied to my future career as a content specialist?
Fame and fortune? Unlikely.
“Influence”? Probably not.
But there is real skill development available by doing. Something which can help score that ‘ordinary’ job, down the road.
For sure, but I see also as the maturation of the market, and as we are more and saturated with influencers and the like, each person gets a smaller share of the same pie.
It used to be an easier market to tap into for aspiring influencers and the like, but the giants are still the giants and there’s only so much attention the consumer is willing to give.
These unpaid interns are at the mercy of a capricious gatekeeper with its “algorithms” and constantly changing terms of service. So it is like doing unpaid internship for a “job” that keeps changing with no warning. There have also been heaps of videos about youtube burnout as this “doing what you love job” expects the “intern” to provide their own production team. It is humanly impossible for one person to do everything to satisfy these inscrutable “algorithms” now. Great job, great future! As this article mentions, the situation with heaps of wannabes and only a handful of stars has always been the way of things. This always seems to happen to every media channel where the cost of cut-through skyrockets as more players enter and it becomes saturated.