Without advertising money, some of the greatest tv shows of the last century would never have been made, memorable sporting occasions and a lot of other advances in technology and medicine would never have come to be without advertising.
It may not really seem that way but life is not all that straightforward for the popular YouTuber. In this day and age, our attention spans are shorter than ever.
We can’t be bothered to wait 10 seconds for a web page to load, we fast forward films to the ‘good bits’ and we don’t often read articles word for word. We just kind of skim through them, many of you will probably not even read this line!
Yet regardless how much these YouTubers love their hobby of making hair videos to entertain us, nobody has the time to work a full 8 hour day and upload 3-4 videos a week on YouTube regularly without being compensated for their time.
For a popular hair YouTuber, to remain popular she has to stick to a pretty regular (even rigorous) posting schedule. Lots of them are uploading a new videos every two to three days, or at the very least once a week just to maintain their current pool of subscribers.
Quite right too! With approximately 100 hours of video being uploaded to YouTube every minute, there is plenty of other distraction for the average surfer, many of whom also have busy lives and can be ruthless about removing ‘dead wood’ from their subscription lists. It’s just the way the world works.
One of the first jobs I ever did was a commission based sales job when I was 20 and I absolutely loathed it. The idea of selling and being sold to was repugnant somehow yet what I didn’t realize at the time is that we are selling and buying products and services all the time by default anyway.
Many of us go to work every day to make enough money to buy stuff that we want to buy. At our job we are selling stuff to people who want to buy it and these people are paying for it with the money that they made at their job selling more stuff to other people!
So Taren has not demonstrated an ‘ugly truth’ about how YouTube businesses work. In fact she has put forward a very elegant truth of how the world really works.
So stay calm as you drive down a highway being bombarded with billboards of advertising, stay calm as you flip through that magazine with advertising on every other page, calm yourself as you watch your favorite tv show but have to endure a commercial break every 10 minutes and most importantly, chill as you comment anonymously on your smartphone about how these YouTubers are no longer being ‘real’.