Get Rich in Your Parent's Basement

The future of media and entertainment will look very different from the past

Below is my latest arts, culture, and media update.

The stories are (a bit) more positive than usual. The indie world is pushing back against big web dinosaurs, and getting some wins. The future is still cloudy, but I remain optimistic.

The dominant platforms are losing market share to freelancers and rule-breakers. It’s just a matter of time before the power balance shifts.

So I’m betting that musicians, writers, and other creators will operate in a much better environment five or ten years from now. Maybe even sooner.

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YouTube now pays more money to video creators than Netflix.

Why move to Hollywood when you can film a YouTube video in your parent’s basement. That might sound absurd, but indie creators are now making more money than professional filmmakers.

YouTube now pays out 55% of revenues to creators for regular videos (and 45% for their Shorts videos).

Instagram can’t match that—in fact, it just shut down a program that shared ad revenue with creators. The same is true for TikTok, Twitter, Snapchat, and most other digital platforms.

Those web plantation owners don’t even want to tell you how they calculate payouts. Or even worse, they don’t want to pay creators at all.

That’s why YouTube will win the streaming wars.

The future of media is (1) the rise of indie voices, and (2) the success of platforms that support them and pay them fairly.

I’m no fan of Google/Alphabet, but this is one thing they’ve got right. Others need to imitate them, or lose the creative talent they need to survive.

By the way, the future of the music business will also look much like this. The major labels just haven’t figured it out yet. They want to pay 10% (or less) in royalties, but in the future creators will get most of the cash—whether the bosses like it or not.

The same will also happen in journalism and publishing. In fact, it’s already starting here at Substack.

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Netflix is trying to make its shows as dumb as possible—telling filmmakers to create ‘content’ for viewers who “aren’t paying attention.”

How is Netflix responding to the threat from YouTube? They’ve decided to make stupid shows for stupid people.

According to N+1, the new formula in streaming is content for “casual viewing”—in other words, stuff people can play in the background while doing something else.

Slipshod filmmaking works for the streaming model, since audiences at home are often barely paying attention. Several screenwriters who’ve worked for the streamer told me a common note from company executives is “have this character announce what they’re doing so that viewers who have this program on in the background can follow along.”

Many entertainment companies have destroyed themselves by playing this game of dumb and dumber with the audience. It might seem like a winning strategy—betting on stupidity feels like a sure thing.

But in the long term this rarely works.

The audience for idiot fare has zero loyalty, and will abandon you for the next piece of idiocy from someone else. Just look at what happened to Buzzfeed and Upworthy and USA Today, and so many others who took the low road.

The music business is suffering now for the same reason.

And if it really comes down to a stupidity battle, Netflix will never beat Instagram and TikTok. Case closed.

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Microsoft is impersonating Google.

I didn’t believe this until I tried it myself.

According to PCWorld:

This morning, users are discovering that if they search for “Google” in the primary Bing interface, they’re shown a special Bing search page. Before you scroll down to the actual search results, you’re presented with an all-white page with a centered, unbranded search bar and a multicolored doodle above it that’s heavy on yellow, red, blue, and green.

Source

I’ve accused Silicon Valley of building its future on shamming, scamming, and spamming. But now the huge web platforms are doing it to each other—and not just to us.

There’s a deeper story here. Not long ago, Microsoft bragged that its gazillion dollar investment in AI would allow it to steal business from Google. Now it’s reduced to cosplay, pretending that it really is Google.

Which lead us to our next story….