Why almost no one is making a living on YouTube
The rich get richer phenomenon, also known as the preferential attachment phenomenon, has been considered a fundamental property of networks. In this, the nodes of a network gain connections in proportion to their already existing connections. Real world data often does follow power law distributions instead of the bell curve. The article cited takes us through various statistics that prove that the phenomenon is evident in the industry of content creation on Youtube and it’s usually the already successful youtubers that end up becoming even more successful everyday while it becomes harder for the newer creators to reach the top and earn views.
A professor at Offenburg University conducted a study and collected Youtube data to determine how it works for creators and found that the top 3 percent of all youtube channels account for about 64 percent of all user engagement including views in 2006 and this number has increased to 90 percent after a decade. Even in music streaming platforms like Spotify, a study conducted by a market research firm Nielsen, shows that the top 1 percent of songs make up for about 86 percent of the music streamed There are various factors that influence the number of views or hits a channel receives and the “rich get richer” phenomenon and its finding in the Youtube industry has various implications that can be used to design the Internet or help newer creators navigate their way through content creation and monetizing their brand. The chance of a new channel making it into the top 3 percent was found to be best for entertainment channels and in particular comedy channels and these trends are definitely useful for helping newer creators understand what content “sells” on the internet. The non-mainstream content usually doesn’t receive a lot of engagement unless these happen to go viral but with the large amount of content being uploaded every single day, the possibility of this happening for an artist is close to none and this seems to be a scary reality.