No, it’s pretend. It’s not a fact.

Uber denying the labor relationship of their business practices and pretending they are offering a service rather than profiting off of labor does not mean me pointing that out is “denying a fact”. It’s Uber playing pretend. Just because you say “hey, my business model is to [blank]”…

My sense is that YouTube Red exists to attempt to control the content and the timeline in which it is produced. YouTube is not a benevolent force, they are trying to squeeze pennies out wherever possible.

So Kraft is a customer of Wal-Mart? Uber drivers are customers of Uber? After all, they use Uber’s platform.

“They’re also receiving value from YouTube”

Nothing close to the value they produce for YouTube. This is the disparity. This is what this article is about.

Believing content-creators are customers is certainly a disconnect. The sentence itself is oxymoronic.

Hey, that was your example and I like it.

I agree that there is a distinction between the “hand out the window” and well-produced short-films.

The distinction is that the latter takes significant effort and makes significant money for the company that pays the creator.

This is known as “labor”

and YouTube is able to make a profit off that content.

I think this is our key disconnect here. I get that, theoretically, their model would exist, but it would not have value without large-subscriber-count channels.

But large-subscriber-count channels are what made the business model possible. YouTube Red itself might contract with creators, but the reason it is able to exist is because of the labor of those creators prior to Red.

No, I’m not.

Something that takes a lot of effort and makes a lot of money for someone else is labor.

“Hand out the window” does not count as “a lot of effort”

I’m not saying that’s how the ads work - I’m saying that’s what makes them viable to sell. You can’t pitch “hand out window” to an advertiser and expect them to want to advertise on your platform. You can, however, show quality content with millions of views consistently produced.

Waffle House Fight videos rely on…

The large-subscriber content-creators haven’t helped make YouTube profitable - the made YouTube profitable.

Companies don’t pay much for advertisements on videos of your hand out the car window.

I would not argue those people are performing labor - only people who are working in a manner as described in the article

I am not performing any labor?

I’m reading articles as recreation. YouTube content creators - who create at the scale mentioned in this article - are without a doubt performing labor. Their content is what provides the value on which advertising can be solicited.

Are their commenters laboring? No.

That’s,…

YouTube would not be as profitable as it is without content-creating channels that produce subscribers and consistent levels of views. That’s what makes is a company worthy of advertising.

If YouTube - when Youtube was only clips from a DVD collection and unedited videos of hands out moving cars, it was not nearly as…

you do labor and get money. You don’t do the labor and don’t get money.

The labor you are doing is producing a product the company that pays you profits from.

that’s labor

Contrived bullshit doesn’t equate to a reasoned argument. Without content creators, there is nothing to host advertisements for. Don’t be intentionally daft.

“Oh no, we don’t need TV shows - just ads. That’s the REAL content”

OK.

Incredibly contrived, semantic logic.

“Oh no, the content has no value...it’s just what the ads precede. People come here for the ads, not the content. The content is not what makes us money. Without content, we’d have a perfectly equitable business as a purely advertising platform with absolutely no other content”

Mak…

I didn’t realize a requirement for performing labor was “being solicited”

that’s....contrived

In what way are they not? How can you possibly twist this to NOT mean exactly what I said?

I guess we should just call Wal-Mart a “content host” that has no obligation to pay “content creators” like Kraft for the goods they sell and profit from...

“laboring for themselves” ? so they don’t create the product YouTube sells ? YouTube makes 0$ off the arrangement and not the vast majority of the income from the product?

What the fuck does this mean ?

You are doing the work to produce the good that makes the profit for the company

That’s fucking labor dude

It’s only not labor if you semantically deny it is labor.

They are doing the work to produce the goods that make the profits for the company. That’s called being “an employee” and not being paid for it is called being “a slave”