My single complaint?

Fucking stealth grass glitches.

“Better off” is certainly speculative here.

I think it’s hard to be “better off” than being actually compensated for the value you contribute to your employer. I think “bootstraps” or whatever is a poor argument against a labor movement.

Should they find other ways to monetize while they organize for a just…

it’s <4 inches from the “Buy” button...

it’s <4 inches from the “Buy” button...

Then I think we’ve found the source of our argument?

I agree with the article in that this class of laborer should organize against their...erm...for lack of a better term - employer for better conditions, and that the value they create for the company will show in a loss of ad revenue due to undependable rates of…

YouTube’s business model does not acknowledge the value disparity. That’s the fact here. They pretend that each channel has the same value while ignoring the fact that that is complete fucking horseshit.

Businesses do not get to “not see the distinction” on matters of labor relations. Coal companies didn’t get to “not…

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…