Research reveals the difficulties and precariousness of YouTube content creators
An international research on YouTube reaches the conclusion that only a small fraction of channels can expect to earn a decent salary through advertising revenue, whereas the popular video website succeeds thanks to the economic pressure put on its creators. Òscar Coromina, lecturer in the UAB Department of Audiovisual Communication and Advertising, took part in the research entitled "Making a Living in the Creator Economy: A Large-Scale Study of Linking on YouTube", alongside other researchers from the University of Amsterdam and Queensland University of Technology. The study was published in Social Media + Society.
The study focuses on analysing how content creators seek to build their online presence on different platforms and increase their sources of income. The research team examined a near-complete sample of 153,000 "professional" YouTube channels, each of them with at least 100,000 subscribers at the end of 2019. The analysis of the URLs found in 137 million video descriptions provided valuable insight into the monetisation and networking strategies used in the creator economy, which is notable for its global, large-scale dynamics.
According to the study, there are 138,284 channels with 100,000 to 1 million followers that generate an average of USD16,346 (EUR15,022) in annual revenue. The 14,969 channels with 1 to 10 million followers generate an average of USD165,892 (EUR152,454) annually. And only 517 channels in the world with more than 10 million followers generate an average of USD1,707,446 (EUR1,569,143) per year.
The study highlights the "aspirational curve" concept,
which represents the distribution of success in the creator market, where only a small fraction of channels can expect to earn a decent wage through advertising revenue. Within the sample of 153,000 channels with at least 100,000 subscribers each, most creators are at the bottom of this curve, with future-oriented job investment rarely materialising and being forced to diversify revenue streams.
Thus, the conclusion is that YouTube thrives as a highly unequal media system, thanks to the economic pressure it exerts on its creators: in order to optimise the visibility of videos, which depends on the platform's algorithm, and thus generate more advertising revenue, the creator is forced to generate a certain volume of content with a certain frequency. As examples, Coromina explains that "a large media company such as RTVE employs many more people in Spain than YouTube", and argues that "the university system is much more efficient in terms of generating wealth and employment than YouTube".
In addition, significant differences in monetisation and networking practices were observed according to geographic location and content categories. The economics of creators in countries such as India, the largest producer of videos in the sample, or China, have different characteristics compared to the Western world, where it is more common to use the links that accompany videos to try to exploit them on other social networks. These differences demonstrate how national and linguistic spheres are developing at different paces and in different directions within the broad context of a platform media system.
Article: Bernhard Rieder, Erik Borra, Òscar Coromina, Ariadna Matamoros-Fernández. Making a Living in the Creator Economy: A Large-Scale Study of Linking on YouTube. Social Media + Society April-June 2023: 1–20 © The Author(s) 2023 DOI: 10.1177/20563051231180628
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