Selling Out to the Digital Era
An essay for STSC Symposium: Regret
In late 2015 I got an exciting job1 as a head of post production for a creative studio that produced interactive documentaries. At the time I joined, the company was new and running off of loans and private investment, so we had a lot of freedom: we were coming up with new projects, shooting and editing footage daily, throwing things on the wall to see if they stick and if they didn’t, finding the results very interesting.
Obviously the company ran out of money. Around the beginning of 2018 we downsized to one of those closet-sized shared office spaces, and by the middle of the year I was reduced to part-time or infrequent work, until finally let go.
The company restructured, though, and contacted me around January of 2020: could I come back? They had learned how to monetize a card game based on one of their video series, and were finally profitable.
I ignored the advice of my career-counselor mother, who always told me, “You can never go back once the relationship is over.” I told myself that it was a different company now, with a specific monetization model and a plan rather than dreams and good will. I went back and worked there until January of 2022, at which point I was laid off a second time from the same job because the card games sales didn’t remain profitable.
The reason I loved the job the first time was because the stuff we were making was novel, exciting, and above all meaningful. But it took literally all of my creative energy and left me with zero IP of my own. During the time I worked there, I never made any short films. I never wrote any scripts. I never edited narrative work.
Over six years I edited over 700+ videos, dozens of peripherals, and yet when I sat down to make my reel and find another job, I had maybe ten usable seconds to show what my work was all about.
But one long-term benefit the job did compensate me with was a very clear look into the asymmetric power of platforms over content creators, knowledge I feel must be made clear to everyone who participates so that they can avoid some regrets themselves.
One of the videos I edited for that company has over 30million views on YouTube. For comparison, about the same amount of people watched Oppenheimer in domestic US box office.
Even better, our engagement was so outstanding that YouTube Studios themselves contacted us to talk about it and learn how it drove behaviors on the platform. I can’t tell you how many times I saw people’s mouths drop as we described how our videos had 80% average completion rates — back in 2016, that was unheard of for videos longer than a minute. Ours were normally over 10 minutes and often as long as a half hour.
Our views-to-likes ratios were good, our dislikes were nigh-nonexistent, and YouTube Studios couldn’t stop telling us how excited they were about our likes-to-subscribe ratios. In short, in every way imaginable, people were finding our work, they were staying on our videos for far longer than normal, they were following up with subscriptions, they were liking and commenting and sharing and everyone involved was like “This shit is great and you know what’s even better? That it’s for content that really improves people’s lives!”
I can sincerely attest that it has changed lives, because I’ve read the emails and comments and I’ve spoken to people who have told me it has changed their lives. It’s changed my life, it changed how I communicated and it helped me come out of my shell and I still play the card games sometimes with friends and loved ones.
So there you go. I’ve had a hugely successful career, right?
Do you want to know how much money 30million views earned my company from YouTube monetization? About eight thousand dollars. Total. Over a 5 year span.
A production of a video costs more than $2000. A production of 700+ videos obviously more than that. There was my salary to consider, plus my coworkers’, plus my boss’, plus the production costs, equipment, insurance, locations, business costs… &c.
Total YouTube income across the entire channel was about $2-3000 per month from millions of monthly YouTube views. Remember that YouTube themselves were ecstatic how well these videos did in keeping people on their site. Our company made unicorn quality content and YouTube valued it enough to call us up and consult on it, but not enough to pay rent on our office or update our computers.
When the company pivoted to merchandising rather than videos, the videos stopped being the product, and started becoming the promotional content for the product. That forced our focus toward tweaking the videos to best promote the product, rather than to be the best video, and of course that meant that we had to exert all of our energies into marketing the merchandise rather than coming up with new projects, new stories, new experiments.
The company I worked for was driven by a belief that as long as the content was good and meaningful, as long as it touched lives and changed minds, as long as it had its real base of devoted fans and followers, the rewards would follow.
It turns out goodwill and enthusiastic engagement is not enough. The rewards went to YouTube, not to our company; and then later when we sold merchandise, the budget largely went to Facebook ad buys rather than creating new and diverse work.
I worked for six years trying to build something meaningful with a group of artists and all the revenue was taken by Alphabet and Meta. With all that experience pulling digital levers in the pursuit of impact and reach, the only metric I’ve found reliable is how much I get paid.
¯\_ (ツ)_/¯
On Substack, this sent off a flurry of responses that were more or less along the lines of either “Well I buy books and so should you!” or “Yeah so actually here are better numbers and context, and this is just how prestige industries work.”