Tony is Fantastic. Just the right combination of smart, funny, and machinist minute.
I mean I did share a .pdf of content from a specific producer.
A lot of the non-Youtube content I would share is either gated, or has an intensely specific application. The stuff other folks here are likely to care about is conveniently on Youtube.
I blew the dust off my bookmarks, some stuff is dead, other stuff I haven’t followed in a dog’s age. The internet has been shrinking, and since I don’t use the Twitters or the Tumblrs, Youtube is my primary content stream. I guess theoretically we could also include artists/directors/studios, but those can probably be covered in their respective subforums.
Okay everyone, Ive worked it out.
The “content” is the part of the media that you, the consumer, actually want to experience. It’s what you get value from.
This has to be in relation to the monetisation of that media via advertising. The content is what draws the eyeballs, and the adverts are what is inserted into that consumption to make the platform or publisher money.
If you read a book, the transaction is between you and the publisher, and from that to the author. If you read an article, the transaction is via an advertising platform as much as it is with via the publishing platform.
I think this is why I never consider myself a “content creator” because I don’t see myself as doing any creation on behalf of YouTube or other platforms. In my mind, I make things and YouTube just happens to be one of the places I publish some of the things I make. I’m making it “for” my audience, which is spread all over the place online, as well as in the real physical world.
And I think my mindset is that of a non-“content creator” because I’ve been making media for my audience since 2000, which is well before YouTube existed, and long before “content” was something advertisers wanted so they could put adverts next to or in front of it.
My audience gained value from what I made, and in return they supported me in my transition to making things for a living. I’m a professional performer now due to me becoming one of the most famous jugglers on the internet back in 2000-2005, and that wasn’t based on me providing “content” to a third party platform.
I also believe words and their meanings have power. If you look at the media people make and consider it as “content” you’re accepting the advertiser’s framing. For them it doesn’t matter what you are watching, as long as they can put adverts next to it. Instead, why not think about what you are consuming on the terms of the relationship between yourself and the original creator.
Are they making content for advertisers, or are they making videos for you to watch? Are they creating content or are they writing articles you like to read?
So if this thread is re-titled “Reliably Excellent Media Sources” I’ll join in, but for now I’ll just be sitting over here, feeling queasy at the world’s acceptance that keeping advertisers happy is the natural state of things.
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It’s a given that anyone distributing their content through a producer is acting as an agent of that producer, but I think it’s assuming a lot more sinister intent on the part of the creators to believe that they only produce content to support their producer. I would bet that 99% of the people who post videos on Youtube do so because it’s the most popular way to share videos, not because they want to be Youtube Content Creators™. While Youtube hosts a lot of mainstream content likes news and clickbait, the fact that a thread like this was created to share stuff that isn’t that should be evidence that the site isn’t a monolithic ad-slinging apparatus.
I think this thread, as opposed to other threads, is a source of reliable content. As in, this is a youtube channel that updates regularly with very good consistent stuff.
Need your planetary gearset fix? Every Wednesday you can get your gear on.
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How frequent is necessary for it to qualify as reliable tho?
Not really how I read it. I was thinking it’s more content sources that are reliably excellent, as in, their excellence is consistent, maybe not their upload schedule.
For example, Noah Caldwell Gervais, who uploads one 30 min to three hour video about a single video game topic(usually a game, series of games, a genre, visiting locations that have frequently been in video games etc), every month or three. They’re not consistent in upload Schedule, but they are rock-solid consistent in being of absolutely excellent quality. Or This Old Tony, linked further up in the thread, who makes consistently great, very high production quality videos about making stuff and using tools, but whose upload schedule is basically a hopeful shrug.
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I’m kind of feeling theres a difference between lowercase c content and capital C “Content.” Lowecase c content is just the material a creator wants an audience to see - webcomic, blog, podcast, YouTuber etc. And i think that even if that is done to make money it’s not the same as “Content” which to me implies cynical cash-grabby clickbaity algorithm finesse-ing material.
Case in point: I might actually be stepping up on my idea for an old anime review vlog thing I posted in the Shit Talk thread. I don’t want to be a Content Creator™, I just want to share my thoughts, maybe entertain people, and make something like what I’ve enjoyed for years with webcomics, blogs, and podcasts.
You are using the word “producer” in a way that I don’t understand, hence I can’t really reply to your post. You don’t “distribute content through a producer” because a producer, by definition of the word, isn’t a distributer but a producer.
In my post I tried to make it clear that YouTube is a video advertising platform, and they need content to show after or before their adverts. It’s not a producer of anything (except for some adverts for its own products) but is a three-way aggregator of viewers, video producers, and advertisers.
I was using “producer” in the film sense, IE a film has a director and a producer. Sometimes they are also the same person, but sometimes not. The producer is the backing, oversight, and money that makes the media happen, even though the director is the the most involved “creator”. Youtube is a platform for content creators, and I will not dispute that there are creators on it who create content with the intent to generate revenue, that is, the actual content they create is irrelevant, all that matters is it’s “engaging”. But I would also posit that a large proportion of the creators on Youtube use it as a platform because it is the most popular platform, and if you’re looking to share your content why wouldn’t you use it? Some of the producers I linked (Peter Coffin and Thought Slime) are explicitly anti-capitalist, but like all of us they still live in capitalism, and you gotta eat somehow. I have high confidence that all the creators I posted, and all the creators everyone else is sharing, would continue to create content and share it even if they weren’t being payed for it. I also don’t think there’s anything wrong with earning a living doing something you enjoy doing.
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OK buuuuuut did you not, in fact, create media that was distributed through a platform?
I’m not policing your intent at all here. Your intent as an artist is clear. But, posting your content online is defacto distributing it to your audience, and I’m willing to bet that you built that success by being your own producer, distributor, and advertiser. This, to me, is functionally indistinguishable from “providing content to a third party plaftorm,” because unless you built your own platform that’s exactly what you did.
Well, maybe not your own distributor entirely. You used tools available online to distribute your content.
I understand that you are defining “content creator” in a specific way based on extant advertising methods, but the current framework evolved from the one in which you found initial success, so I don’t really think of those as being different in principle.
This seems related to the concept of being a “sellout” - are you making art for the sake of making art, or are you making something the audience will consume so you can make a buck?
And, honestly, does it matter? If I buy into the concept you’re selling me, isn’t that effectively enough?
Okay, I think I understand you. However you aren’t replying to anything I said, nor making any point worth responding to.
I want to say that there are three different two-way relationships in play when someone posts something to YouTube, and using the word “content” means that the most important relationship, that being the one between the video producer and the viewer, is being framed in the language of the third party, that being the advertiser.
So when it comes to YouTube, it’s the difference between saying “this person makes videos that I enjoy watching” rather than “this person makes undifferentiated something that advertisers can co-opt to try to sell me stuff and I happen to enjoy that stuff”.
Now both are technically correct, in much the same way that everyone who posts things to YouTube benefits in all kinds of ways is correct.
But if we pay attention to our language, we can use it more better.
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I guess the point I’m trying to make is that based on the context of this thread, everyone had the unspoken understanding that we are sharing “this person makes videos I enjoy watching” and it’s kinda weird to imply there was any other motive than that.
Well that’s my exact point. I did build my own platform to distribute my own videos. In 2003 I was getting hundreds of views of my videos every day, which took a lot of hard work to keep going in terms of bandwidth and website shenanigans.
Since then I’ve hosted huge amounts of my self-produced media on websites directly under my control. The Juggling Podcast, the Science Fiction Book Review Podcast, all all my other audio projects were or are published on my own websites. All my photography is right on my blog, in the highest resolution versions, along with all kinds of other writing. The novels I’ve published? Download them direct from my website. Etc, etc, etc.
So my initial success was NOT based around advertising, nor did the current business framework grow out of the way I produced and distributed videos back in 2000-2005 when I was launching my career as a professional entertainer.
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Again, you are making a point orthogonal to mine. We all know what the word means, and why it was used. I’m just weirded out that the language of advertising companies is now the default way to talk about media and media consumption. We already have a word for people who make videos, and that is video producers. It wasn’t video producers who started calling themselves “content creators”, it was the advertising platforms.
My own understanding is slightly different to the “unspoken” one of everyone else. If the only thing that is meant by “content” is “YouTube videos” then why don’t we talk in terms of video producers or channels?
Jesus Christ people. Our threads need their own meta threads now? What is this, Wikipedia?
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Oh, I legitimately didn’t know that! I have a much better handle on your perspective now. I had only been exposed to your work (to my recollection) through YouTube, so I had assumed you had used that platform as your primary distribution channel.
And this makes more sense to me. I myself actually use that exact language precisely because advertising pervades our lives, but my goal is more akin to getting people to recognize and reclaim that relationship, rather than continue to be beholden to the whims of advertisers.
My own stance is something like “yes advertisers are selling you content because it works very well - but you can also learn to use those tools to effectively advocate for your own content without the advertiser getting in the way.”
Shades of meaning, but I agree that we can strive to use our language more effectively here.
You say “now” like this isn’t how we’ve literally always operated. Welcome to the FRCF, fuck your thread topic, we’re going meta.
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