On April 6, two days after Nasim Aghdam, 39, allegedly shot up the YouTube headquarters in Northern Cali, I received an email from YouTube thanking me as a creator and providing them with support “during this very difficult time.”
It’s the first time since I started my YouTube channel in 2008 that I ever received an emo “engagement” email from YouTube. Usually I get those kinds of emails from Vimeo, which professes its love for me on a regular basis. As a result, the two platforms have completely different perceptions among me and my film-tech hipster circles: YouTube is for stupid viral cat videos with low production value; Vimeo is for serious ARTISTIC film auteurrrrrrrs entering film festivals. Whatever.
The actual REAL difference between the platforms is YouTube allows creators to monetize videos – but only after gaining the attention of millions of eyeballs. As a result, we got YouTube stars like Justin Bieber, who crossed into mainstream, and Anna Akana, who just dropped a YouTube Red original web series (which looks terrible, but not indicative of her very funny channel targeting female millenials).
And then you got Miss Aghdam, now known as the “YouTube Shooter.”
On her now defunct website NasimeSabz.com, (which anyone can easily retrieve through archive.org), Aghdam had several posts about Persian culture and veganism, interspersed with rants against YouTube. You can also see screenshots of her YouTube analytics showing the drop in her video views between January 2016 and October 2016. Did she really only earn $.10 for more than 300,000 minutes of watch time?
She said in one of her videos before taking her aggression out on YouTube headquarters: “There is no equal growth opportunity on YouTube or any other video sharing site.” That’s a true statement. It’s obviously not a justification for a shooting rampage, but that’s another cultural problem for a different article.
What fascinates me most about this event, as someone who started a YouTube channel in 2008, is that a weirdo like Miss Aghdam found her followers. This was the beauty of the Internet when it was invented. And it was the super exciting prospect for creatives when YouTube launched in 2005. Finding followers for your own niche was the promise of the Long Tail, a book all us GenX tech kids worshiped as we re-grouped from the first wave of stupid online venture capital money. It laid the foundation for “web 2.0,” which we now call “social media.”
The difference between Aghadam, 39, and me is that I quickly realized my niche Femmebot content would never earn me enough followers nor enough money to pay rent through YouTube. Latinas in tech? Pft. That’s like a percentage of a percentage of the population.
More importantly, it was at this time that I met 85-year-old Hazel Henderson, a friend of New America Media founder Sandy Close, and an OG techno feminist LONG before the Internet came along. She took me under her wing and explained Silicon Valley’s business models. Data was their bread and butter. The more information they stored in their servers, the higher their valuations. This was the reason I was late to create a Facebook profile, also in 2008. I knew what Zuckerberg was up to. But, I decided as long as I used it as a professional journalist, no harm, no foul.
Over the last 10 years, social media platforms have strengthened the “Mediocracy” we’ve been living under since the invention of radio, yet it’s only now that the people are awakening to this reality. And it wasn’t until exactly one year ago, April 2017, shortly after a social media president had been elected, that I finally snapped and walked out of my job as a multimedia manager counting clicks and collecting data inside Times Square, aka “emotional Afghanistan” (as it’s been described by Benjamin Dickinson, director of “Creative Control“). I felt like I was slowly going insane.
A few months after my “meltdownload,” I re-connected with Hazel to interview her about the platforms that were supposed to connect us and equalize us, and how they had further divided us into two classes: a free workforce making money for a handful of owners in Silicon Valley:
NOT coincidentally, this interview happened months before the YouTube shooter snapped, and Zuckerberg tried to explain this business model to old dudes in Congress. So, now that the viral cats are officially out of the bag with Zuckerberg’s Congressional testimony and the YouTube shooter’s revelation that Google’s advertising business model doesn’t work, the business of data is about to experience a paradigm shift. Google and Amazon are next.
Creators will flock to alternative subscription-based platforms modeled after Netflix. Instead of uploading their content to “free” platforms dependent on advertising, creators can have more control and earn more for the content they create through a co-op business model. Vimeo OTT, formerly known as VHX, has been offering this since 2011, and there is new platform that just hit the market called Uscreen. My theory is these platforms have not taken off yet because creators had to first use the free platforms to find their audiences. And just like we saw users flee Myspace for Facebook, we may see a similar shift to subscription-based platforms.
