Honestly I think people will keep making those sorts of videos anyway. We never get paid anything for posting on Stack Overflow or Hacker News yet here we are. And YouTube had lots of good videos before it had monetisation.
Right, but if even 5% of car mechanics were making Youtube videos only a few would still be able to make a meaningful amount of money off of them. A car mechanic capable of adapting to a new technology early, and building an audience off of that is more than just a car mechanic.
If you benefit from a disruptive technology, you can't expect the "new normal" to persist indefinitely. The ride certainly may not be free or easy, but it would be abnormal for it not to change.
This whole thing seems very reminiscent of SEO about a decade ago. It was still fairly new and thousands of people built incomes and entire businesses with employees around it. In some cases a search algorithm update wiped out all of their audience. Of course, in nearly every case those impacted immediately blamed Google.
When something is fairly new, the first movers often get outsized benefits. You have less competition which makes the ability to both capture and monetize an audience easier. As the market matures more competitors appear. If the pie doesn't grow as fast as the new competitors arriving, all participants earn less profits.
The results of what Google/Youtube is doing now is just bringing the same effects early. The future of Youtube producers will consist of less search visibility combined with ad revenue divided more ways. 15+ years of double digit only advertising growth has gone a long way to mask the audience problem (and when it ends it is going to result in massive changes to Google.)
Perhaps. I think there are people in places [even in the US] where money goes further for whom a dozen dollars here, a dozen dollars there from different uploads made it worthwhile for them. I hope you are right, but I fear we might lose some great contributors.
Would you still be here or on StackOverflow if you knew that some of the contributors were "gold members" who got directly paid while you didn't?
We participate in these places for the intangible rewards and one of those, I believe, is feeling that we are helping to foster an egalitarian community. When the community is explicitly tiered and money-based, is that still something people will want to chip in to out of the goodness of their hearts?
If they do, then that is great. Since there is no compensation from youtube, these creators should upload the content to a bunch of online streaming platforms.
