The Fragile Creator Economy - SOME MORE NEWS
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- Опубликовано: 9 июн 2024
- Hi. In today's episode, we look at how people make money on the internet, how vulnerable tech platforms affect people's livelihoods, and why "being your own boss" often means your boss is just Jeff Bezos.
Executive Producer - Katy Stoll
Hosted by Cody Johnston
Directed by Will Gordh
Written by Erik Barnes
Edited by Gregg Meller
Produced by Jonathan Harris
Associate Producer - Quincy Tucker
Post-Production Supervisor - John Conway
Researcher - Marco Siler-Gonzales
Graphics by Clint DeNisco
Head Writer - David Christopher Bell
Sources: docs.google.com/document/d/14...
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Chapters:
00:00 - Intro
1:09 - The Ripple Effect
10:32 - When A Site Goes Away
19:38 - So What of Creators? 
Приколы
if we lose @SomeMoreNews, we will lose any chance of a boar-free future
He thinks we can stop it😂
If they go under we know it was the boars
I welcome our new boar overlords!
Tbf, without boars the world would be unboarably boaring.
boar me once, shame on crack. boar me twice, shame on those seal-flipping Orca's that are definitely talking crap about me!
"The internet was supposed to be digital anarchy, but instead got hijacked by corporations using that legal gray area to exploit people"
Best quote of the episode.
This seems to happen a lot. Makes you wonder why we never see this coming, never have a plan to stop it, never have a way to fight back, and why nobody ever exacts vengeance on the people doing it!
That is, unfortunately, the inevitable fate of anarchy: to be hijacked by whomever is most powerful.
Why I'm skeptical of actual anarchy, too.
Concentrated power isn't good. But neither are power vacuums. 😬
Yeah it was free for about 40 years other than the monthly subscription.
Even then there are ways around that. Libraries, cafes and other public places.
Services weren't gatekept behind paywalls, subscriptions and microtransactions. Nobody really asked you for money.
You could use them for free and they would actually do what they said on the tin.
Now it's just mining your wallet and personal data. You have to download and use so many things like adblockers, JavaScript blockers, sign up/in/paywall hoppers just to get it back to even being usable.
I miss when the internet was run by a bunch of nerds, geeks and dorks. It so was fun and silly. So many experimental flash games, art and web comics that would seemingly go on infinitely.
The internet was created by CERN scientists to share info freely.
Now everything is so depressing and cynical. Even the most minor and harmless of words/criticisms will get you shadowban-ed.
There's a committee at Stanford that was specifically created and designed to control the narrative.
Kinda ironic what it's become.
We can get that back by saying f it to the big corps and going to the Fediverse and the small web.
Just chat. Don't buy anything.
@@stoodmuffinpersonal3144That's the irony.
Anarchists originally created Silicon Valley because they were sick and tired of being abused by working for the big corps.
Capitalism really said “You like your work? Then why would we pay you?”
Majoras mask is the best game. Truly a work of art
We must end capitalism. It's not democratic at all. Myth. Socialism is, IS democracy in OUR economy
Unelected minority running everything: wages, prices, employment, et cetera
VERSUS
Everyone decides that together ❤️
Cody referencing his actual real life career prior to Some More News is fucking surreal. He's so good at playing his persona that I honestly forget that he's not a perpetually duped pothead who's life hangs up on the whims of an Eldritch horror disguised as a puppet.
Katy may be an eldritch horror but she is NOT a puppet!
I did not realise he was supposed to be stoned all the time 😅 I thought he was just quirky 😂
Also: I think I missed that - what was his past background?
do ya think she might be one of them... feeeemales? @@TheDarthbinky
This whole system is like running a rat race while having to also spin a hamster wheel.
an Eldritch horror disguised as a puppet. - Never heard a better description of Zuckerberg.
I don't know who the boss of RUclips is, but I think the situation has only changed slightly for the SMN crew.
Also I am sad, that I only got to meet them on youtube, since I am very very glad I never subscribed to Assbook .. ( you know like the Duke said .. your face your ass .. whats the difference )
The fact that most GoFundMe campaigns are for medical bills is just depressing
2nd most: funerals
Apparently it is for GFMs founder as well
@@shoveIi agree we need more parties and am a fan of the ranked voting idea. That said, there are two major differences in the parties and how they govern. Both are owned by the corporations, but the GOP also has to bow to the evangelicals and the NRA. Because of that, the LGBTQ community will always be a target and guns will always matter more than children. Until a better party comes along, I will have to bite my tongue and vote blue.
Murica fuck yeah!
Murica
So anyone remember monthly pulp sci-fi anthology books? Fun fact they didn't go out of business because tastes changed. Every single one of the major pulp sci-fi anthology books used the same distributor to get their books into stores. This would have happened in the sixties. A venture Capital firm noticed that the distributor owed a bunch of valuable property so they bought the company and liquidated it.
This left the pulp Syfy companies without a distributor for their and they all went under before they could find and set up a new one. Remember this was the 60s and things moved slower and it was harder to find a company to do that kind of work.
I guess my point is this is absolutely nothing new.
Indeed, capitalism ruins everything in pretty much the same way. Make something a commodity because it's good, then that attracts the middlemen, gatekeepers, and vultures, and there's seemingly no coming back.
You think that's depressing? Most major (print) publishing companies now are actually subsidiaries of the "big three," and those in turn are owned by - *drumroll* - toilet paper companies. Yup. This has been the state of the book publishing industry ever since the toilet paper companies figured out there was money to be made there, and bought up the book companies.
I feel like today online there is at least easier to setup options of moving to different "distributors". More of a challenge if the banks or credit card companies decide they don't like something. There is also still an issue of content creators not being an employee and closer to gig workers.
@@SomeGuyAsWell Banks and credit card companies don't have likes and dislikes. There are a bunch of businesses they won't work with because those businesses are high risk, are they because of increased regulatory scrutiny or because many of their customers will fight and dispute charges. But those are purely business decisions. Banks don't have advertisers and they're generally not worried about losing individual customers. Now they're marketing departments might have different requirements for where they will advertise but when it comes to who they'll take money from that's purely a business decision.
There is nothing new under the Sun
This was a very cathartic episode to listen to while repairing my sewing machine so I can get back to making cow plushies for my etsy store to pay my medical bills :|
F
you could just not pay them.
the figure they chose is fake, and divorced from reality; more, there is no enforcement mechanism to collect medical bills.
F
What's your etsy store name so i can purchase?
Just be grateful that the manufacturer of your sowing machine ALLOWED you to repair it. /s
As an Etsy seller I simple LOVE the fact that basically the whole site has become Temu with artificially inflated prices. Cool stuff. Not exhausting at all.
gotta love competing with all the child labor overseas factories the HAND MADE marketplace
I just made a comment about this individually, and I'm only coming to this perspective as someone who buys stuff from Etsy. But it's so fucking exhausting trying to figure out "can I find this cheaper on AliExpress/Temu/Shein, or is this actually a handmade product". 99% of the time it's the first one. Like I mean I also understand that as a seller it's exhausting, I'm not trying to say it's not. But man it's so hard trying to shift through crap.
Gotta love when the most accessible retailers sell 90% straight to landfill.
I had to leave Etsy as a buyer because they were refusing to refund money when a seller ghosted me. I hate that it's become a cesspool for independent sellers and unsuspecting buyers. I loved being able to find unique products while supporting small businesses, but now it's such a slog to find quality, handmade work with fair policies it's no longer worth it.
I am very sorry it's a source of exhaustion for you. It should be easier and accessible. I am always open to alternative site suggestions if people are moving elsewhere.
It's hard now to find actual artist on the site without some other platform advertising them. I miss the days of finding them just scrolling through Etsy
I doubt this video will cover it but a video with "fragile creator" in the title like 3 days after the james somerton takedown + him deleting his twitter and turning off comments on his videos is really funny
I doubt anyone at Cody's Showdy followed Somerton, but I'm sure they follow Hbomberguy
His mother must be proud. Wait, that was the other guy.
@@Joe90hOOF
I'd crawl under a rock as well, homie is done for
@@Joe90h get this guy another Guinness world record!
They also didn't mention how a lot of these funding sites also take advantage of the sex industry for early explosive growth before randomly deciding to "fix" their image by ruthlessly cutting as many of them out as possible since safe places to sell adult entertainment are rare.
I remember having my whole livelihood dependent on etsy, then 1 day they decided to ban my shop because of some customers mad about having to pay for custom duties, nearly ended up on the street due to trusting them, lost all my savings, lost nearly everything and if not for family's support wouldn't even be here today. The pain and misery they inflicted were untold and still have not recovered years later.
Considering last week's Patreon crackdown on many "adult" creators... This is surprisingly well-timed to explain the issue.
Etsy took such a big wet bite out of my sales when someone clicked on an ad I did not want posted that I basically had to give the art away. I shut down my account after that
Wait... Are you saying that Etsy posted ads for competing suppliers on your page? If so, that's awful. If not, do you mind explaining what you mean?
not the original commentor, but it was mentioned in the episode. Etsy decides to promote your content by providing ads for your content and then take a cut from your sales when people come to your site through those ads
Etsy takes one of my posts and puts it on a featured ad against my will or consent (they don’t even alert me that I’ve been selected) then if someone clicks on that ad to come to my shop and buys *anything* they take an extra 15% on top of all the other fees.
"5-Second Films: The App" sounds like a good idea to us. Surely a concept that won't die on the vine
Hey! I was so happy to hear Cody mention you guys! I find so few people these days that know about 5 second films, but you guys were way ahead of the curve!
I still watch "Missing" at least once a year :)
I'm so glad you guys are still around
ROBODOG: SIT
Thank you for shining a light on how predatory all of these platforms have become
🙏
"Growth Capitalism" baby! Because wages and salaries are for the poors and stock options are how you get rich.
You nailed it all. Most of these stupid things are just middlemen between users and content creators. Everything is just becoming a money vessel while users are responsible for it's health. and the same companies make changes that are typically unpopular by a majority.
The biggest negative change we've had is when apps made the switch from chronological scrolling to algorithmic and endless. Then they force the narrative and everyone either obeys or falls into a void. It's why Facebook claimed IG reels and shortform vids from randoms are what it's users want "according to data", yet most people i speak to still wish instagram was back to mostly content from those we purposely followed for that reason over a stranger's content. it's not about you. it never was they just don't need to hide it anymore.
And as a result it assumes my band's followers don't care to see our show announcements because people constantly ask me when the next one is despite posting about it.. how is hiding content from the users that do want it going to help growth? Instead we're penalized for not posting 10 vids every single day and jumping on viral trends. We're just trying to be a band, not insta creators.
The crackdown/hiding of posts on anything resembling an ad for your show or product or whatever, if you don’t pay to boost it, is something that definitely needs to be covered.
@@barleymepodcast2301 1000%
It's just another gig delivery service taking half the revenue for basically no cost.
We paid to build the internet, and we paid for the service.
It is past time for municipal internet.
It is a good time for guilds. Neofeudal does seem to be the vibe of 2023.
Pitchforks & torches, tar and feathers, public stocks for failed leaders...
we rebel or we continue as a permanent undrrclass.
Just want to clarify, the Unity situation happened a few months ago, and they have since decided to rollback their 'fee-per-download' model after basically every indie company spoke out. It still hurt them a hell of a lot, a lot of developers have moved to open-source solutions that don't cost anything for anyone, at all.
The runtime fee will still exist, but they become more cautious of how they do it than their initial thing. One change is that the fee wont count for any Unity game using versions older than 2024 version. The update shows that they mean initial installs (though they changed the name to clarify that installing the game, deleting, and rei-installing it only counts as one install, rather than the theoretical 2 that people feared).
Even back in the original terrible version, you weren’t charged if you didn’t make money. Though I’m not sure how that would work when it comes to subscription services.
I might sound like I’m defending Unity. Nope, screw them. I’m glad they made the fees better, but I just don’t know why they didn’t do the tried and true “if you make money, we want a small cut”. It’s funny because they kind of added that in a roundabout way while still sticking to the runtime fee for some reason. You pay whichever cost you less money, be it from runtime fee or 2.5% of revenue.
Sources:
Fee FAQ (current stuff)
unity.com/pricing-updates
Fee blog (outdated stuff)
images.response.unity3d.com/Web/Unity/%7B410f1e43-64c2-4d2e-819a-0fa291ce719e%7D_09-12-2023-Unity-plan-pricing-and-packaging-updates-Unity-Blog-V1.pdf?.13.23
It's like being a contractor at RUclips but with somehow even fewer rights
I always equate it to WWE wrestlers.
@@bazzfromthebackground3696 That's a seriously messed up situation. Like, it should literally be illegal. It is a textbook example of misclassification of employees.
@@ichijofestival2576 the governing body that would do anything about that have had their teeth pulled.
It's the beauty of the gig economy baby! All the profit and all the exploitation at the same time!
I love the precarity of my fake internet job. It almost reaches the precarity of my real academic career
Yanis Varoufakis has a lot of talks about this topic. He calls it another form of economics, that has more common with feudalism than with capitalism.
As these platforms have their digital fiefs, and if you want in they charge you % of your income just for being there. Thus these the people owning these platforms are very much like feudal lords extracting money from their serfs.
I'm glad someone brought this up. I saw some interviews covering his opinions on "rent-seeking" and "technofeudalism" from months ago. A few others have commented on this in the context of the Unity debacle, and how it's going to inspire other companies. Very concerning.
In a way, it's like Bethesda's horse armor DLC. While it was criticized, its financial success encouraged other companies to make similar moves.
Re: The Unity thing. They back-peddled. Not that anyone would ever trust them again, but it seemed important to mention.
They didn’t backpedal fully. It’s just now capped at a % and doesn’t retroactively apply.It’s still an insanely scummy change that is meant to punish small devs and mobile developers to force them to use their ad service and kill their competitors. All of it is legally gray and I wouldn’t be shocked if they just slowly implement the original policy over the next couple years.
@@MogDog9 Don't really care much about the mobile game developers, since that market was screwed over a long time ago, flooded with shameless cashgrabs, predatory monetization, and outright scams - but with the state of the AAA game industry, currently headed in a direction similar to the mobile games, indie game developers are more important than ever.
The bulk of us moved over to Godot's engine and have been adapting to Python, even after they "walked back" some of their bizarre changes within Unity, the problem a lot of us saw has been the writing on the wall for years now. Unity's new board of directors have been making radically bad changes, cutting resources, and adding predatory features baked into the engine over time. Even when people were laughing and clapping at the CEO stepping down, there's still a whole slew of corrupt assholes just waiting to direct the ship. One of which being notorious for pushing adware.
Godot isn't perfect, but at least for now we have to wrestle with issues like spotty physics and not the whole engine going bottom-up at whim of some dumb millionaire.
Whoa, a 30-minute episode? Is Cody okay?
Yeah this is the shortest one after the one about my favourite guy Jordan "Bordan" Peterson
It's odd. This could have easily been a 60 minute video.
I'm playing it twice so I don't feel weird.
He only got 30 minutes of the upload before RUclips " had an issue" That's why he did the credits at the beginning! 😂
Cody got some hemmeroids. Give the bloke a brake
Hot take: Facebook killing Cracked was, in retrospect, one of the best things to happen to comedy. Every single Cracked alumni is making incredible content. From Some More News, to Behind the Bastards, to John Oliver, to Small Beans. All incredible.
Don't forget Maggie Mae Fish, she still makes video essays and many on genre film 😊 her exclusive series on sex in cinema history on Nebula is worth it.
It certainly worked out in the end! But just goes to show what a foolish decision it was, kicking all these talented people to the curb when they had built-in audiences to follow them to their next joint
Definitely can’t forget Maggie Mae Fish! The best cracked comedian who is also a sentence
What ever Happened to Adam Todd Brown. His articles were great, and he had a podcast for a bit. I've lost track of him.
C'mon. Give me the link I desire.
Oh shit, I forgot. RUclips has gone out of it's way to enshittify.
@@LegoDork he runs Unpops.
I miss OG Cracked. I was watching it every day for like 3 years, right until the layoffs. After Hours and Obsessive Pop Culture Disorder and [REDACTED: Legally distinct News show] were some of my favourite content online up until it was all gone in one moment.
I remember Machinima dying overnight too. And Vine... Damn there has been a lot of website murders huh.
I remember when Cracked was a paper publication. It was the poor man's Mad Magazine and kinda disappeared in the late 90s before cropping up again in the mid-late 2000s as a website with user-written comedic list articles.
i appreciate the odd shorter episode tbh
Was it the one written by the wonderful creator james somerton? So glad to have people making original content in times were capitalism has transformed so many ideas into empty soulless husks
@@keksfaktor3650 Surely you're not attributing the work of Thomas Andrew Tallarico to some plagiarist?
Chiming in to raise awareness that Toddintheshadows uploaded a new video which may as well be an official companion piece to said recent vid. Not only does it throughly debunk many things said by Somerton, it also manages to spotlight Nick actually being a part of the problem.
I'm still trying to finish that video! Can only do it in 1/2 hour chunks.
Don't look at the timestamps.
I'd like to thank the team at some news for playing the best part first. The ending credits are my reward for managing to hold my attention for however long this show manages to go.
IKR? forty-three seconds in and I'm out of here.
The video on Jordan Peterson which was a totally normal and reasonable length must have been a real treat for you then.
I've got 2 jobs and my husband has 2 jobs and somehow we still are struggling to buy groceries and gas
Cool guy Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis has a new book out about this, he's basically saying instead of technology advancing us out of capitalism it's regressed things back to a technofeudalism. So people are working digital fiefdoms for the lords in this new age; Amazon, etsy, uber etc
Thank you for bringing up the issues Etsy sellers and all creators face! After the Etsy strike you mentioned we formed the Indie Sellers Guild to continue to fight for a fairer internet. This last year we've advocated for creative indie sellers with the US Senate, the FTC, and UK Small Business Commissioner. And like someone else mentioned, another group of strike organizers formed Artisans Coop, a seller owned handmade marketplace.
Sometimes I think "why would I want something with Warmbo's face on it" but I just went to the new merch page and saw the mousepad, and I actually laughed out loud. So my wife is about to get a really weird Christmas suggestion.
That's Warmbo talking to you.
Warmbo TP would definitely sell to a friend that absolutely hates him.
There's a mousepad? Nothing I need more than a Warmbo mouse pad.
14:55 NEVER CALL IT THAT! Call it twitter, call it musk's folly (better option), but never call it that misbegotten letter! We must remind musk of his failure at every single goddamn turn!
I dunno. I like X, formerly known as Twitter. As it's like you're respecting his rename, but then jabbing in a reminder that no one actually knows wtf X is and it's still twitter to everyone.
I like X'ed out twitter. Personally.
Twitters dead, X is the parasite that feasts off its remains, you wouldnt call a maggot a lion because it grew on a lions corpse would you?
I like the jab they did recently when they mentioned how much Twitter was worth vs how much "X" is worth. I just think of that every time I hear it.
@@prettyevil6662000for me, Ill start respecting the rebrand when Musk starts respecting his trans child
@@YumixfanExactly this.
All the things that Cody said about platforms like RUclips and Twitch also ring true for Bandcamp and independent artists dependent on that platform.
I have been bracing myself for the Bandcamp implosion since it got bought out. 😢
@salyx same here. Dreading having to move my music to dsp's at some point
@@salyx it got bought out? Great...So we can't have a less shite version of spotify without someone buying it to make it just as bad?
I genuinely don't know any replacements for Bandcamp. And now that spotify is going to pay their artists even less in 2024, fuuuuck, man. Tickets and merch are the only good ways to support left
@@randomusername1735 yeah it really sucks, hoping for the best with it. Their union just closed a deal on a contract with Epic so we'll see.
Sounds like the problem is the private ownership over the means to produce content, let’s call them the “means of production.” How about social ownership of these “means of production”? How could we call this? 🤔
Would appreciate it if you cleared up the Unity issue.
They ultimately caved to public pressure and just set up a %-based revenue sharing model.
This being them unilaterally changing their user agreements, so this new fee just came out of nowhere, and was done secretly, with them taking down their agreement, editing it, then uploading the changed version silently a couple days before the announcement.
So as to trap existing games in their new user agreement versions, instead of what they shipped with (which is what the contract specified)
So no love to Unity here, might even be worth covering how they just "change the agreement" on us like Darth Vader.
Unity is far from the only example of this backalley psuedo-legal EULA nonsense, they all do it.
They're so slimy that most of the game industry is moving away from them, permanently. I've made a tidy profit shorting their stock in all this scandal.
Godot is seeing a transformative influx of users, it's an open source project that aims to be a better unity-like engine, and I think open source might just be our only relief valve in this endless nightmare of subscriptions, each draining a single drop of our lifeblood like a million mosquitos.
Honestly that hole situation is almost a net positive, the amount of people that made the switch to open source software and the big donations to open source projects done out spite is really going to help the industry move forward.
Unity is going to have to do a lot more than just reverse some bad decision if they want to compete with free and I am not just talking about it costing $0 I am talking about having the freedom to chose how to distribute and monetise your games. They have violated peoples trust and that is not something that is easy to earn.
If they made the attempt to do that out of desperation and not greed then things might be worse than we thought and I won't be surprised if they end up declaring bankruptcy very soon.
Ah, I actually have some knowledge of this - I'm currently studying game design. You left out that they did this shortly after Godot 4 released, which was basically the point at which Godot became as good as Unity. My teachers have said that relying on Unity is a business risk, and are actually changing the curriculum they teach to be less reliant on Unity. That should say a lot about how good its long-term prospects are.
@@releasethebogus8581 First, Godot isn't as good as unity, not by a long shot.
Also your teachers are teachers, they know about as much as you do about the actual ins and outs of the games industry, their prognostications carry zero fucking weight. Actually, they probably know less than you, as they're teaching some mickey mouse "game design" course.
Then again, you signed up, so maybe there's a knowledge parity there.
@@HerrCron Woah, calm down! First off, most of my teachers are currently working in the industry - one of them released a game just this year. I chose the course I'm doing because it's let me learn the skills used to make games in a context that I'll enjoy more than a generic C# programming course.
Second off, I have used both Godot and Unity, and while I would have agreed with you in the case of Godot 3, Godot 4 is absolutely usable for large games, and I honestly prefer it to Unity. First off, Unity's documentation is all over the place, and chunks of it are just... not there, especially when working with shaders. Godot's documentation is, contrary to what you may expect, a lot better, though obviously not perfect. And worst case, you can just look at the source code - not so with Unity.
@@releasethebogus8581 Wow, one of them released a game. This year and all?
I take it all back!
This is what corporatization does. It takes a great idea / concept/ business model, it institutionalizes it, locking down the rules and codifying them so that a few hold the keys, then it’s gatekeeping all the way out from there. It’s purest expression is the total farce that is Shark Tank. A bunch of already gluttonously wealth people pretending to give a crap about a small business owner who’s trying to monetize their one skill or idea that’s worth anything real, while trying to “wheel and deal” to “help” them make it big. It’s grotesque gatekeeping and it’s how the very very wealthy have always continued to stay that way. By controlling the means not by actually producing anything of true value.
The lack of Banana Duck in the merch store is frankly criminal
ITS A GOOSE
Not to mention that anyone using any of these platforms who creates adult art or writing (or is queer/makes queer content) is constantly having to contend with rules changing that would make their content suddenly against TOS. Most of these sites have really arbitrary nsfw rules and usually use ai to flag content so people who follow the platforms rules often get caught and lose visibility or their whole platform and often any money that hadn't been paid out.
This is a real world thing, but in my business class for physical therapy, a PT business owner got three maybes for anyone thinking about starting a business. He went on to ask if anyone was paying a mortgage yet, bc real pressure is leveraging your morgage for start up costs. We all gave him the blankest stare I think hes ever received. Most of my classmates live at home or with several roommates, and we are all 6 digits in debt. None of us are buying a house for the next 10 years.
Cody: You wanna try another take on the bidet commercial? Katy: Nah.
👍
It's my personal theory that they write the copy for each other's ads and don't let each other read it until they film 😅
Katy: If you reshoot that AG1 chug.
Time is money, and she’s got a hot tip about the ponies on the other line
@@afreaknamedallie1707I am stealing your theory.
@@afreaknamedallie1707 I think you're right- i especially get that vibe from this ad.
The owner class will never let us escape their control, every time we create a way to be independent they buy it up or lobby governments to destroy it.
Honestly you better enjoy AI now because in the future, I can see it going the same way as the internet.
I miss the era of Cracked you were part of. Interesting articles and really good videos from you and the other big names. Im really happy you continued to make Some more news it feels like the last remnant of those days.
Oh my god, agree! After Hours I still will go back and watch thru! I found their videos right as they were...yeah.
I actually didn't like The Last Remnant, but you do you.
...
...
...I'll just see myself out. Please don't throw anything while I'm fleeing.
Fellow Cracked alumni are still floating about. Behind the Bastards is Robert Evans, and Seanbaby is doing... something.
@@zerodollarbird I know Dan O'Brian works for last week tonight on the writing team, and is now an academy award winner for his work.
@@miisgi9641 I just recently rewatched all those and was reminded how snappy the writing was. Their fan theories were sooo entertaining.
I really hate the internet gig economy. So many people have to market themselves into commercials, stuffed between real commercials, to try and make a living.
Hey Cody! Just want you to know how much I appreciate your hard work and determination in providing the best journalism on the internet.
Honestly surpised that you didn't delve into the whole "cloud" culture in the online space - there are businesses out there, massive multi million companies that exist but are beholden to other larger companies. Because of service like AWS and Azure people can now more than ever "spin up" their websites but become locked into the platforms that they subscribe t, I don't think we as a culture have fully seen what it means for a business like amazon to fail - it would literally bring down half the known internet because so much is being hosted on services in Amazon web services.
These (and the companies that you talked about in the video) are like internet landlord, they are not the ones making money - you are, they are just giving you a space to create the money and are leeches on your hard work. They create more and more arbitrary rules and might on a whim decide to not have you in that space anymore. It's damn right scary.
I just had a 2+ hour video copyright claimed for a minute of a song buried beneath other audio. And for that, the copyright holder gets to claim the entirety of the video's ad revenue. Not even to mention how fair use is disregarded or goes outright unacknowledged. Ultimately, the individual loss for a channel my size is pennies but the fundamental emotional toll is far greater. I'm making this stuff because I love to create and these skeevy companies moving goalposts, nickeling and diming you, pulling the rug from under you, and many times just flat out stealing from people who can't defend themselves legally is soulcrushing. There *has* to be a better way.
A long long time ago, there was a man so rich he is to this day considered the richest American in history. And the US government forced him to break his company into like 30 smaller companies and sell them all. Imagine that.
This show is bringing "Last Week Tonight" level stories, such amazing work
geez it almost feels like having to focus on making money creates problems that ruins things for no reason other than "lets make more monies"
Competition is important... when you're an underdog, when you're the one on top all that matters is knocking down competition.
Or making sure no competition can form to begin with. A lot of companies in most businesses sectors seem to be channeling the spirit of Standard Oil. And by that i mean they either bully smaller businesses out of the market, undercut them, or buy them out.
I mean, I don't think it makes too much sense to blame them for anti-competitive practices. Like, yes, they are pure evil and probably kick puppies, but it's not their job to make the economy functional or to ensure "healthy free market competition." No individual company gives a crap about the free market, why would they? They're just doing whatever they can to make money, using whatever is available to them. Expecting them to ever reign themselves in is just dumb, because they never have and they never will. What needs to happen is government action, whatever form that takes.
I write books and have audiobooks and when I say I make a depressingly small amount of money from that, even when sales are fantastic.
@emisformaker Writing novels is such a difficult way to go that I respect most people who pursue it.
For one thing, none of us are making money except maybe Neil Gainan. I could sell 10,000 copies next month and between Amazon fees, shipping, publishing costs, etc I'd still make nothing worth getting excited over.
Second, no one cares. Of all the creative paths out there, it's the hardest one to get any kind of traction. Social media is never that exciting or it's disingenuous, if you're doing any kind of a good job with it you spend a considerable amount of time between projects, and the amount of time needed to dedicate to reading a book or evening listening to an audiobook is a whole lot more than watching a video. I've known people for well over a decade who will, to this day, tell me "Oh, I’ve been meaning to read your books."
Lastly, as I kind of alluded to in the last point, the sheer amount of time and money it takes to properly produce a novel. Besides just your own writing, you need to hire editors, proofreaders, cover designers, possibly a formatter, and that's before the audiobook with the talent and audio engineer. And for anyone saying well if it costs so much and makes so little, just stop doing it. We could, but then there's no more books.
Anyone in the publishing world right now who isn't the one percent of the one percent who's getting paid by a big publisher is in this purely for the love of the game and I respect it. If you're spending months to write 80 to 100,000 or more words, putting it through the editing process, doing it again, taking care of printing and design and most expensive of all, marketing, only to have people complain the ebook is more than a dollar, all while most certainly holding down a career that actually pays your bills, then again, huge amount of respect. Because god knows the rest of the world doesn't respect authors.
Yeah part of what sucks with Kindle too given Amazon demands no competes for KU.
Me, a budding author currently working on their first novel: [cries]
@@SpoopySquid I said all of this and I'm currently writing novels 5, 6, and 7 at the same time. You're going to be all right.
For all of those negatives, there's nothing quite as satisfying as having a book in your hand that you wrote and now someone else has on their shelf.
My grandmother passed away, and my whole life she knew how important the dream of becoming an author was to me. She got to read three of my books before she passed, and the immense pride she had for me is something I could never replace with anything.
There are negatives, sure. The lack of money, the time commitment, the mutated wasteland that is Goodreads; the positives though are what you should focus on. Writing a novel you're proud of is a mountain frw ever climb. And it's easy to many fun of people climbing up mountains for how dangerous and low reward it is when you're sitting at home in safety, but the completion is often the reward.
@@SpoopySquid The crushing part wasn't only selling 70 copies in my first year, the crushing part was learning that was 5 times the average.
It’s weird that since the vast majority of the content is user generated, these companies don’t own the means of production, they own the means of presentation and visibility.
I feel an opportunity was missed by not mentioning the recent monumental fuck-up that is Gamurs' handling of the creative side of The Escapist.
There are plenty of videos on YT, but basically, somehow the creators all banded together and formed their own thing - Second Wind - away from corporate ownership.
I think it's one of the most important developments in worker-owned endeavours in recent history, and I'm all for it ❤
They're still under RUclips control sadly, but yes, it felt cathartic, I didn't even watch zero punctuation before, but now I do watch ramblomatic religiously.
@@mrptr9013 "Control" is too big a word, I'd say. The ad revenue is only a bonus for them, as they're entirely crowdfunded. So as long as they don't play pr0n games or dismember live babies, I'd say they're pretty much safe.
College Humor now Dropout is a better example. They're their own website now. They basically just use RUclips as advertisement to get people to subscribe to their website instead.
As a banana duck statue I can attest that my creators where in fact very high, like me rn
Your channel is the only channel that I do not fast forward thru the ads. You both make them worth watching!
I on the other hand appreciate the red borders around the ads, as it makes them easier to skip
I have my suspicions that their agreements with AG1 don't actually require Cody to drink the stuff, he just does it because he knows we like to watch him suffer.
@@SirPhysics If he actually drinks it on camera, requested or not, they're going to want to keep him coming back. Makes sense to just do it honestly.
@@SirPhysicsI think he's pretty directly said before it was his idea and suggestion, that he just genuinely doesn't mind doing it. I think he leaves it to your imagination whether or not he enjoys it or just doesn't mind lol
Robinhood clearly had a major liquidity problem going on when they basically gave every customer a margin account and GME stock went wild. (Dan Olson / Folding Ideas explained this so well.)
I'm surprised I had to scroll down this far to find someone mention this. And I'm surprised SMN didn't have a more nuanced explanation. Usually they're better researched than that.
The problem wasn't just that the stock was taking off, it's the fact that the meteoric rise drew in a massive flood of new users hoping to get on the GME bandwagon but Robinhood's policy for new accounts was incredibly risky. Essentially, they'd front the cash for new customers when they joined because initial deposits take several days to clear and that could cause major liquidity problems as the situation changed so quickly. Maybe there is an element of truth to, "They were just trying to protect the hedge funds," but the mundane answer is more likely. Robinhood was worried about running out of money because of their own inherently risky practices for new accounts.
Yeah, and that's the problem innit? They did it to protect their own ass. It's almost like all these jackasses don't own anything more than wind and wishes, because they can all collapse at a moment's notice.
No matter how much they own in legal assets or contracts when push comes to shove and it actually starts to unravel the whole web of lies all of their assets become piss in a hurricane.
I've been a full time artist/seller on Etsy for coming on almost a decade now and yeah, it's draining. Profits keep getting cut into because Etsy wants more and more. It's tough.
Cody kept his scalp after Hbomber’s last run.
I swear if hbomberguy gets to the middle of his next video and says "This video is actually about Cody Johnston", my computer is going out the window and I will retreat to live out my days in a hut in the wilderness.
Same tbh.
Why wouldn't he keep his scalp? Hbomber's not in league with the boars, is he?!
@@g.f.martianshipyards9328 please help me understand
Wdym
@@prettyevil6662000HYDROGEN BOMB IS A BORE???
Great troll Cody's Showdy. I totally thought that I had a fat finger moment & skipped to the end of the video.
I swear, The Stanley Parable is a masterclass in game design. You play through the examples of what the narrator is teaching, and I fucking love it.
Thanks again SMN team. It's annoying that every attempt to get out from under the collective corporate thumb just becomes another corporate thumb.
Wow, that bidet ad really brought the whole thing together.
Yes, Etsy has consistently gotten worse and more expensive for sellers. So they court resellers and the like.
Maybe Cody coul do a video about how Wizards of the Coast was able to completely build thier billion dollar brand by making small mom and pop businesses train and pay thier entire product development community, otherwise known as the Judges program.
What a totally cool and not-at-all nightmarishly dystopian socioeconomic system we live in. Truly there is no possible alternative
"We apologize for the credits. Those responsible have been sacked"
You know my sister was once bitten by a møøse
Mind you, møøse bites can be pretty deadly... @@OmGwTf117
Corporate interest is waging a dystopian war on humanity. They are really out here making it impossible to solve this peacefully.
Current economy is so depressing but it's uplifting to see people like SMN doing the content we need under the currently depressing economy, so I'm uplifted but also depressed after watching your videos.
Keep the good work, Mr Cody and Mrs Katy ♥
By no means is this is a critcism of Some More News. You guys are fantastic and spot-on, and funny as hell while doing it. I hope you are around for a long time, truly.
Although it is too bad that they are forced to accept advertisers who make non-scientific claims about nutrition, many kudos to Some More News to state that the claims in the ad are from the advertiser. This kind of detail is another reason I am a huge fan! Thanks, SMN!
Because I see this as a news tv show thing, it feels weird when you talk about the internet and you don’t sound out of touch.
there are no words to describe what i felt seeing DREAM mentioned on this channel.
There are no words to describe what I feel about _Dream_ existing
It was called the "rentier economy" back in the old days.
I was half asleep and having bad allergies this morning so this intro really fucked with my brain. Thanks Cody.
I have no excuse; I'm just easily confused 😆
im sorry, did they call Cracked's pivot to video "failed"??
to this day, they STILL repost old videos with katy and cody because that era is the only thing that Cracked fans remember
I actually really liked After Hours
There were a lot of videos being produced that *weren't* doing as well as all the ones you remember. That's how it failed.
It’s crazy to be in a generation that has lost tons of photos, messages, and memories from dead social media, and even the digital transfer of physical-copy media.
I sort of miss the days of shoeboxes full of pictures and letters, the wall of VHS, DVD and CDs…
People: Let's upload our minds to a computer, so that we can live forever!
The computer/internet: Is filled with lots of lost media, photos, and memories; some of which are hard to recover or completely lost forever.
Honestly this is kind of a terrifying concept, imagine if people uploaded their minds to a computer but then something happened to that computer and thus people's consciousness are now lost forever.
At the tail end of me being an active creator on TikTok I joined a creator advocacy group that spans a bunch of platforms. Its called the Online Content Creator Association. They do a lot of really good organizing and advocacy work as far as I can tell
This is why I'm working on a way for creative friends to work directly in payment services and manage their own subscriptions/sales/etc. I have no clue how long it will take, but I am so tired of seeing these platforms put their own profit above the service they provide. It's ridiculous.
Did anyone else stop to read the "credits?" Pretty hilarious. "Greed will uh...find a way..." -Not Dr. Ian Malcolm
Only reason I watch this show anymore is to see if Katie can get through a Hello Tushy add without laughing.
"Floss your butt twice a day" sent me
This is entirely Yanis Varoufakis' "Technofeudalism". Varoufakis gives a whole socioecononic framework for thinking about this new phase of our global economy. A much deeper analysis which this video could have done with mentioning.
I bought a subscription to Nebula to support that group of independent creators, because yes another Cracked/College Humor implosion is a concern.
Especially for those with disabilities it's incredibly cruel how entire sites can screw creators over so fast. After working with many people and organisations and trying many jobs I break down in all of them and no longer can function. Online has been the only place I've gotten a margin of success and I rely off of it to make ends meet. Yet after years of trying to build communities and essentially working full time as an artist, finance manager and social media manager I have already had the experience of it all being swept out under my feet and left with nothing (thanks Elon) and I expect I will face it many more times. There definitely needs to be a work around on how to secure positions for online business that are stable for those that do them.
I have a friend who ran the first unionized videogame company. They had made one game called Beast Breakers (absolutely fantastic game). They were working on a sequel, nearly done, but then all their funding got pulled for no reason at the very last minute in the most punitive and malicious way they could do it, forcing my friend to have spend thousands of his own money to keep the company afloat while their funder get promising to give them the money. So the company went under and now people can point at the fact it was because they were unionized.
Super ironic that this came out the day that Spotify laid off a ton their workers just because and will be refusing to pay most musicians
Spotify did WHAT? Honestly I think they tell their employees their fired by making a Spotify Wrapped style report of their performance and finalize it with “so you’re fired. Bye, enjoy your (shitty) severance!”
@@auliamate they laid off like 1500 people and have apparently been telling tons of indie musicians that the pittance they pay is about to be down to zilch
Glad i ditched them after the Some More News vid
Awesome timing. Twitch just announced that they're shuttering operations in Korea, something a not-insignificant number of people depend on for their livelihoods lol
The negative developments in the websites that The Showdy describes was summed up by Cory Doctorow as “enshittification”.
I'll always be a little sad about what happened with original Cracked, but I suppose the silver lining is what Cody and Katy have been able to do here, Daniel and Soren being able to be successful TV writers, Maggie to be able to do her deeper weirder dives and Swaim doing SmallBeans. It just sucks that all had to happen in order to get all of those things.
16:55 Jfc, jack and musk look like somewhat normal human beings (although jack looks like he's constantly in a state of Peter Dinklage cosplay), but sugarmountain looks like he's in mid-transition to the "Innsmouth Look".
Going from this to an episode of behind the bastards with Cody and Katie on it is a bliss I need it
15:51 Man, I haven't heard about Uncle Yellstuff in _ages!_ I wonder what he's up to these days? I remember thoroughly enjoying his drunken rants during the early aughts. Who could forget his epic on-again-off-again beef/masterclass in homoerotic undertones with dril? It truly brought a tear to my eye when Uncle passed the torch to dril after a 7 & a half-hour rap battle. This might've been in mid-2005, I think, but my temporal memory is godawful; I'm aware that time passes, but that's about it. I remember events, not dates.
Anyway, once dril packed it up, I truly bawled my eyes out at the ending of not just one era, but two. R.I.P., Uncle Yellstuff AND dril, you both were too good for this sinful, ultracapitalistic Earth.
I wish every episode was 60 minutes +… CANT GET ENOUGH SHODY!!
Whomever edited the bidet ad is a hero for how well that impossible audio was normalized.
Hat off to you, sound person. I see your footprints, and I appreciate you.
A note about the Unity fiasco: the CEO who was responsible for those proposed changes was an ex-CEO of EA, a triple A video game company notorious for making anti-consumer choices for profit and churning out whatever they think will make the most money. He's since resigned from his position and unless I'm mistaken, all his bad ideas have been thankfully walked back. It's too late now though, as many indie developers jumped ship to other game development software like Godot and it's unlikely that these developers are going to go back after spending time learning how to use new software (I could be mistaken though, I'm not exactly deep in the indie dev scene so that last part is mostly supposition on my part).
He was so brave for 13:47. idk how much sponsors monitor channels when their product isn't advertised in that video, but suffice to say... Cody puts on a brave face when he has to.
edit: oh god he did it again
Employers: "Listen to that Dan Koe guy and how you'll be free from our suffering by being in the Creator Economy"
Also Employers and dirtbags: "Plagiarism without consequence AND fewer workers rights. Now that's the way to run the entire economy to the ground so WE have the power!"
I don't comment much, but I feel compelled to shout this into the ether. The Hello Tushy Bidet ad was the best advertisement of all time.
This is tangentially related but we had some scares of Discord choosing to sell itself to major corporations, one of those instances being Microsoft. It was immediately scary to anyone paying attention because the value of Discord is its relative corporate neutrality on the internet. If one of those corporations buys it, then that's it, the game is over. And it's all lives and breathes by way of decision making by just a few or couple of people. I once had a streamer, who rides the capitalism hog pretty hard, argue to me that it would've been "good" because while Discord was and still is making a profit (as in paying its bills), it wasn't "generating enough growth." Aaaaassss an independent company. Growth. I stopped watching that streamer.
Discord selling itself to anyone would mean that it’s over for real-time, properly regulated, community hubs online. Not only because Discord is already kinda screwing some things up all on their own, but a giant overlord would mean they would be at the behest of investors in Microsoft’s or Amazons’s trillion dollar market cap.
The corporate neutrality is so important in a world where everyone seems to own everything. Every company, from cars to phones to fucking blankets, everyone has a parent company, or a dumb board of investors. I’m hard pressed to find a brand that is valued at anymore than a billion dollars that is a private entity not on the stock market that is wholly owned by itself
People these days are addicted to financial growth
Wonderful research.
Thanks for everything yall do!
Was kind of hoping you would tack on a bit about Twitch announcing that they are leaving South Korea. Especially since Jeffrey Bezos, CEO, entrepreneur was name dropped in the description.
South Korea is a major market in streaming (#3 in the world in viewers behind the US and Germany), and it’s hitting the Korean streamers/viewers pretty hard.
A whole conversation in the credits at the beginning. Never stop being glorious Some More News team.
You guys are the *ONLY* youtube channel that I *intentionally* watch the ads on!!!