‘Success’ on YouTube Still Means a Life of Poverty
When I was 17, I thought I was really beautiful and I wanted to be a model. By which I mean I imagined it would be easy money and I never seriously pursued it.<p>I imagine many people who want to be a YouTuber are kind of like that. It sounds like easy money and they aren&#x27;t ever going to work that hard at learning their craft, etc. So it shouldn&#x27;t be terribly surprising that a lot of them aren&#x27;t doing particularly well.<p>On the other hand, I&#x27;m a writer and it is the same thing: A few big name stars raking in the dough and a whole lot of losers struggling to get by. And I get told all the time to go get a real job if I want a middle class income.<p>I don&#x27;t know where people think these real jobs are. We are seeing the rise of the gig economy. There are fewer full time jobs with benefits and more gigs.<p>I am medically handicapped. Doing gig work has overall worked better for me than a corporate job. I hit $50k in debt while working a corporate job. I paid a lot of that off while homeless and doing freelance writing and struggling to eat.<p>I don&#x27;t know what the answer is. Historically, middle class jobs did not just magically happen. Society designed them that way. Most were designed under the assumption that it was a man supporting a family whose wife would do the cooking, etc, so he could focus on his job. Under that model, you didn&#x27;t need everyone to make a middle class income. You needed the primary breadwinner to have a good job with benefits that supported his whole family. Society was designed around a nuclear family model and jobs were designed with that in mind.<p>The world has changed and the nuclear family is not the default expectation. Plus regular jobs are getting scarce.<p>So I think we need to take it seriously that there are systemic problems here. We are allowing a system to develop with a few big winners, a lot of losers and little or no middle class.<p>At the same time, we need to accept that not all content is equally worthwhile. However, if we want some form of UBI, I would be much more comfortable with the idea that if you have some kind of YouTube channel or similar, you should have some kind of basic income from it than with &quot;free money for everyone.&quot;