Big YouTubers have seen the writing on the wall, and have been diversifying income streams for years. A lot of artists are migrating towards the "patron" model (think Renaissance patronage, but crowd-sourced) using tools like Patreon or Liberapay. This strikes me as inherently more pure than throwing videos at Google's algorithm to see which one can bring home the biggest slice of automatic-ad-revenue pie.
The attention economy is doomed, too many people are online now for it to be viable. Patronage and connecting with followers will come to dominate. Not to oversimplify, but there's a theory that all an artist needs to be financially stable is 1,000 true fans chipping in a few dollars a month. Google's YouTube middleware currently occupies a comfortable niche in the bringup process required to meet that figure... but they're ultimately nonessential.
As the bubble shrinks, creators will look back and wonder why they ever bothered driving millions of random people toward a platform that mostly pays out to Google.
The attention economy is doomed, too many people are online now for it to be viable. Patronage and connecting with followers will come to dominate. Not to oversimplify, but there's a theory that all an artist needs to be financially stable is 1,000 true fans chipping in a few dollars a month. Google's YouTube middleware currently occupies a comfortable niche in the bringup process required to meet that figure... but they're ultimately nonessential.
As the bubble shrinks, creators will look back and wonder why they ever bothered driving millions of random people toward a platform that mostly pays out to Google.