The Internet and the Old Maid (Part 3): Odds and Ends

In the third and final post on this topic, we’ll wrap up some loose ends.  At the time of this writing, the top rated comment on Katy Perry’s song “Firework” on YouTube says

176,150,854 views.. Katy Perry made around $100 million for this video/song. SHE DESERVES IT a very inspiring song

I think that estimate is a little high, to say the least.  I find it hard believing that either Katy Perry or her record company, Capitol Records, make $.57 per hit on a YouTube video.  The information is hard to find, however.  People who sign up with YouTube as YouTube Partners are not allowed to publicly disclose their revenue, which I think is a silly rule.  And because of this, you find widely different values for revenues from YouTube.

There used to be a site named myu2b.com that would attempt to document this.  It looks the site is down, probably shut down by YouTube.  This post goes into a little detail about how myu2b.com generated its statistics, but long story short: certain statistics such as views, comments, and subscriptions per day are all accurate, but the daily gross is still a guess.

I started chasing my tail a bit with this post by trying to find accurate incomes for YouTube partners.  At the end of the day, it’s clear that people are making their living posting videos on YouTube, and that’s pretty cool.  What’s even cooler is that for a lot of these content creators, they’re happy where they are and with their independence.

In the past, the only reason to self-publish a book was to get noticed by the legacy publishers.  Self-publishing anything was a means to an end.  Now people are controlling the entire creation process and making their livings doing that.  Sure, freddiew is now featuring movie stars in videos and a lot of the big name YouTubers would jump at the chance to sign with a big studio (is this “selling out”?  Who cares, it’s their decision).  But one thing is certain, the Internet has allowed self-publishers a place to stay and flourish, without kowtowing to the whims of the old gatekeepers.  Awesome.

Now, without further ado, some of my favorite YouTube content from small guy content creators:

Bed Intruder, the most-viewed YouTube video of 2010 excluding major label music videos, and Auto-Tune the News #5, my favorite in the Auto-Tune the News series, both from schmoyoho

Aimbot, a video exploring the use of an aimbot in real life, from the action-oriented freddiew

Darth Vader vs Hitler and Einstein vs Stephen Hawking in the Epic Rap Battles of History series by nicepeter

Fails of the Weak, a weekly series of Halo fails by RoosterTeeth (of Red vs Blue fame)

Defeating a Ninja by nigahiga

Dock Ellis & The LSD No-No, exploring the underreported world of performance inhibiting drugs, by NoMasTV