In late 2001, when I moved back to Austin from a year spent writing children’s television shows in New Zealand - this is a true detail - I discovered that the job market for zany internet guys had dried up, and thus entered into a 4-month sabbatical from employment. During this period, I filled my time with a little video experiment called The Ben Brown Show, where I created a 3-4 minute mini-show every few days and posted it to the internet. At the time, posting these videos was pretty hard. It took a long time to upload and to download. It filled up my disk space. My biggest fear at that time was that a lot of people would see my video, thus causing my internet traffic bill to skyrocket. I avoided this problem by removing each episode as the next one was published. That way, even if one of the episodes got popular, it wouldn’t lead to my entire back catalog being downloaded, draining me entirely of my delicious money.
OH NO! SUCCESS!
YouTube came along eventually and made this process totally painless. I mean, YouTube is a pretty amazing thing, I’ll admit it, but coming from the perspective of someone who posted video online BEFORE YouTube, HOLY SHIT, THEY ARE GIVING AWAY FREE VIDEO HOSTING. I could not only host new videos, but all of my old videos! Forever! For free! For a long time, this sounded like an amazing offer. Video hosting is HARD, SLOW and EXPENSIVE, so getting it for fast, easy and free is a virtually unbeatable deal. Especially if you are as cheap as I am, and let me tell you folks, I am cheap. CHEAP!
I am definitely willing to watch advertising in return for services and entertainment - that is the basic handshake of the internet and of the media business in general, and I acknowledge and value it. When I see advertisements in my Gmail, or next to my Google searches, I understand that to be my payment to them for providing a valuable service.
While reading this somewhat ranty post about Google and Second Life and privacy isssues and how they are going to generate a giant profile of my exact consumer habbits - all my favorite subjects! - this bit really caught my eye:
While Google pretends to be the “good guy” by lobbying for nonrestrictive web usage, it continues to archive all of our actions. But why? Could it be that while we play in digital worlds, Google is betting that virtual reality is indeed a growing part of our culture, and that we might even prefer cyber worlds to our own. And why not, we already enjoy performing every aspect of our lives for Google’s benefit on YouTube.
Wait, I thought I was getting the benefit here! My original calculation of the deal with YouTube was video hosting in exchange for viewing ads. I guess I imagined that my video wasn’t doing anything unless I called it into action - to show it to a friend, or to link to it from my blog. But that’s not actually the sum of it. In exchange for the video hosting, YouTube gets to trot my video out to whoever wants to see it! And with that, they get all the hits for my video! And all the ad impressions from EVERYONE who sees my video. I’m paying more than I originally thought. I had been thinking of YouTube as a tool for sharing video. Now, I am starting to see them as a distribution network that’ll loan me a slice of space if I grant them license to use and reuse my content.
All of a sudden, the hammer is demanding part ownership of the birdhouse I used it to build.
All of a sudden, I feel like I am creating videos for Google to sell.
Now, don’t get me wrong - I don’t feel that this is an inequitable situation. I really don’t need Google to send me a check for the pennies they’ve earned on my videos. After all, I, like most people on YouTube, use it to share videos with a very small set of people. The utility for me is definitely more valuable than any advertising income Google might earn on it.
For now.
I wonder how much benefit Google will actually get from our little partnership in the long run. I have a sneaking suspicion that the presence of each video on YouTube is a lot more valuable than the pennies it makes on ads in the short term. What really concerns me, all of a sudden, is that the videos that I have uploaded to YouTube are now essentially out of my control, to be used by Google for Google’s benefit, not for mine. My video is now effectively in service to Google’s goals, whatever they are.
I wonder, will there be a point when this deal is no longer fair? I wonder, will I be able to tell when it happens? I wonder, has it already happend?
I admit, I am definitely struggling with the varied roles I personally play in the media buying / selling / creating landscape. And right now, I am just picking on Google and YouTube because the blog I quoted picked on them. But I really think that the whirlwind of change that we are currently experiencing in the media is just the gentle stirrings of a much bigger and more violent storm still on the horizon. As Google (and companies like it) grow to compete with or replace traditional broadcast networks and record companies and newspapers, we the users will start to look more and more like the television writers, who you may remember are on strike right now against their distribution networks.
What happens when we cross the line from users to content creators? And what if the terms of service don’t seem to apply the same way? Do we go on strike? We aren’t a union! We aren’t even employees! We’re just performing our lives for Google’s benefit, and hoping they continue to play nice.
To be fair, Google does currently pay some of the top producers for their content. And I’m sure that they’ll eventually expand this program and pay anyone who wants to earn their pennies. But agreements like this do not guarantee that we’ll all get a fair shake. And sure, you can always delete your videos off of YouTube, but then nobody will be able to revel in your hilarious circa-2002 antics!
I love to fantasize about the scifi totalitarian regime Google will eventually become just as much as everyone else, but I think there are scary things happening today that I don’t really hear anyone complaining about. Google and other new media companies can and are doing an end run around the political and economic protections that were fought for by the good folks who put their creative necks on the line before us. It may not matter today, but I doubt that the Google authored YouTube terms of service will ever provide a suitable replacement for the Writers Guild. Of course, I’m sure Google doesn’t see YouTube’s existence as undermining organized labor, but as the media tide shifts and the network evolves and the line between tool user and media author blurs, I find myself hoping that we don’t have to refight battles for fairness and freedom that have already been fought.
(Dear Readers, I promise that next time I post, it will not be about my personal struggles with capitalism!)
