It’s been two and a half years since Nicholas Carr wrote:
Web 2.0, by putting the means of production into the hands of the masses but withholding from those same masses any ownership over the product of their work, provides an incredibly efficient mechanism to harvest the economic value of the free labor provided by the very many and concentrate it into the hands of the very few.
He still has a point — it’s true that MySpace, Facebook, Youtube and others convert the free labour of their users into cash, by aggregating it on a huge scale and creating value in the form of an audience they can sell to advertisers. In the way that they’re selling an audience to advertisers they are analogous to conventional TV, radio and newspapers, who aggregate news and content to gather an audience whose consumption of the content is paid for, or at least subsidised, by advertising.
Carr argues that the “disturbing” difference is that the Web 2.0 companies are exploiting the free labour of their users’ contributions to an “attention economy” by converting it to their cash economy; i.e. sharecropping — the users are labouring to create value that somebody else controls. I agree that this seems disturbing.
But people are now using these websites to gain their own audience, and this gives them leverage. If you have a large enough audience, e.g. Youtube subscribers, you then have the capacity to start converting your contributions to cash for yourself.
An example I’ve noticed recently is Philip DeFranco aka sxephil, who has gathered an audience of 379,621 subscribers at the time of writing, and 14,279,986 video views since September 2006.
Phil has just recently begun a daily VLog in addition to his normal show in which he has promised to do a video per day for a year. It would appear that he’s making some cash – in his video from 26th April he gratuitously discusses how he loves shaving with his Gillette razor and how superior it is to an electric razor, did he mention that it’s Gillette?
And in the newest episode, Phil goes to New York City to meet his ‘friend’ Katie, who just happens to be the star of an impending Youtube show called Green Eyed World. In Phil’s video they frolick around in a park being best buddies and filming each other with cameras and some other stuff. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with this, but the show looks very produced, with all its graphics and Sprite as its sponsor and FullSIX, an enormous marketing company on board.
To me, this is a demonstration of how it’s possible to use the social media sites to put in time and effort to gain currency in the attention economy, and when you have enough, you can cash in, with sponsors and by sharing your audience with others who are willing to pay.
In effect, the barrier to entry for building an audience is lower than ever — distribution costs are zero and your only production costs are what it takes to film, edit and upload a video to Youtube. It’s sharecropping, but you can make some real money!