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YouTube To Share Revenue With 20-year-old Filmmaker
destinyland writes "YouTube just has signed a deal to share ad revenue with 20-year-old Brandon Fletcher. YouTube had already said they'd implement revenue sharing this summer, but this indicates they're willing to put their money where their mouth was. 10 Zen Monkeys has a funny chronicle of Brandon's enviable march to YouTube money. 9 weeks ago he flew to California to demand YouTube feature his video on their front page. A security guard refused to let him off the elevator — but he made crucial contacts which helped seal the deal 9 weeks later. Taking this business to the next level makes sense in the here and now, when some 70 percent of internet users are streaming video."
An uppity privileged wannabe movie mogul kiddie, and his name is Brandon. Who'd have guessed?
I think we can officially say goodbye to the real internet. Some of you may not be old enough to remember this, but there was a time when people produced content and communities on the internet for no other reason than they cared and enjoyed doing it.
Bah, humbug.
The original Internet crowd was primarily made up of human leftovers of a number of different kinds; sexual deviants, social rejects, the autistic, and the terminally mentally ill. They were people whose main incentive for coming online was due simply to the fact that nobody offline wanted to be reminded of their existence. It was a means for them to achieve some degree of dubious social interaction with others of their own kind, while at the same time, mercifully sparing anyone the unspeakable horror of being exposed to their presence in an actual physical sense. While online, their corporeal forms could thankfully remain locked in their customary subterranean environments.
These days, the basement-dwelling freaks that I'm talking about here still inhabit the same purely textual cracks in the cybernetic pavement that they did back then. The only difference is that we're now on the other side of the extremely brief period when the protocols they use (primarily Usenet and IRC) entered something vaguely approaching mainstream awareness.
And yes, like every other untamed frontier to have ever been encountered by human beings before it, the Internet too has been swamped by a tidal wave of sociopathic, utterly amoral, suicidal capitalism of the kind that apparently exists on a literally genetic level within the American heart.
I once read of the effect of commercialism on the Internet being described as, "the greatest human conversation to have ever been held having been silenced." I thought then, as I do now, that the only thing truly great about that description was the degree of pretentiousness and self-indulgence inherent within it.
The Internet was never a "community" in a primarily positive sense at all; rather, it was initially simply a gigantic virtual psychiatric inpatient unit. If online commercialism has done anything truly positive for the net at all, it is that it has forced the human cockroaches that originally inhabited it to need to bury themselves even more deeply in order to avoid contact with mainstream society.