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What YouTube’s Top Earners List Tells Us About the Platform
YouTube is aging into a mainstream media environment
This week, Forbes released its 2022 “Highest Paid YouTube Stars” list and it’s far from surprising. Leading the list is my friend MrBeast, who earned over $50 million last year. The rest of the list mostly consists of white dudes and children who do toy reviews. The combined earnings of YouTube’s highest earners is nearly $300 million, and as Abe Brown and Abby Freeman note, some of these YouTubers would rank among the top 40 earners among the “Celebrity 100” list.
YouTube is an endlessly fascinating and frustrating platform. Its existence is omni-present, always there and ubiquitous as both a tool and an entertainment source. Like our unconscious knowledge to know we can Google anything, we also know that YouTube can provide us a visual answer. There’s no outside to YouTube.
As Nick Srnicek notes in Platform Capitalism, YouTube converts immaterial labor like affect, knowledge and creativity into data and then monetizes it. It’s a platform that isn’t just a culture factory, it is culture. And that culture seems to be perpetuating previous media structures and losing its edge.
The list this year seems to reveal that YouTube really isn’t surprising anymore. In fact, as Chris…
