In 2019 a poll found that 30% of children in the UK and the US would choose being a Youtuber as their preferred profession ahead of jobs like astronaught, musician, athlete, or teacher – making it the top rated profession amongst school age children. It’s a sought after job, apparently. But YouTube isn’t just a cultural phenomenon it’s also an economic and technological phenomenon as well, involving the use of a digital platform to manage a distributed workforce spread across the globe. And the practices and protocols that Google, the company that owns YouTube, employs have huge impacts on shaping the working conditions that YouTubers experience.
In this two part episode of the Fairwork podcast, we hear from Jörg Sprave, a German Youtuber who runs the slingshot channel, a channel where he makes homemade slingshots and launchers. We hear his story of getting into YouTube, what it is actually like making a living from YouTube, what happens when the platform on which you’ve built your livelihood starts to make seismic shifts, and how he formed the world’s first union, for Youtubers.
Here's Jörg's Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVZlxkKqlvVqzRJXhAGq42Q
There's loads of good videos about the Adpocalypse on YouTube itself, but I found this one particularly informative: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7M7yyRDHGc&ab_channel=vlogbrothers
As always, you can contact me at robbie.warin@oii.ox.ac.uk
Robyn Caplan has written a great academic article with Tarleton Gillespie on YouTube's demonetisation policies which you can find here: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2056305120936636
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