After the gold rush
We now expect online clout to produce financial rewards. But the reality rarely lives up to the promise.
It's been a week of celebration in my world - Neil Young announced his Spotify boycott was over, and a few days later, all his albums returned to the platform. Being an old-school music aficionado, I had my favourites of his albums as MP3s, but having Neil on Spotify makes listening to him so much easier. Sorry, Neil, I know you still hate them and their lack of fidelity, but I'm too far gone to change.
One of my favourite Neil albums, and the one I'd recommend if you're looking for somewhere to start with his vast back catalogue, is After The Gold Rush. You get both sides of Neil Young - the quiet, introspective, acoustic, folk-country-inflected songs alongside more Crazy Horse-type electric guitar workouts.
A screenplay with the same title inspired the album; it’s about an "apocalyptic ecological disaster that washes away the Topanga Canyon hippie community". The title, which references a gold rush, suggests that, as with many scenes or trends, there comes a point when it invariably becomes overpopulated and overexposed and loses any magic it may have had in the first place.
Gold rushes have been around for centuries—there is evidence of gold rushes happening in Ancient Greece, even if the most notable and prominent examples occurred during the 19th century. And in many respects, they've never gone away—even if they've changed significantly in the internet age.
Plenty of trends that have got people frothy and excited over the past ten years fall into the gold rush category. Sometimes, they're relatively easy to spot - with no obvious utility, plenty of people struggled to see how NFTs were anything but a get-rich-quick scheme. Like gold mining in the 19th century, NFTs made a lot of money for some people but "proved unprofitable" for many more. Similarly, games like Axie Infinity promised a brave new world where people could make real-life money from their virtual endeavours. But again, while there are success stories, most people wasted their precious time for very little, for lower-grade minerals.
The latest gold rush to grace the internet age revolves around using generative AI tools to get rich quickly from the creator economy. As with so many of these kinds of trends, the premise is simple. Per this excellent long read on the practice by 404 Media, users generate large numbers of junk videos using stock footage or ripped online videos, overlay them with text generated by ChatGPT, and then aim to strike viral gold via payouts from TikTok and YouTube.
As anyone who ever received the brief of "make us go viral" from a client knows, generating a critical mass of views is a mixture of hard work and a significant amount of luck. Laid out as a process, it sounds simple - an easy way to make money. The truth is that only a small number of videos do the kind of numbers that generate significant revenue for their creators.
But the fact that those videos and success stories exist, like the early winners in the race to find gold in California, allows the myth that anyone can make significant money from creating low-effort junk videos to propagate. That myth doesn't just grow organically - it's fuelled by a bunch of influencer hustlers who claim to be able to sell you the secrets to making $12k a month from TikTok.
The 404 investigative piece dives into some Discord servers that claim to help you find the gold among the other minerals online. For $40 a month, you get access to tips and tricks on how to hack TikTok and YouTube's algorithms to make money from low-effort videos. As ever with this kind of endeavour, there are plenty of success stories on show - look, my tips work. However, as Jason Koebler reveals in the conclusion of his piece, for every user who finds gold, many, many more users do not see the same results.
Because, of course, there is no secret sauce to creating hugely popular online posts, whether video, image or text. As with any creative endeavour, there are foundational elements that you can follow. But just as knowing the foundational aspects of media relations won't guarantee you blanket national coverage, understanding what makes a video go viral doesn't translate into guaranteed viral success.
Only 0.08% of the 13 billion videos on YouTube hit one million views. The median number of views on YouTube is just 40. Not all those videos aim to "go viral and make serious ca$h", but they show the high odds against racking up millions of views. Look at any other data from "creator economy" platforms and you see the same pattern. A micro-class of creators making serious cash, striking virtual gold, then a vast long tail encompassing everyone else and their small returns.
But just like me, when I play the lottery, many people don't want to hear about the odds of going viral. They look at other users in their community and think, "Why can't it be me?". And that's not wrong - it could be you (to quote a National Lottery tagline). It's just extremely unlikely to be you.
It's especially unlikely to be you because the platforms paying out the cash to creators also read the tech press and will spot how people try to game their algorithms and tweak their programs to cut off the money supply. There's only so much gold in those hills; you must mine it quickly before it disappears. Then it's on to the next way to make people believe there's easy cash to make online. Money floods in, money floods out; the world moves on to the next thing.
The desire to go viral and find popularity online is one of the hallmarks of our modern social media era. Users have always looked for online clout; plenty of users have said and done unpleasant things for the extra clout. It's only been in recent years, accelerated by the pandemic, that people have associated online clout with cold hard cash.
Ryan Broderick talked about this in Garbage Day last week - there's an expectation now that securing a certain level of virality "is intrinsically linked to financial reward". As Ryan says, this is now the business model for almost all platforms besides LinkedIn. Fill our servers with "content", and we'll reward you with money - with little oversight of what that "content" actually includes. Unless it hurts a platform's reputation, it doesn't matter. The point is to keep the machine churning on - for the gold rush to continue in some form or another.
How long the machine keeps churning is hard to see - however, there is a distinct need for brands and businesses to monitor its progress and observe how any new gold rush pans out. That's for two reasons I can see:
First, and most obviously, to not get sucked into a short-lived ruse that may have reputational repercussions. Anything that looks too good to be true probably isn't true. And there is no formula for how to go viral. Generative AI tools may help identify one in the future, but even then, that formula will quickly become formulaic. Everyone will go viral, and virality will become meaningless.
Secondly, brands must be aware of the company they're keeping on user-generated entertainment platforms. The majority of videos people see come from that 0.08% of creators with enough clout in the bank to regularly do big numbers. But generative AI-based video spam is out there, and it's not great for your brand perception score to have your ads appear against such low-effort videos. And it could be even worse if the money starts to dry up and the competition for payouts starts driving ever more unsavoury posts.
Using Google Trends data as a proxy, we can see that interest in the topic "creator economy" took off significantly in early 2022. It seems we're still far from making the economics of being a full-time creator work for anyone not in that top 1% of online asset producers. It remains a highly erratic, boom-bust economy with just enough rewards to keep people returning for more but not enough to create viable, sustainable businesses.
Based on the current evidence, it's hard to see that changing in the future - and the dream of the gold rush, of striking it lucky online, will continue to perpetuate. Even if most people's efforts to find gold will be in vain, ending up unfilled like the screenplay that inspired Neil to write one of his most famous albums.