Back in December during the Christmas Livestreams, the Yogs contacted me and several other fanartists for a music video project in the shape of a community contest. The project never saw the light of day and so I kept my worries to myself. With the recent resurgence of artists talking about their bad interactions with the Yogs regarding fair pricing of their work, I decided to put my worries into words because my silence will only help make it easier for other artists to walk into bad situations unknowingly.

Christmas is an important season for Yognau(gh)ts. It is a holiday season full of community projects for the Charity livestreams where everyone comes together and works toward a common goal. The willingness to contribute to Yog-related content is high in December, and fans who might not have been active throughout the year return to the fold of the community during the festivities. There is a shared spirit of doing something for a good cause.

Myself and some other artists were contacted before the contest was supposed to be made public for everybody, because the Yogs “wanted to reach out to those we personally wanted involved in this first”. This was the first line to make me wonder, because this didn’t sound like a contest at all when cherry-picked artists got contacted prior to it. Because this music video project was announced during December, and with the Charity Drive happening at the same time, I assumed the proceeds of the video would go to charity. In 2014, all proceeds of the “Does Santa Claus…?” video were added to the charity money on the HumbleBundle page. After asking for more details, I was told that this year’s video would be monetised the same as all their other videos, and that the work the artists would do for it would not be compensated.

Sadly, this is not the first time the Yogs have had trouble with dealing with fancreations:

Here is a reblog chain of pythosart talking about lack of credit on her art on the old spreadshirt store. (edit: sorry for the misgendering, fixed now!)

Here is an account on how Turps contacted a fanartist to remove a donation button from their site because they also posted fanart.

Here is an account by baron-norris about the lack of credit and recognition for their art.

While I know that everybody can decide for themselves what to do with their time, I decided I cannot with a good conscience keep my silence. And although the contest and the video got shelved, there’s no guarantee something like this won’t happen again (see the 4th of July fanart contest last year).

DISCLAIMER: I had lovely experiences working together with members of the Yogscast before. I worked both with Kim on a shirt design she was selling in her old store and did a private commission for Trott and Katie. Hannah contacted me for art before and although we didn’t come to an agreement, she has been nothing but respectful in her correspondence with me. This post is directed at the Yogs as a company and how they deal with fanwork.

What the contest was asking for is free work. The Yogscast rely on a lot of fan labor already in the months leading up to December, and especially during the Charity Drive Livestreams. Fan labor comes in many shapes and forms: modding the livestreams, tending community sites like Reddit, creating widgets for the streams, running forums and even creating fan content to spread awareness of the Yogs themselves. And yes, I mean the fans that gush and make gifsets and draw fanart and share ideas, the redditors that grab screencaps and create discussion threads. The “labors of love”, as some call them, are an important part in keeping media relevant and in the public eye. Abigail De Kosnik writes in her essay “Interrogating “Free” fan labor” about the influence of fandom on the Star Trek franchise:

“Fan productions help to sustain awareness of, and interest in, mass-media texts over time by continually supplying fresh commentary, videos, news, stories, and art, thereby fighting off the texts’ obsolescence. Fans’ ongoing discussions and expansions of the “universe” of a particular media production serve to advertise the production in these interim, or hiatus, periods. If fans of the original 1960s Star Trek had not continuously, publicly performed their investment in the Trek universe during the 1970s—by organizing Trek conventions, publishing Trek fan zines, making and trading Trek uniforms and memorabilia, and so on—it seems doubtful that Paramount would have thought to revive Trek at the end of that decade.”

Fans become a unique power like this: they are at the same time consuming media and producing content for it (actual content or supplying work hours for the cause). These creative powers and acts of fan labor are attractive to companies to use for themselves, because by encouraging fan labor, content keeps getting generated and distributed, which equals free marketing and promotion for the source material. Especially for a YouTube fandom, sustaining interest and therefore view counts on videos is the base of their business model. Fans sharing content and recommending content to new potential viewers is one of the many ways they can reach bigger audiences.

It is important to say here that free labor does not equal exploitation. There are many ways in which free labor can be a conscious decision of someone to offer their work and hours up for a cause, like volunteer work for charity.

The fan labor in fandom spaces is primarily done for other fans in hopes of positive reception and mutual inspiration. There are often many hours devoted to the creation of fanwork without any expectation of monetary reward. When fans create for fans, the most important thing is the joy in shared interests.

Sometimes fan work transcends fanspace and intertwines with official platforms. I have taken part in such acts of free fan labor before. The Christmas themed Reddit banner for /r/yogscast was drawn by me for free, as a token of appreciation for the community. I also did the reddit banner that was used prior to the Christmas one. I know the Reddit isn’t run by the Yogs themselves and while I knew that it is one of the main communication platforms, I also knew there was not going to be any direct monetization of my art. I wanted to do something nice for the festive season.

On another occasion, I was approached by Kim about a FluxBuddies fanart I had drawn. She wanted to put it on a shirt and sell it. While the fanart itself was done to share for free among like-minded fans, it being put on a tshirt and being sold would change the dynamic completely. Kim and I settled for a fair compensation fee I would be paid for the rights of use of my art to sell on her store. We both benefited from the agreement.

[original fanart]

In recent years, more and more content creators, like Kim there, have shown interest in the creative force and fan labor of fandom and its output. Keidra writes on her blog “The Learned Fangirl” about this:

“But that’s the thing, in an environment where fans are seen as an economic engine and media owners are making marketing decisions around fan creation and online activity, the gift economy model has been disrupted. Fans still create for each other but also (if not mostly, these days) for the market because the market now recognizes it. Fans know they are essentially an engine for marketing and negotiate their worth in that space.”

But how do you negotiate your worth in a situation like this? Where is the line between volunteering for something and being exploited?

And here is when it becomes tricky. Exploitation is the use of a situation to gain an unfair advantage for oneself. A Yogscast Music Video that consists of fanart alongside art done by inhouse artists will primarily benefit the Yogscast themselves. The artists who submit work will get credited in the description, the payment for their hours is “exposure” and the joy of having done something for a group of people they enjoy watching. Meanwhile, the Yogscast get to monetise the video and the work they didn’t pay for like they would a video they created themselves from start to finish. By crowdsourcing the artwork from the community, the Yogscast can potentially cut down on production time of the video itself. Any artist whose art is not going to be used in the video is drawing the short stick: the one big incentive to contribute is not going to be an option for them.

You might be saying now, but I would have done it anyways in my free time! Fair enough, but even that deserves to be paid. Respect yourself and what you do, your time is worth something. Only because you knit a scarf in your freetime doesn’t make it worth nothing. Maki Naro wrote a great article about this on Popular Science.

“Exposure” is a buzzword that comes up a lot in discussions in the art community. In the best case scenario, it means that through having your art shown to a wider audience, you will generate more business and gain new customers. In the worst case, no one will contact you either way and you just did work for free. It is very rare that the generated revenue from new clients who found you through exposure like this outweighs the price of the work you put into it in the first place.

Contests to submit art for a project that is going to be properly monetised fall under the umbrella of spec work. Spec work is work for little or no pay for a final product that will be used as if it was created by a full paid professional. Most often the incentive for working under these circumstances is a contest, recognition by people you admire, and the promise of exposure. This is very attractive for clients, because they will get work for basically free. By taking part in contests like these, you are signalling the contest holders that you are okay with these terms, and that they can continue relying on you for underpriced work. This leads to professional designers in the fields having to massively undercharge their work to compete with companies holding contests to even find work.

Some of you readers might have heard of CrowdSpring and the controversy surrounding that company. CrowdSpring was advertising that they would take design wishes from clients and then basically crowdsource the creation of it to people, at a low price, undermining actual design agencies and freelancers. You can read more about it here. Sadly, CrowdSpring is not the only company that relies on spec work. Big names like H&M hold contests to save money as well, and I am sure many of you have seen contests to create t-shirts, banners and headers with little to no pay as well.

The creators of Rick & Morty even openly aknowledge and joke about the exploitation of fan contests in their contest to promote the S1 dvd set.

These contests seem to be everywhere, and by our willingness to take part in them, we are signalling to the people behind them that we are willing to underprice ourselves for their benefit.

The website www.nospec.com has an easy test to find out if a contest is spec work.

Will the winning designer be equally paid for the work rendered as if they were hired under contract to do the same thing?



Will the company negotiate proper compensation for the usage rights proportionate to the designer’s level of skill?



Will the company return the working files and usage rights to all submitted designs, especially if they don’t win?



If any of the above questions can be answered with “no”, then the contest is spec work. Almost all fanart contest I have ever seen online answer the above questions with no and that should be a big warning sign for you as an artist. If a company doesn’t set guidelines to respect you enough, then you shouldn’t help them by offering your work and time up for less than it is worth.

The contest was to be advertised as a community project, but the community is only rewarded in exposure. Unlike charity work, where the community would work together towards the goal of contributing to charity, this contest would encourage the community to produce content for the Yogs themselves. The gain of the community is therefore a lot smaller than the one of Yogs, creating an imbalance between content-creators and the contributing fans. There should be mutual respect between community and creator, to not invalidate the work of the other.



To be honest, I was prepared to contribute to this project if it would have been for charity. I love the work the Yogscast does each year to help raise awareness and money for good causes, and would have loved to be part of a community effort towards this. But knowing that the revenue from this video would have not gone towards charity, and the work completed would not have been compensated, I was left feeling uneasy about it.

In the end, no one can decide how you choose to spend your time but yourself. If you are willing to do work for free, that is your call and you have every right to do so. But I wanted to make this post to show with as much transparency as I can, exactly why I cannot contribute to contests like this in good conscience.



Because my time and the free time of fanartists is worth more than this.