Anonymous asked:

Watched the Mentally Advanced series recently, your animation is on point. YouTube has become much friendlier to animators in recent years, why not make an animated series and slowly release it on a schedule. It could be pony related or completely original. It's just a shame to see such talent, for animation, not go to use. I love the magic of animation, and I think you'd be able to compete with some big animators on YouTube.

I couldn’t say without having the kind of information Youtube hides from everyone, but a lot of times if an animation channel gets promoted now it’s because they’re with a company that can do that promoting, or they’re related to something that has its own paid promotion so there’s a bit of adjacent support.

The trick with the major web platforms today is, unlike a decade or longer ago, they’re all monopolies. They’re not competing to have the best content because they are pretty much the only sites with content at all, so their business models now revolve around exploiting advertisers with spam, or absorbing the value of someone else’s product.

What do I mean by that? Well, platforms like Steam, Apple, and Youtube share revenue with people who use their platform. Ten years ago, they used to promote a person’s uploads and notify your entire subscriber base of new videos, meaning that through free advertising they added value to your content. But now, they direct traffic away from your content more often than not, and you have to pay to be seen by people. Who do you pay on Youtube? Well you pay Google, who owns Youtube, of course. So you functionally wind up paying to generate an audience that Youtube just shifts away from you anyway, and Youtube gets 45% of any ad revenue the content makes, plus whatever you paid for the advertising.

So you as the creator put all the time, effort, and money into this product, wind up handing about half the ad revenue off to the platform that owns the market, and can easily wind up earning less than the platform did after your expenses. And for what? I have over 180 thousand subscribers on my main channel but can barely reach 5% of them in Youtube’s current design. I’m giving them revenue for that?

Bandwidth is still expensive enough that running a profitable private video website is quite difficult at scale, especially because Google’s search engine will be trying to kill your private website and force you over to Youtube.

So I’m not saying there aren’t some animators who still get promoted, and I know that there are people who are being paid and promoted like crazy just for posting vlogs, even though if you ask me that content is some of the most boring, lazy stuff you could ask for. But that dull content runs a lot of ads, and it’s the economics, which still haven’t changed, that says there’s no reason to really invest a whole lot into the idea that Youtube is going to do anything good for animators in general.

I still like animating. I hate doing it for Youtube. A lot of the online ecosystem is like this now, and it’s pretty tough to survive in. All that said, I was talking with Pencils this weekend about maybe doing a sort of promotional animation for “The Talon of Wisdom”. The characters are built as rigs, after all. I don’t think a series is going to fly and I lack the deep pockets to advertise, but you are right, it’s a shame to learn a skill and let it go to waste.