A digital natives reality check
There are many ways that digital learning benefits students, as most readers of this blog are well aware. Online schools provide an alternative to students who want to move more quickly than their peers, or for students who need scheduling flexibility. Online courses allow students to learn subjects that they would not otherwise have access to. And so forth.
There’s another take on digital natives, though, that deserves critical scrutiny. That is the idea that for young adults—or a person of any age, for that matter—success via Youtube videos, Tik Tok dances, or “influencing” is a viable career option.
Are these viable career options? Sure, in the sense that aiming for the WNBA or NFL is a viable path. If you make it, great. But you’d better have a fall back plan!
Put in terms of sports, or movies, that observation may seem obvious. But in the realm of Internet fame, the long odds don’t seem to be as well understood as they should be. So, let’s take a look at some numbers. In a post titled Why So Many Elites Feel Like Losers, Freddie DeBoer lays out the options available to gain fame and fortune online:
“…there are so many places to gain a following. If you’re a writer, there’s WordPress or Substack. If you’re a visual artist, you can share your art on Instagram or Twitter. If you make physical crafts, you can sell them on Etsy… If you’re a musician, there’s Soundcloud or Bandcamp. If you’re a podcaster, there’s Stitcher or Apple Podcasts or Spotify. If you make video content, you could publish to YouTube or TikTok or Vimeo. If you make video games, you can sell them on Steam or GOG. If you play video games, you can monetize your hobby on Twitch.
A quarter of a century ago, these platforms did not exist; equipment was much more expensive; and know-how far harder to access. Now, the tools are available to anyone. Audiences have never been larger, and never before have they spent so much time consuming artistic content.”
Sounds great, right? But then DeBoer lays out some numbers: (The following phrases are very slightly re-worded quotes from his post, re-ordered and put into bullets to simplify his points.)
Estimates for payouts for a thousand views on YouTube are around $18 dollars; less than 12% of videos even reach that threshold.
90% of Twitch’s users stream to six average viewers or less, and a quarter of even the top 10,000 highest-paid accounts make less than minimum wage.
It’s estimated that 99% of podcasts make no profit.
98.6% of Spotify artists make an average of just $36 a quarter.
On Patreon, a platform that creators of all kinds use to monetize their work, less than 2% of users make even the federal monthly minimum wage.
About 90% of Etsy stores earn less than $400 a month.
In summary:
“…the creator economy follows a power law distribution; the vast majority of people in it get tiny amounts of money and attention, while a small sliver of users are handsomely rewarded with both. Any individual creator might become one of the winners. But at scale, almost everyone is going to fail.”
Is this a major problem? Overall, probably not. I suspect most students understand that they are not highly likely to make a career out of Tik Tok videos, just as I figured out by the time I was age 35 that I probably wouldn't make it as a major league baseball player. And certainly the skills that students are learning as they become small-scale creators will serve them well in other endeavors.
But I still hear, a bit too often, the idea that a significant number of today’s digital natives are going to make a living as artistic creators. We owe it to them to be more realistic.