While PewDiePie’s accumulated 20 billion views is impressive, it is dwarfed by the most watched channels on YouTube. Indian television station Zee TV’s channel is the most watched YouTube channel on a monthly basis, with viewers watching their videos an incredible 7.81 billion times every month. Although India’s large population is an obvious advantage in terms of video views, with an internet penetration rate of 34.4 percent, large portions of the country are unlikely to have access to YouTube. Unlikely stars such as Ryan Toysreview have also attracted close to 30 billion views, generating significant revenue in the process.
Big views, big bucks
Kjellberg first incorporated PewDie UK Limited in August 2015, ultimately operating as a subsidiary of parent company Pewdie Holdings AB, based in Sweden. While the full picture is harder to determine since the establishment of the group’s UK operations, the last complete set of Swedish figures from 2015 show the company earning 8.6 million U.S dollars in profit on the back of 9.3 million U.S dollars in revenue.
Yea the really insane thing about influencer economics is that, I would think, concise fast videos would get the most views and the most profit.
But it seems like the opposite - the kids watching these want more a place to hang out, because views almost always go up with video length rather than the reverse, and it’s probably the biggest factor driving influencers on to Twitch, where the viewer/profit ratio is way way higher and so they catass for hours and apparently so the best there. But I’ll even see that on ordinary channels where long, boring ass two hour videos get twice the views of a fast edited video.
I think it’s flipped - they probably need to also upload it to YT to make the ad $$$. Twitch et al pay more for streaming rights but I doubt they’re anywhere near the ad payouts that YT offers.
You don’t get paid based on views, you get paid based on ad views. Longer videos have more ads inserted, thus video producers are incentivized to not create short videos.
So I looked up the channel of one of those top 10 influencers. And it’s insane, every single video on that channel is for some gacha game implemented as a Roblox mod that I’d obviously never heard of. Wondering about how a game like that could possibly sustain a 6M subscriber YT channel, I then looked at the mod. The peak concurrent player count for that mod was apparently 1.7M. There has only ever been one game on Steam with a higher number of concurrents than that.
Mmm… You can’t really compare the monetization of VODs vs. live streams. The audience is so fundamentally different, both in how sticky they are and how condensed they need the entertainment to be. So you play on livestream to keep your one thousand true fans amused, and giving you $5/month. And then you hope to get a couple of noteworthy segments to post to YouTube for the people who aren’t so attached to the streamer that they’ll watch mediocre content for 8 hours per day.
The one time I watched a popular live-stream on YouTube, the amount of donations and subscriptions flying around seemed comparable to Twitch.
Indie publisher Raw Fury opened the kimono (as the business guys like to say) on their publishing agreement. It’s caused quite a stir. It’s an admirable show of transparency, considering that most developers go into these publishing contracts frequently not knowing what to expect, and often having no experience with contracts and negotiation.
There’s also been some criticism. According to Raw Fury this is the contract that all their devs have signed. They don’t negotiate! Which means that some of the more tight-fisted items in the contract–rights to all existing platforms and all platforms that are released for the next 10 years, a 50/50 revenue split after they recoup the dev costs PLUS a 15% arbitrary mark-up–are not simply things they plan to negotiate away. It also means that in sharing this, they’re sharing the actual terms of all their existing contracts, presumably without the devs’ permission.
Raw Fury clearly thought they would get plaudits for this move. They’re saying it’s good for indie devs. Probably true. Now other small publishers can talk about how their contracts are more generous than Raw Fury’s!
Oh, there’s also other documents in the Raw Fury dropbox, including a pitch deck template and some legal stuff.
Overall, an interesting move. I’ll be curious to see if there’s fallout from it.
50/50 with recoup but (I understand) significant advances that basically finance cost of production is pretty decent. Most iffy terms are the developer’s obligation to pay to the publisher if the agreement is terminated before the publisher recoups, basically allowing on paper the publisher to terminate mid-contract and impede the developer from taking the game to another shop.
But overall, yes it’s decent. Specially if the advances do cover for development, which seems the case here. Note that this is not the case for a LOT of indie publishers out there.
Of course the real value of a contract is not in the writing, but in how one values the partnership. In this case value hangs in how much the publisher will try to increase expenses to keep Net Revenue down, and how many sales can the publisher generate through their media channels (sales which in turn increase Net Revenue and thus developer’s share).
The Vlambeer guys do not sign “normal” publishing agreements by virtue of being incredibly successful, so take everything there with a grain of salt. Specifically, the 70/30 split they quote is certainly NOT the norm for deals where the publisher fully funds development. It’s a common split for porting/publishing games that are already developed at least partially and often up to Beta, but not when a publisher basically assumes all the financial risk.
Vlambeer did do a couple of games with Devolver Digital in the mid-point of their careers when they were a recognized indie team, but not necessarily super successful. I certainly wouldn’t call that extensive knowledge, though.
In my experience in the industry (rarely directly privy to the contracts I was working under), JW is also arguably wrong about the non-compete part of the contract, which says the dev can’t make a similar game for a year or so. I’ve definitely heard of those stipulations.
Yep, everything seems par for the course, with some items more questionable and other very generous. The termination clause is particularly aggressive (although if you go into this short of contract you need some mutual trust) but most of the stuff seems like a decent deal.
Some of Raw Fury’s recent releases seem at least several hundred thousands in terms of budgets. That level of funding is going to carry some aggressive clauses.
