By Aakash Deep:
Since the advent of the modern computer and internet, social media has become a societal phenomenon encompassing an entire generation into its framework. As 40% of the global population uses the internet to connect and share express content, delivery of multimedia has undergone a rapid change in its dynamics.
Incubated in 2004 by two former PayPal employees in a garage, YouTube started as a video aggregator facilitating users to share videos among family and friends. Within a few years, half a billion people got hooked on the site. The momentum of this tech phenomena further caught on as the smartphone and high speed data connection became more accessible as a globe. The average consumer was the typical teenager consuming and sharing all kinds of content and uploading less than just an hour of video per second.
As more and more people shifted to this newer piece of video sharing, this social phenomenon, once finding itself short of funds in a garage, had become a multibillion dollar company, taken over by another rapidly growing tech company – Google. Under the mammoth search giant, the video sharing tool was given a business model that would soon change the future of all media corporations from news corporations to record labels.
As content became more accessible under the usage of free internet, new problems arose. An entire generation turned to what would later become the biggest nuisance ever committed by a generation as a whole. This was illegal downloading of all content, with multimedia becoming the single most packet being affected. This was probably one of the biggest challenges the company had to face – how to convince users, habitual to accessing free content, to pay for it. There was also a particularly huge concern for issues of copyright and intellectual property as the archaic laws of distribution of content was limited to physical sales of media. The loophole in litigation meant anyone and everyone was uploading copyrighted material leading to multimillion dollar lawsuits and billions in loss. A decision however had to be taken soon enough that, if structured, could open new revenue streams for producers and a platform for artists. Thus for the first time, artists were curated globally who started sharing and developing original and exclusive content for the site in exchange of revenue share. This not only opened completely new sources of revenue generation but also complemented physical sales, a huge matter of concern for artists as well as producers.
Today, more than a million artists put up more than a billion threads of content earning on an average $10,000 annually, with the bigger creators roping in millions. Media houses, production corporations and independent content creators have formed together cartels like VEVO that license exclusive content of their artists earning from aggregator-creator models like Google AdSense and pay-per-view allowing them to make top dollar on every piece of advertisement viewed by users.
As the company brought its three hundredth advertisers on to its platform, a billion users consume content freely, artists make more on content created and advertisers grab more eyeballs than they could on any other network. Once, a video sharing social phenomena has now become an industry of its own supplementing all kinds of by-creation and is acting as a catalyst for complete reinvention of the production, distribution and consumption of content.