[shawn]

Most people would not pay for the kind of content that shows up on Facebook and YouTube by so-called “content creators”.

This isn’t really true. I’ve been trying to demonstrate this by curating some interesting and educational YouTube videos in one place: https://www.laarc.io/l/videos

You’re right that there’s a lot of noise to sift through. But there are real gems.

People may not pay for it directly, but they pay for it with their time and attention. In most cases that can be translated to dollars for popular items. You can get a sense of estimated value by looking at socialblade. Here’s a content creator that recently rose to fame: https://socialblade.com/youtube/channel/UC5_do3JQAPHA1rIlM-2...

(If anyone knows how this guy got ~300k subscribers almost overnight, I’d love to hear from you. It’s a mystery, but it doesn’t seem like foul play. Just lucky social exposure with some good timing.)