Questionable Content XVII: "My Brain Is Trash And I Live On The Internet"

[Wraith]

A very small number of Twitch channels make a lot of money, though several of the high earners, such as Critical Role, are groups rather than individuals, and the dropoff rate is massive. A leaked revenue set for the Aug 2019-Oct 2021 period had Critical Role as the highest earning channel, making 9.6 million, while the 7th highest earner, AuronPlay, made 3 million, or less than 1/3rd as much.

Bare in mind that CriticalRole's $9million is estimated between 2018 and 2021, not just over the course of one year.

If I remember rightly, Marigold supposedly has 200,000 subscribers - assuming the estimated average cut for a streamer, that's something like $500k per month or $6million per year. She is not only the single most subscribed channel in the world, but is making approximately double what CriticalRole made on average over the last 12 months. And is doing so without sponsorships, without merch deals, without paying wages to a huge cast, or even without quite knowing how she did it.

Heck, even Aurelia has 50,000 subscribers - that's $1.5million a year, which is pushing top 20 on the platform - as someone who streams at 2am and occasionally abandons their stream for an hour in order to talk down an AI having an existential crisis.

In short, Jeph doesn't know how streaming works. It's entirely possible that Mr Farmer could have a lucrative career as GrumpyDadPlays simply because QC logic has nothing to do with real world facts.

[Keltest]

He probably looked at youtube subscriptions and assumed they were basically equivalent.

[Eldan]

Psh. Let's be a bit more Watsonian here, people!

It's not that Jeph doesn't know how streaming works, but in the post-singularity cyberpunk future of QC, streaming just works very differently!

[Gez]

Psh. Let's be a bit more Watsonian here, people!

It's not that Jeph doesn't know how streaming works, but in the post-singularity cyberpunk future of QC, streaming just works very differently!

That's actually vaguely plausible because for some reason there are billions of robot-people around, they seem to outnumber humanity already, and they all have 24/7 Internet access directly in their brains.

If you try to figure out how the economy of such a world can work, i.e. why there are still humans around who can afford to live besides those who have a career in entertaining their robotic overlords, remember that the Singularity happened and this means that no part of the worldbuilding needs to make sense because "an AI did it" is the new "a wizard did it".

[theNater]

..."an AI did it" is the new "a wizard did it".

Well, it's like Arthur C. Clark said: "Any sufficiently advanced AI is indistinguishable from a wizard."

[Keltest]

Meddle not in the affairs of AI, for you are boring, and they are constantly on the hunt for a new reality TV program.

[Wraith]

He probably looked at youtube subscriptions and assumed they were basically equivalent.

Anywhere else, it would be clear that he said 'subscriptions' when what he actually meant was 'followers' or possibly even just 'viewers'.

But this is QC, where Marigold became millionaire practically overnight. Followers don't make you any money, especially if you're not advertising anything to them, so what else could it be? A Freudian slip wherein he said 'subscribers' but meant... Patreon donators, maybe? Even at $1 each that makes way more sense than a $5 twitch sub each. Or a combination of stream subscriptions and Patreon donators?

I'm perfectly willing to suspend disbelief and agree that Marigold could have caught lightning in a bottle and somehow become wildly successful as a streamer. Why not? As stories go it's more or less plausible - Even in this last week, I've seen a small streamer go viral after being wronged by a bigger streamer and their subscription count increased ten-fold as people rushed to show their support. But even she didn't become "twice as big as the next biggest streaming personality on the entire platform" even if her meteoric rise might turn out to be fleeting in the end.

[Willie the Duck]

There are admittedly certain fields that have relatively low technical skill barriers to entry, compared to others, and streaming, is actually one of them. The amount of knowledge necessary to setup your own Twitch channel is quite low, and the gear necessary to do so is also quite common presently and doesn't require a huge monetary commitment.

That's different from the skills (also luck and, critically, networking) necessary to make such a channel a monetary success. There are ~8 million people streaming on Twitch, which is just one platform, but Twitch only brought in, in 2020, 2.3 billion in revenue, which means the average amount of money earned, per streamer, was ~300 dollars.

A very small number of Twitch channels make a lot of money, though several of the high earners, such as Critical Role, are groups rather than individuals, and the dropoff rate is massive. A leaked revenue set for the Aug 2019-Oct 2021 period had Critical Role as the highest earning channel, making 9.6 million, while the 7th highest earner, AuronPlay, made 3 million, or less than 1/3rd as much.

So really, the distribution of monetization for streaming is fairly normal for any arts/entertainment field - most people make effectively nothing, a small slice near the top makes enough to get buy but probably not more than they'd make in a conventional job, and a tiny group of high earners makes a fortune. The only real difference is that, because streaming is run through giant digital platforms there's no threshold that has to be crossed before a participant can actually bring in revenue, however miniscule. That's different from say, music, where the average garage band or hobbyist never gets a paying gig of any kind.

My point was that the reaction was entirely plausible to me. Guy standing in front of modern art and saying, "my 4 year old kid could do that." is practically a trope in and of itself; or Radar's point about Money for Nothing (which I assume is the video you linked, I keep forgetting to look when not on a work computer).

He probably looked at youtube subscriptions and assumed they were basically equivalent.

I think he conflated the term followers and subscribers or similar and, after catching it/having it pointed out later, decided to just roll with it.

[Cikomyr2]

Meddle not in the affairs of AI, for you are boring, and they are constantly on the hunt for a new reality TV program.

"AI watch Humans suffer for their entertainment" was always a hollow and silly sci-fi concept to imagine to me.

Until you.

[Mechalich]

That's actually vaguely plausible because for some reason there are billions of robot-people around, they seem to outnumber humanity already, and they all have 24/7 Internet access directly in their brains.

If you try to figure out how the economy of such a world can work, i.e. why there are still humans around who can afford to live besides those who have a career in entertaining their robotic overlords, remember that the Singularity happened and this means that no part of the worldbuilding needs to make sense because "an AI did it" is the new "a wizard did it".

Unfortunately we really have no idea at all how many AIs there are running around in the QC universe, which is a big problem that only grows bigger with each passing strip.

AIs could be 10% of Northampton's population - which would be in line with having 2-3 AI police officers as seemed to be the case - or they could be 50% and have numbers to match that of humans and we have absolutely no idea which is true. We also don't know if Northampton has a particular high percentage of AIs compared to other places in the United States or globally - there are a number of logical reasons why this would be likely but no commentary on the matter at all. We don't even have any real idea what proportion of AIs have bodies of any kind and what portion of those have more or less human normative bodies.

Could streaming be bigger in the QC universe? Sure, and it doesn't necessarily require an especially large AI population for that to be so. Since a relatively tiny fraction of the present day human population supplies the overwhelming majority of streaming revenue, a small AI population in which streaming subscriptions are much more common (which makes a certain amount of sense, since at least some AIs have an awful lot of free time) could massively balloon the industry. Marigold's circumstances would make much more sense in a world where streaming is 10x what it currently is.

The general problem with the whole Marigold streaming bit is that the plot requires the characters and audience to interact with QC's absurdly lacking in detail future-shocked reality. It's not the first time this has happened, Union Robotics' ongoing financial woes struggle to find any sort of context for similar reasons, and there are other cases, but because this plot is on another scale compared to basically everything else (except Yay), it's very obvious.

[VoxRationis]

Streaming couldn't be too much bigger on account of the fact that it, much like most of the mass entertainment industry*, is basically an adjunct to the advertising business and is thus constrained in its total size by the profit margins of the productive industries that would desire to buy advertisements, which are themselves constrained in total size by an array of physical limitations.



*Specifically that portion of it which does not require up-front admission costs (and some portion of that which does).

[LeSwordfish]

It seems clear, but bizarre, that Jacques made a mistake and was left with the choices "retcon it" "explain why things are different" and "make two of his characters global celebrities on a whim" and went with the latter.

[Traab]

Meddle not in the affairs of AI, for you are boring, and they are constantly on the hunt for a new reality TV program.

An AI is never late. Nor is he early. He arrives PRECISELY when his atomic clock schedules him to!"

[halfeye]

Streaming couldn't be too much bigger on account of the fact that it, much like most of the mass entertainment industry*, is basically an adjunct to the advertising business and is thus constrained in its total size by the profit margins of the productive industries that would desire to buy advertisements, which are themselves constrained in total size by an array of physical limitations.

I wouldn't call money supply physical.

[Keltest]

I wouldn't call money supply physical.

Its physical-ish.

[Gez]

Ultimately, money is energy. There's a direct link between economic growth and energy expenditure, which is why there's been a skyrocketing economic growth with the industrial revolution, after centuries of stagnation; and nowadays the fastest economic growth is in the developing world. High economy = high energy use. So yes, money is physical-ish.


Anyway, I love all the Jeph Jacques Ronald Reuel Tolkien quotes.

[VoxRationis]

I wasn't even thinking of money supply; in a world where all the currencies are fiat, money supply is arbitrary. I was more thinking of the fact that people live in physical space, use physical goods, consume physical food, and require physical services, and these are all subject to limitations that, unlike the money supply, the Federal Reserve can't handwave away when it feels like it. Moreover, they pay for these things with money (whatever its total amount) that corresponds to rather less flexible value linked to the provision of physical goods and services, tied as it is to their employment.*

Alice the streamer makes money because Acme Corp wants to attract the attention of Bob and Carol, her viewers, with the intent that Bob and Carol will buy more of Acme Corp's products. Bob and Carol, however, have fairly limited budgets (regardless of the actual amount of money represented in those budgets) from their jobs producing widgets for Beta and Corp Corps., respectively, jobs which are paid from revenues provided by the sale of those widgets. If Dan decides to become a streamer and gets the viewership of Bob and Carol, the value Acme Corp can expect to get from Alice's streaming diminishes by a proportion proportional to the ratio of Dan's viewership (in person-minutes) to Alice's. (And heaven help us if Carol decides she wants to get in on the action and leaves her productive job to become a streamer as well!) In a competitive environment, Acme may be compelled to accept this, placing money into advertising with diminishing returns, or even with negative returns on investment, purely to avoid its competitors' capturing the market (in much the same way that the security dilemma between states can compel them to competitively place resources into their militaries past the point at which any return on those investments can be expected), but this is limited by Acme's total profit margins; Acme cannot persistently spend money on advertisements (and thus on streamers) sufficient to put it in the red.

Now, you may ask, what about Aspire Solutions, a service-providing company which advertises to businesses? Can it not provide Alice with money for advertising? Yes, it can, of course, but from Alice's perspective, it's probably worse than if it didn't, because Aspire's revenues depend on getting business from Acme, which then has less money to spend on Alice, and Aspire won't have a comparable amount of money to spend on Alice because of their overhead.

*In a local environment (such as the economy of a single country or some subdivision thereof) you can get distortions of this, with places like Wall Street, ancient Rome, or Las Vegas that make shiploads of money without being economically productive, but that's because they're collecting money from a broader population that is economically productive, and especially in the modern age of globalization, with capital and goods flowing across the globe almost freely, the population from which rents or effective rents can be drawn is broad indeed.

Edit: I forgot to make explicit the physical limitations of Acme Corp's revenue potential, but its market is limited by some function of the total population, its distribution limited by various supply chain and logistical concerns, and its supply limited by the raw materials available to make its widgets. These different constraints have varying levels of flexibility, but all reach a limit somewhere, and in any case, revenue will tend to be throttled by the most constricting of these.

[Delicious Taffy]

It's good to see her dad being so supportive. He even seems to have acquired The Lingo from her.

[Wraith]

I should not have said "I like Goblin-Marigold" because clearly Jeph is reading my posts and now that we've seen it 4 or 5 times in a row, in every arc we've since it she started doing it, I'm pretty much fed up of it forever.

Marigold struggling to adapt to adult life and occasionally relapsing into grumpy anti-socialism is funny. Her constantly being a helpless and ungrateful woman-child is quite a lot less so.

[Traab]

A nocturnal dumpster goblin huh? Wow, thats one of the best random descriptions ever.

[Cikomyr2]

Ultimately, money is energy. There's a direct link between economic growth and energy expenditure, which is why there's been a skyrocketing economic growth with the industrial revolution, after centuries of stagnation; and nowadays the fastest economic growth is in the developing world. High economy = high energy use. So yes, money is physical-ish.


Anyway, I love all the Jeph Jacques Ronald Reuel Tolkien quotes.

Thats the currency theory of Petrodollar..

Which i utterly subscribe to. So +1!!!

[Delicious Taffy]

I recognize Claire, but who are these other two characters?

Jokes aside, I do the same thing with my SO. Minor inconveniences get the loudest, most theatrically excessive overreactions.

[Eldan]

I recognize Claire, but who are these other two characters?

Emily and Renée.

[Thufir]

I recognize Claire, but who are these other two characters?

Emily and Renée.

Wow, this joke is just as funny as the last 20 times someone made it!

[Keltest]

Remember when Jeph remembered that Dora's hair was dyed and would actually have her roots grow out over time and need to be re-dyed?

[Wraith]

Jokes aside, I do the same thing with my SO. Minor inconveniences get the loudest, most theatrically excessive overreactions.

The first time my wife and I "threatened to divorce each other" (note inverted commas for comedic context, etc) we had been married for... about 15 minutes, I think? We hadn't yet gotten outside to start taking photos, I remember that much.

Then again Claire's father was at least neglectful - if not outright abusive - so her reaction to couples fighting could be related to old trauma regarding her parents. Not sure why Dora would be so earnest to explain it away beyond "Ah we're just joking, we do it all the time", but the rest makes perfect sense.

[Traab]

The first time my wife and I "threatened to divorce each other" (note inverted commas for comedic context, etc) we had been married for... about 15 minutes, I think? We hadn't yet gotten outside to start taking photos, I remember that much.

Then again Claire's father was at least neglectful - if not outright abusive - so her reaction to couples fighting could be related to old trauma regarding her parents. Not sure why Dora would be so earnest to explain it away beyond "Ah we're just joking, we do it all the time", but the rest makes perfect sense.

Probably because that wouldnt really work as an explanation by itself and claire would continue to believe that she walked in on a real fight. Going into detail helps lend verisimilitude to the explanation.

[Keltest]

So, I dont know if it ever has actually come up in the comic, but isnt Tai like, several years younger than Dora? Theyre both adults now, but that does make their meeting as children substantially less likely.

[Mechalich]

So, I dont know if it ever has actually come up in the comic, but isnt Tai like, several years younger than Dora? Theyre both adults now, but that does make their meeting as children substantially less likely.

Scout camps often have fairly wide age ranges, so it's quite possible for them to have met if the variance is 5-6 years, and multiple camps on the same lake is actually a thing in New England (can confirm from personal experience). However, has it ever been confirmed that Tai is a regional local? I wasn't under the impression that was the case.

[mucat]

So, I dont know if it ever has actually come up in the comic, but isnt Tai like, several years younger than Dora?

Is she? I got the feeling she'd earned a bachelor's degree (which, Tai being Tai, might have taken a bit longer than median), maybe a master's, and worked several years at the library afterwards. Not an old-timer, but older than Marten, and (I figured) about the same age as Dora.