First is the contradictory ways people describe “mainstream media”. Most people I talk to seem to refer to a few large companies as representing “mainstream” (itself an awful term which needs to die). But these companies are actually minorities, outliers. For example, most movies by far are neither made nor distributed through the Hollywood movie cartels. Yet, most people seem to assume that those from Hollywood are “the real ones”, that they count more, for whatever reason, because Hollywood has told them so. Same with music labels, news journalism, etc. People look to an old top-down broadcast model from the 1950s and insist that these few offerings represent the “mainstream”, the majority. My definition is that mainstream media (yuck…) means the media made by most people.
As far as the whole lots of viewers and ad profit thing goes, it might have no competition because it is not even necessary in the first place. There is no objective reason why it should matter how many people watch your videos. If it is worth making and showing, then do it.
OK, admittedly if you regularly watch stuff like that, perhaps. But if you just watch Vevo [pop songs] all the livelong day…
[EDIT] While we’re on the subject, we might as well take the opportunity to point out that ads, as opposed to something like (say) Patreon, are generally a bad business model to begin with.
Two people I watch have switched to a Patreon based revenue system and I feel MUCH better just paying a nominal amount for content directly rather than having to watch ads on their channels. And in both cases, the money they got from Patreon wound up being a substantial amount!
Cable was actually initially just an antenna for hire for areas with poor free to air reception; they received free to air broadcasts in good reception areas and piped it to subscribers’ homes via wire without any original content. It’s something Cory likes to bring up whenever cable companies complain about a number of copyright issues.
Yes, I remember alter cocker friends, relatives & others saying this about cable promising ad-free programming shortly after cable-TV became kinda up-scale, the new gee-whiz thing to have.
Anyway, I’m sure you’re betting right that they’ll work something out.
