Horatio Alger Comes to YouTube

The CNBC Web site has reprinted a story from The New York Times by Brian Stelter, which, at first blush, appears to be yet another effort to promote the brave new world of Web 2.0 as an opportunity for everyone to get rich:

Making videos for YouTube — for three years a pastime for millions of Web surfers — is now a way to make a living.

Michael Buckley quit his day job in September. He says his online show is “silly,” but it helped pay off credit-card debt.

One year after YouTube, the online video powerhouse, invited members to become “partners” and added advertising to their videos, the most successful users are earning six-figure incomes from the Web site. For some, like Michael Buckley, the self-taught host of a celebrity chatter show, filming funny videos is now a full-time job.

Mr. Buckley quit his day job in September after his online profits had greatly surpassed his salary as an administrative assistant for a music promotion company. His thrice-a-week online show “is silly,” he said, but it has helped him escape his credit-card debt.

Mr. Buckley, 33, was the part-time host of a weekly show on a Connecticut public access channel in the summer of 2006 when his cousin started posting snippets of the show on YouTube. The comical rants about celebrities attracted online viewers, and before long Mr. Buckley was tailoring his segments, called “What the Buck?” for the Web. Mr. Buckley knew that the show was “only going to go so far on public access.”

“But on YouTube,” he said, “I’ve had 100 million views. It’s crazy.”

However, those not lazy enough to read below the fold will discover that this is a story that goes deeper than the usual Internet evangelism:

Granted, building an audience online takes time. “I was spending 40 hours a week on YouTube for over a year before I made a dime,” Mr. Buckley said — but, at least in some cases, it is paying off.

Mr. Buckley is one of the original members of YouTube’s partner program, which now includes thousands of participants, from basement video makers to big media companies. YouTube, a subsidiary of Google, places advertisements within and around the partner videos and splits the revenues with the creators. “We wanted to turn these hobbies into businesses,” said Hunter Walk, a director of product management for the site, who called popular users like Mr. Buckley “unintentional media companies.”

YouTube declined to comment on how much money partners earned on average, partly because advertiser demand varies for different kinds of videos. But a spokesman, Aaron Zamost, said “hundreds of YouTube partners are making thousands of dollars a month.” At least a few are making a full-time living: Mr. Buckley said he was earning over $100,000 from YouTube advertisements.

The program is a partial solution to a nagging problem for YouTube. The site records 10 times the video views as any other video-sharing Web site in the United States, yet it has proven to be hard for Google to profit from, because a vast majority of the videos are posted by anonymous users who may or may not own the copyrights to the content they upload. While YouTube has halted much of the illegal video sharing on the site, it remains wary of placing advertisements against content without explicit permission from the owners. As a result, only about 3 percent of the videos on the site are supported by advertising.

But the company has high hopes for the partner program. Executives liken it to Google AdSense, the technology that revolutionized advertising and made it possible for publishers to place text advertisements next to their content.

Readers of this blog may have noticed that it has advertising placed through AdSense. I have even written on occasion about what AdSense has and has not done with my content. It certainly has not become a revenue source for me, which neither surprises nor angers me. I doubt that there is a particularly high demand for the sort of writing that I do; and I suspect that those who actually "get into" reading my content are doing so out of an interest that tends to ignore any advertising placement. I have even written about the fact that, for those who are trying to make a living from their blogging, the blogosphere has become a latter-day sweatshop. In addition, I have looked into the logic behind AdSense and discovered that it can do some very curious (if not amusing) things.

Buckley's case, however, is more serious than my own:

In a time of media industry layoffs, the revenue source — and the prospect of a one-person media company — may be especially appealing to users. But video producers like Lisa Donovan, who posts sketch comedy onto YouTube and attracted attention in the fall for parodies of Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska, do not make it sound easy. “For new users, it’s a lot of work,” Ms. Donovan said. “Everybody’s fighting to be seen online; you have to strategize and market yourself.”

Mr. Buckley, who majored in psychology in college and lives with his husband and four dogs in Connecticut, films his show from home. Each episode of “What the Buck?” is viewed an average of 200,000 times, and the more popular ones have reached up to three million people. He said that writing and recording five minutes’ worth of jokes about Britney Spears’s comeback tour and Miley Cyrus’s dancing abilities is not as easy as it looks. “I’ve really worked hard on honing my presentation and writing skills,” he said.

As his traffic and revenues grew, Mr. Buckley had “so many opportunities online that I couldn’t work anymore.” He quit his job at Live Nation, the music promoter, to focus full-time on the Web show.

The very fact that I use my own blog to "rehearse" means that I do not even pretend to be in the same league as Buckley. Buckley's story is less about making money through the Internet and more about an experienced professional who decided that he would be better off starting his own business. YouTube was just the "real estate" on which he could create and run his "storefront" operation. In many ways his story is not that different from the old Horatio Alger yarns about the capable young man (yes, they were sexist stories) who ascends the ladder of success on the strength of his own industriousness. Alternatively, Buckley is the embodiment of the words of a Chinese poem, whose source I have forgotten, incorporated into a cantata by the composer Ezra Sims:

Hard work succeeds, naturally.

My guess is that most of those who imbibe (or, for that matter, serve) Web 2.0 Kool-Aid have never heard of Horatio Alger and are not particularly interested in Chinese poetry!