To follow this up, one of my favorite channels on Youtube is Outdoor Boys. It's just a father who made videos once a week doing outdoor things like camping with his family. He has amassed billions of views on his channel. Literally a one-man operation. He does all the filming, editing himself. No marketing. His channel got so popular that he had to quit to protect his family from fame.
Many large production companies in the 2000s would have been extremely happy with that many views. They would have laughed you out of the building if you told them a single person could ever produce compelling enough video content and get at many viewers.
Serious question: but aren't there thousands of other guys doing almost the same thing and getting almost no views? Even if there are lots of new channels, there aren't going to be lots of winners
But there are many Youtubers making a decent living doing it as a one person shop or a small team. In the past, you needed to a large team with a large budget and buy in from TV/DVDs/VHS to get an audience.
There are no such detailed numbers as far as I know. No platform (twitch, YouTube etc.) generally provides this information. Thinking bad one could assume it's because most people would realize it's one in a million who makes it.
Channels that make money consistently also have teams behind. Sure, probably they are smaller then TV studios, but TV studios do also other jobs compared to youtubers.
Anyway, these are the only numbers available. If there are numbers that show that masses of individuals can make a living in a market with so many competitors like YouTube I am happy to look at them. Until then, I will observe what is known for almost everything: a small % takes the vast majority of resources.
YouTube is a platform, it's not a product. And in this case, created a new market. A market in which, by the way, still very few people (relative to those who try) are successful. In fact I wouldn't be surprised if the percentage would be much smaller than 10%.
Basically I would flip the question and ask: if you could produce videos now very simply with AI and so could other 10000 people, how many of the new channels do you think will be successful?
If anything, the YouTube example shows you exactly that it doesn't matter than 1000000 people now can produce content with low overhead, just a handful of them will be successful, because the market of companies available to spend money to sponsor through channels and the men hours of eyeballs on videos are both limited.
Talking about companies that just produce products, either you come up with something new (and create a new market), or you come up with something better (you take shares of an existing market). Having 10000 companies producing - say - digital editing software won't make suddenly increase by 10000x the number of people in need of digital editing software. Which means that among those 10000 there will be a few very good products which will eat all the market (like it is now), with the usual Paretian distribution.
The idea that many companies with smaller overhead can split the market evenly and survive might (and it's a big hopeful might) work on physical companies selling local and physical products (I.e., splitting the market geographically), but for software products I cannot even imagine it happening.
New markets are created all the time, and it's great if maybe smaller companies (or co-ops) could take over those markets rather than big corporations, but the way the market distribution happens I don't think will be affected. I don't see any reason why this should change with many more companies in the same market.
I also don't think that 10000 new companies will create 10000 new markets, because that depends on ideas (and luck, and context, and regulation, etc.), not necessarily on resources available,
Now count how many TV stations there were in the 90s and 2000s.
This is just Youtube alone. What about streamers on Twitch? Youtube? Tiktokers? IG influencers?
Plenty of people are making money creating video content online.
The internet, ease and advancements in video editing tools, and cheap portable cameras all came together to allow millions of content creators instead of 100 TV channels.
77.500 channels which make any money. Now plenty of those make a handful of dollars per month.
Also, 77k worldwide.
I am not going to deny that YouTube (and all social media) created new markets. But how is this not an argument that shows that when N people suddenly do some activity, only a tiny minority is successful and gains some market share?
If tomorrow a product that is made by 3 companies will see competitors by 10000 1-man operations, maybe you will have 30 different successful products, or 100. 9900 of those 10000 will still be out of luck.
I
YouTube is not an example of a market that being exposed to a flood of players gets shares somewhat equally between those players or that allows a significant number of the to survive with it. Nor is twitch or any of the other platforms.
Because:
1. One person companies are better at giving the wealth to the worker.
2. With thousands of companies the products can be more targeted and each product can serve fewer people and still be profitable
Then companies won't need to spam you to convince you that you need something you don't. Or that their product will help you in ways it can't.
Once person companies will not have a 100 person marketing team trying to inject ads into ever corner of your life.
> One person companies will not have a 100 person marketing team to inject ads into every corner of your life.
But they could have a thousand-agent swarm connected via MCP to everything within our field of vision to bury us with ads.
It's been a long time since I read "The Third Wave" and up until 2026, not much has reminded me about its "Small is beautiful", and "rise of the prosumer" themes besides the content creator economy which is arguably the worst thing to ever happen to humanity's information environment, and LLM agent discussions.
This is exactly one of the things I find maddening at the moment. "Everyone" (except my actual friends) on social media is trying to sell me something.
Eg: I like dogs. It's becoming increasingly hard to follow dog accounts without someone trying to sell me their sponsor's stuff.
And if it's so cheap and bespoke, why buying it and not making it in house?
What about access to people with know-how of that product? You use a product that only 4 other companies use, you can be sure you won't find any new hire that knows how to use it.
To me it seems the reality works in the opposite way. Among the many products built, some will be successful and will swallow the whole market, like now with basically any software or SaaS product.
> And if it's so cheap and bespoke, why buying it and not making it in house?
0. Sure, some products will be made in house. That said, being able to spec a product well is a skill that is not as common as some folks seem to think. It also assumes that an org is large enough to have a good internal dev team, which is both rare and relatively expensive.
1. It sloughs responsibility, which many folks want to do.
2. It allows for creation to be done not by committee and/or with less impact from internal politics.
3. It facilitates JIT product/tool development while minimizing costs.
That’s off the top of my head.
The realities of business often point to internal development not being ideal.
> No? I dont see any indication that this would be a good idea. Or even looked for.
Do you spec software for a variety of businesses?
I do.
It’s rare that one SaaS or software package does what the people paying want it to do. Either they have to customize internally (expensive and limited to larger orgs with a tech department) or Frankenstein a solution like Salesforce or WordPress with a lot of add ons. And even then, it’s not hitting all pain points.
Being able to spin up or modify an app cheaply and easily will be a massive boon for businesses.
Or magically 9900 more products or markets will be created, all of them successful?