We all know that the U.S. is a mostly capitalist society with some intervention from the government, so why should our internet be any different?

People have been making money off the internet since the internet was born and I don’t think that should change. The first time someone had an advertisement online was in 1994 on Apple’s website.

So with the vast expanse of websites and blogs making money from advertising, the monetized videos on YouTube make perfect sense. People around the world are putting up content and making money from the ads that play with the video and making a career out of it.

I have to be honest, I will never understand how they determine what content is monetized and how the revenue is made because they change that information so often. It’s hard to keep up with it. Here is Youtube’s official explanation.

Being a YouTuber and making a living from the platform allows many people to provide for themselves what they wouldn’t be able to before. There are numerous accounts that are run by people who are bedridden or hospitalized that wouldn’t be able to hold a 9-5 job anywhere but can now support themselves.

There’s also a huge community of people that want to do what they love for a living no matter what form that takes. People can make videos doing anything from trendy challenges, reaction videos, or even doing crafts to make a living.

It perfectly encapsulates our modern day capitalist society, but instead of getting seed money to start a business, they create a free account and watch it grow.

Then there’s the accompanied social media presence that comes with a YouTube creator account. Being on any and all social media websites can drastically increase your views and consequently let you earn more money.

While that may seem the laziest dream job, being in the public eye in such an unfiltered way takes a lot of effort especially with the polarizing sociopolitical climate. Then when YouTubers aren’t on social media, they have to edit all their various videos in a very short time period to keep up a regular posting schedule.

Being a professional YouTuber is just one of the many careers that the new generations are creating for themselves. Give them the credit (and views) they deserve.

There’s a new occupation to put on your résumé: Professional YouTuber. As interesting as this new development in modern society is, I still find it a bit ludicrous, and I haven’t been able to wrap my mind around it.

YouTube is a platform that has grown since 2005, and is now an integral representation of modern society, most notably Millenials and Gen Z.

However, YouTube has changed for the worse, to mostly clickbait-y videos that continue to decline in quality as more people join YouTube for the monetary incentive. Clickbait is using strategies that induce people to watch a video and increase the amount of views the video gets.

Some ways of clickbait are photoshopped bright colors and the usage of capital letters. Honestly, this reminds me of the old workbooks we used to get when we were in elementary school, where colors were everywhere in order to make math or science more fun for little kids who do not have much of an attention span for adding and subtracting.

YouTubers encourage their viewers to watch bright, sunshiny videos of slime, or other unoriginal mindless trends, not really encouraging the development of originality or the personal growth of the viewers themselves.

By using these methods, YouTubers are able to get more views, which they end up making money at your expense.  Who needs real people when you can watch people you’ve never even met creating unoriginal content and giving advice that might not even be true?

YouTubers have no certification or any way for the average watcher to be assured that following this advice might actually help them. I’ve seen YouTubers suggest that their fans who need to write essays write gibberish, change the font color to white in order to sabotage the word count, or make periods a size larger to reach that needed page length of an assignment.

Many content creators tend to follow what is being the most watched at the time, causing multiple videos to be created. All of them seem to be exactly the same, but the people being watched were different. In order for the originality and desire to create to return, the incentive of money needs to be dropped.

And guess what? You watching that content and giving them those views and income basically prompts them to make more superfluous content, because that’s what they end up getting paid for. This is why YouTubing isn’t and shouldn’t be considered a respectable job, because not all the content created is something that we should be applauding.

YouTube has continued to grow more interactive with its audience, but to the point that YouTubers have started earning millions of dollars over videos that probably cost less than a hundred bucks to create and publish.

To encourage YouTubing as a creative outlet would be suggesting that people joined the virulent YouTuber community where people cross limits for a single view.