Economics

A morning or two ago, I woke awoke to find an email from YouTube. Despite my anemic viewership, my channel had been selected for monetization. “Congratulations” read the subject line. Inside: “You can now earn money from your YouTube videos!” Clearly The YouTube team can spot quality!

Some quick back of the envelope arithmetic revealed the sort of dough I could expect to be rolling in. At about $1 CPM (cost per 1000 impressions) My account could have made $20 to date! That could pay for all my coffee for an entire week.

My account, at this point accrues about 100 views per day. If I only redouble my efforts, focusing on video, I could quickly be achieving 10x that! That’s a dollar a day – nearly 1/30th the cost of my health insurance.

But wait a minute here. I’ve been posting videos with the idea of promoting my band and getting our music out there. If only I pivoted, focusing on viral content, I could leap exponentially! The total jazz views of even a towering luminary like John Coltrane can’t keep pace with the deluge of eyeballs attracted by one Dramatic Chipmunk.

Yes, yes - this is all taking shape magnificently. A few well-edited fart videos, some novelty songs played on funny instruments – after all my most viewed video to date is a 2 minute rendition of “Happy Birthday” played in the hot jazz style while wearing a black hoodie and sunglasses at 3am in the conference room of a French hotel. Pretty soon I’ll be rolling in it.

To be candid for a moment, YouTube’s generosity in extending partnership to an account that clearly meets none of the benchmarks laid out anywhere for what generally warrants partnership is notable and appreciated. And I’d like to imagine that it is part of an effort to encourage the creation of original content and to build YouTube as a home for far more than clips of people falling and farting.

But if only now I had that one viral fart video…

http://youtube.com/user/zacharylipton

For hundreds of years, the increased specialization of labor drove greater productive capacity and increased efficiency across all sectors of the world economy. Philosophers like Karl Marx noted the potential damage of such a division of duties to man’s soul. But few could have predicted then that the over-specialization of labor could spell financial catastrophe on a massive scale for those married to very specific skill sets.