The Frinklin and Fred Show

Not to Quibble, But...

Brian's Adventures in Cowtown is back! I'm always glad to see new output from a funny blogger, which he is. And I got chortles aplenty from his attempt to lay down some rules for posting videos on YouTube. As I have never actually watched anything on YouTube (except for the video on Brian's site), I will defer to his knowledge. As as economics nerd, though, I did want to take issue with one thing he said:

It's like there's no incentive to put out quality work. You'd think that the incredible accessibility of a site that allows anybody, anywhere to share videos that they created with hard work and talent would encourage amateur filmmakers to put out solid productions, constantly one-upping each other until the line between amateur video and professional video is practically non-existent.

I don't see why that would be true. In the information marketplace, the existence of sites like YouTube reduces the barriers to entry, which only creates a wider range of options, not necessarily a better one.

I've written about this in the past, but a quick refresher for the non-econ types about "barriers to entry": In the pre-Web world, if you wanted to become a media star, you had to become employed by some sort of media concern: a newspaper, a TV or radio station, a record company, a movie studio, etc. Since there are always many, many more people who want to be in TV, radio, music, and the movies than there are slots available, the barriers to entry were high: you had to impress an editor, programming director, producer, studio exec, etc., or finance your own media outlet. Since the decision-makers were allowed to cherry-pick from such a wide pool, this meant (at least theoretically) that only the best writers, performers, directors, actors, singers, etc. were chosen.

Now, thanks to YouTube and other such sites, pretty much every American high schooler with a summer job is able to buy or borrow the equipment necessary to post his or her videos for worldwide consumption. Talent (or the ability to attract a media decision-maker's eye, at least) is no longer a requirement. This is the price we pay for the information revolution: there's no longer a mechanism for keeping substandard products out of the market. The "one-upsmanship" theory that Brian posits only works if everyone in the market cares about being the best. As he's discovered, that's not true, and if people are primarily interested in getting themselves worldwide exposure, there's no real incentive for them to care about quality.

In the end, the value to the consumer is what matters. In Brian's case, he's a big fan of DCLugi's videos. In a world without YouTube, I suspect that DCLugi's work might never have seen the light of day. So in this sense, YouTube is a net positive for Brian. The downside is that he has to wade through a thousand videos of high-schoolers lip-syncing to "Sexy Back" and dancing on the hood of their parents' SUVs, or whatever.

For true believers in the information revolution, this isn't a problem. The more information out there, they say, the better. Maybe there's one guy in Finland who really wants to see that "Sexy Back" hood-dance video, and thanks to YouTube, he will no longer be deprived of that pleasure. And given that Brian keeps visiting YouTube despite the avalanche of crappy videos he has to put up with, the site must be doing something right. Eventually, there may come a point where the bad material floods the system and prevents people from finding the good stuff. At that point, users would stop visiting YouTube, and presumably, it would cease to operate.

Short of a massive consumer migration away from YouTube and similar sites, though, the only thing to limit the number of poor-quality videos out there is the desire of people to keep making them. Fortunately, though, the trend is likely to burn itself out eventually. Blogs are a perfect example of this. After the thrill of "Hey, I'm on the Internet!" wears off, many people get bored and quit eventually. I read about a study suggesting that the number of blogs is starting to level off, and the same thing will happen with videos, too.

In the meantime, though, I strongly urge all those would-be auteurs out there to follow Brian's guidelines. Even if he's wrong in an economic sense, he's right in an aesthetic one. Trust me. Your future self will thank you. Particularly when future children and potential employers do a Google search for you.

(NOTE: I have closed the comments for this post, due to a particularly obnoxious comment spammer. If you wish to comment on this post, please e-mail me.)

Posted by Mediocre Fred at January 11, 2007 12:02 PM | TrackBack