I was getting pretty bored, and I ended up going down a YouTube hole for several hours last weekend. They say that 500 hours of content is uploaded to YouTube every minute. This doesn’t explain why the same 12 videos keep popping up in my suggestions, but it’s ok. I just ignore them.
Here’s what I found
I ran across this video from about five years ago. You’ll see paper-based stop-motion versions of a lot of classic video games. It doesn’t matter that the video’s a little older because most of the games it references are even older than that.
This guy is either brilliant or he’s got way too much time on his hands. Decide for yourself. Apparently he took a bunch of stock photos, printed them out, cut them out, and then used them to create stop-motion versions of his favorite video games. The last half of the video is really just him talking about what he did and how you can contact him, but the first half of the video is pretty impressive. Granted I would have been even more impressed if he had managed to do a first-person shooter, something modern like Call of Duty, but it’s still pretty darn impressive if you ask me. Certainly more than I would be able to do under the circumstances.
The creator economy
If you watch the video all the way through, you’ll also see that about half of it is a commercial for Pond5. Pond5 is a company that provides stock photo and stock video services. That’s all I’ll say about them. But it does start to explain how and why a video like this gets made.
For about the first ten years of its life, most people just created YouTube content because they thought it was cool. Sometimes they liked seeing their views and followers go up. But YouTube evolved to become the default way for people to consume mid-length videos. So, YouTube rolled out advertising and sponsorship options. Now, if you’re a content creator, you have options. You can get sponsorship money from companies (like Pond5). Or, you can allow commercials in your video and make money when they play.
This is a big change for YouTube and it’s probably what Google had in mind when they bought the company. Regular folks can still use it to share videos, but it’s also a great way to make money.
For the record, Solid Signal’s YouTube channel doesn’t have commercials, but we do advertise our own products there. I mean, we have to do something, right?
