One major problem in first world countries is how unstable numerous economies are. I believe that the post dot com collapse created huge ramifications in destabilizing the job market for better and worse. Gone are the days of pension plans, life time employment/job security and the ability to plan long term. Instead, the market has become extremely demand based and laws do not adequately protect individuals. Of course, it has empowered certain types of people with skill sets such as people in technology, but that aspect has been flimsy still. That said, new models of earning money are evolving and I want to delve into this aspect.
I am someone who is a pretty avid fan of Twitch.TV. I think Twitch offers an interesting model for prospective content creators where livestreamers with a large following and steady audience can achieve some income for their endeavors. But one of the remarkable trends in the Twitch model does not actually hail from Twitch itself but by the popularity of donations in supporting the streamers’ channels. Because of the rules for the numbers that are required for Twitch in order to become a partner (i.e. someone who can receive a paycheck from subscribers), it becomes difficult for most people to earn anything for a while as they build up their channel. Instead, donations allow supports to directly give money to their favorite streamers.
For young streamers, this model of income works out nicely; you could be a college student for instance who has a great deal of spare time to stream games all day and earn a few hundred dollars extra money for utilities, books, food or whatever. For people with families or no longer in school, this method is sketchy at best since the money isn’t great any donations tend to not be reliable sources of income. However, if again you intend to stream as a supplemental income source, then it is possible as a streamer to employ streaming to add to your bottom line.
Either way, this model is interesting because it shows the potential of how income might be gained in the not-so-distant future. Many livestreamers also make some money through partnerships with YouTube. So for those people, they might have 3-4 areas of income, part of which is handled through content creation. I know a few streamers who ended up working part time or doing odds and ends type of jobs to ensure they can make their monthly bills.
But let’s look at another site called fivver. Fivver is a marketplace for people to sell their services to the public for roughly $5. Many of the postings tend to be technical in nature and it reminds me of a 99 Cents store for tiny tech related jobs. A person with a lot of energy and time on their hands could theoretically sell their services on Fivver and earn enough income to subsist.
TaskRabbit is another upcoming service that focuses around neighborhood services that more than likely you don’t like doing but others are willing to perform. It allows the service provider to name a price for doing things like grocery shopping or house keeping. Again, a person who needs supplement income can use this service if they have free time. Or for those who are pretty serious, they can pretty much attempt to independently contract using this system.
At any rate, how are these things related? The key here is that none of them offer large amounts of money but instead focus on things that are required at that moment. They are very single shot oriented for the most part and allow people with time, energy and/or passion to receive extra money. The thing is that the jobs here are things that need to get done no matter what; they aren’t glorious jobs, but the type of work which no one really wants to do. Yet there are always people who need that extra cash flow who are willing to work for the right price.
But you might ask livestreaming really isn’t something that’s needed; it’s entertainment focused. Well, if entertainment was a so-called need, why is it that Hollywood is the empire that it is and many start ups end up focusing on entertainment? It’s because there’s a lot of demand out there to satisfy that craving for novelty. The thing with game livestreaming is that, indeed, it solves a very niche need, similar to how Fivver and TaskRabbit attempt to focus on certain niche needs.
In the case of supporting livestreaming though, many people end up relying on the collective factor of donations, partnerships and ads for their income. In short, it’s all the small bits that are like a penny filled piggybank. But if you look at what’s being done specifically in game livestreaming, you’ll see that there is a particular type of service being done: content creation.
Content creation is just another form of data entry. YouTube publishers are just sophisticated versions of data entry at the audio and visual level. Some may have bigger budgets to work with but at the end of the day, the content goes into a massive bucket of data that can be used for entertainment, information consumption or data analysis.
The big problem with the economy as I mentioned before is a complete lack of stability. In turn, companies themselves cannot offer guarantees for their employees anymore, which makes contracting look more appealing over time. With these services now, people have opportunities to make that extra money to support themselves, assuming they are willing to hustle.
The thing is that you can’t outsource overseas every job. But companies and people still require certain projects that need to be completed within a time frame. And some of those people may not wish to bother with the problems associated in creating a company just to handle menial tasks. This does provide companies as well some unique opportunities to employ such services for a brief period in getting one shot type of assignments done in a hurry though.
But taking a step back, I want to return to the idea of content creation/mass data entry. One of the biggest issues challenging tech is obtaining large amounts of data in building up these data stores. The problem is that the tech world suffers in how AI has not come into fruition the way many people envisioned in movies and whatnot. Brute force data entry is one way in which the collective machine (could be AI, the Cloud, the internet, Google or whatever) can consume data in a certain manner then regurgitate it into something useful. Thus, content creation plays a critical part in this; however, only a few powerhouses currently have been able to amass this amount of data to transform it into something partially useful. I feel that upcoming companies might require the use of mass data entry/content creation platforms to perform more sophisticated data transformations (such as translation, image recognition, etc.) Because of the sheer scale and need for such data, I believe that over time, everyone will be a contributor in some form. Not just an unwilling participant (insert NSA joke here) but someone who receives compensation.
We already have some existing models like Demand Media’s Demand Studios, Wikipedia, reviews for products, etc. But these things barely have started to scratch the service for the level of sophistication required. It’s said that data is/has become the new currency, replacing money, thus making companies like Facebook, Twitter and Google massively valuable.
I did mention that donations were another aspect to earnings. The thing is that I feel the major banks are slowly losing power and that individuals are becoming the force to provide the extra capital for those who need it. Take Kickstarter as an example. People with money can contribute to causes that they believe in. Sites like Kickstarter mostly offer the forum to allow creators to showcase to the public what they’re doing and allow individuals to make a decision rather than a few key people cockblocking potential ideas. I even see more investors these days; part of them I think are the results of successful people who managed to make their money during the dot com days and want to get more into the strategic side of things by directly contributing.
At any rate, I see jobs as fragmenting where people instead choose things that they are passionate about, can do or have the time and convenience to handle. Corporate entities really won’t have the same level of impact because of how shifting the world is. I feel that corporations, banks and the government don’t have much of a shelf life left in the upcoming world that’s being built. Much of the older infrastructure was designed to only allow key people from a select group to maintain their hegemony. Yet I think people slowly are starting to see this and are shifting away from these sources towards individuals and independents, emphasizing the local aspects of true business rather than closed, backdoor deals that are made by the few in charge.
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