You might have heard of the recent Tik Tok sensation of a young girl named Bella Poarch
To be honest I am not that much of a Tik Tok user and just use the app occasionally as the videos there can be quite fun and entertaining. But in the last couple of weeks there has been somewhat of a sensation: a young Tik Toker shook up the community by posting short and simple videos of herself making funny facial expressions and head movements to some weird songs. To the surprise of many her videos have gathered an enormous amounts of views in only a very short time span. Some are saying that she has already got over 755 millions views/clicks in a matter of weeks! That is absolutely mind blowing, and reveals a lot about the popularity of the app itself.
But the story only begins here: This surprising popularity apparently hasn't sat with all of the users too well, evoking jealously in some who think that the simplicity of her videos shouldn't deserve so much attention. In recent days this has caused a split in the community ending up in users either defending or attacking her.
In response to this debate, a lot of users made some videos about her earnings as a Tik Tok creator (Tik Tok shares a fraction of their revenues with the top creators). How much? Well apparently Tik Tok gives its creators about 2-3 cents per 1000 views/clicks. If you do the math this sums up to about 23k$.
That may sound impressive to some and I think most are amazed about how "easy" she could get this amount of money in just two weeks. But if you think about it, it's actually quite the opposite. Sure, 23k$ is a lot of money, but it is just a fraction of what Tik Tok earned from these videos. In fact, comparing this number with the amount of over 755.000.000 views makes 23.000$ seem very small. And I think this example highlights the problem with social media in general (from a financial standpoint): There are only a handful of creators who don't get their fair share of rewards that are being generated from their content.
There are others who proudly present their own earnings from imitating Bella Poarch and seem to be amazed by how much they can earn with this. In this example, a man shows that he has earned over 130$ in earnings from covering the new Tik Tok sensation:
But I have to wonder: How would they feel if they knew of Hive where it is possible to earn rewards on a much more sustainable basis. Sure, it is hard here as well and nobody is going to get rich straight away, but content creators on Hive seem to be much better positioned at earning at least something (the low price of Hive is currently making people earn much less than what they could). To me it seems that people are still largely unaware of web 3.0 and crypto projects such as Hive. And it also seems that people haven't grown accustomed to the idea that creators should earn their fair share and that this is possible.
This alone demonstrates to me that the incentivization idea of Hive (as @yabapmatt pointed out) still holds a lot of potential. We haven't sen this idea taken off because of a lack of mainstream adoption. Cryptos are still too complicated for the main user base.
Could you imagine what 755 million views would translate to earnings on Hive?! Obviously, this comparison is unfit as there is only a very small amount of users currently and the price of Hive is nowhere near to where it should be, enabling much higher payouts. And of course we have to remember that on Hive people don't get rewards based on views. But it seems clear to me that content creators have much more financial potential here on Hive. The possibilities seem almost endless to me and I hope that one day we can call this scenario a reality.
This example further shows to me that it will remain ambiguous as to what constitutes "good content". People get jealous when they see successful content that was made apparently with only little time or effort. But value is highly subjective and perhaps also on Hive we should think of successful content more in terms of the reactions that it causes in content consumers. If people like something then perhaps we shouldn't judge the creator but be happy for their success.
On a side note, I will soon discuss an idea for Hive which I think holds a lot of potential for improving some Hive fundamentals. So stay tuned!
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Fair point of view ;)
People will come sooner or later ;)
Some of them later then others ;)
I think it would be wonderful to have that traffic on hive. But I think it's also exciting when i look for something in google and I find out that the three top results of my search are hive articles.
You are right when you say:
When you see someone earning "tons of money" in instagram, youtube or tik tok, there are thousands of creators who try it but are not earning the same.
Great article!
thanks for the feedback :))