Big-creator bias and how Just About can soften it
Who's getting left behind in the battle for Mr Beast?
For a platform to have the best content, it must have the best content creators.
Once upon a time, most platforms only did one thing. YouTube was the only name in town for uploaded video, and Twitch for livestreaming. Then YouTube decided it could offer streaming as well, and suddenly creators had a choice.
That process has only accelerated - see YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels in response to TikTok - which means competition is hotting up to attract the biggest creators. But does this risk decay through neglect at the grassroots level?
Hunting the big (Mr) beasts
In the latest example of a platform courting big names who broke through elsewhere, Elon Musk has been reaching out to Mr Beast, by many metrics the world’s most popular YouTuber, asking him to try X(itter)’s new monetary rewards.
For a while Mr Beast refused, saying it wouldn’t be worth his effort, but last week, he announced he would publish an old YouTube video on X - his first direct upload to the platform - just to see how much it would make.
The results are in: a little over $260,000, which equates to about $1.68 per 1,000 impressions as a helpful BBC article calculated. “But it’s a bit of a façade,” he says.
Because of the attention and extra advertising his experiment drew, Mr Beast reckons his revenue per view got an atypical boost (there’s even speculation that he got a hand from X itself behind the scenes). It’s the latest of endless examples of the big-creator bias we see on most platforms.
Notoriously, Twitch used to give you a better revenue split the bigger you were, and even after the latest patch on the epic tapestry that is its Ts and Cs, that’s still true for the first $100k you earn. The very biggest are also the first to be courted with jaw-droppingly lucrative deals whenever a rival, like Kick or Mixer (short-lived as it was), emerges. Valve’s reaction to the challenge of the Epic Game Store was to offer a better split, but only for the highest-selling games.
It’s understandable. The biggest creators are by definition those that have proven their value in attracting viewers. But it feels a bit topsy-turvy for platforms to make things easier or more lucrative for creators that have already blown up.
Quality first
We see a way to do things differently. On other platforms, creators publish whatever they want onto the platform at large, and get surfaced or buried according to an algorithm and the signals that users send to it.
On Just About, our bounties have a brief, and submitted content is manually judged against it in a specific thread by the community as a whole and by its content team (currently composed of Just About staff, but ultimately recruited from the community).
This shifts the key metric from how big a creator already is or how well they can game an algorithm to how well the content fulfils its purpose.
All the best submissions then get collated into comprehensive discoverable resources for the whole community to use and enjoy. When we’re a little further down our own growth journey, the hope is our members will discover new, grassroots creators by noticing the names that win bounties or crop up most often in curated content.
So if you’re a creator who knows your topic inside out, but you’re struggling to break through against more established channels, we hope Just About is the place for you to build a reputation for the quality of your content.
At the very least, it’s another place to upload your work with zero downside, where the rules work slightly differently from everywhere else. Check out our Content Creators community in particular to connect with others on the same journey, and browse its curated content for helpful advice on your own!