Social Media
Why Are You Working for Free?
Through social media, personality quizzes, product reviews, and opinion polls, corporations are profiting off your labor
How many times have you gotten an email asking you to rate your experience with a customer service rep? How often do vendors ask you to evaluate a product or service? After you visit a hotel, doesn’t management invariably follow up with a short survey about your stay?
These activities are marketing research, and it’s a job. Whenever you participate in this research, you become an unpaid asset to the company that made the request.
In the 1920s, a psychologist named Daniel Starch came up with some methods to measure advertising effectiveness. Starch hired people to go door-to-door and ask folks if they remembered seeing a particular newspaper advertisement and, if they had, what their reaction to it was. This process allowed advertisers to find out what kinds of ads were most effective.
Starch’s method would be impractical today, but it did create jobs. Jobs that companies can now get you to do for nothing. Even better, in the comfort of your LazyBoy recliner, you’ll be more likely to answer longer surveys with more questions that can take up five or ten minutes of your time, sometimes longer. Isn’t technology fantastic?
And restaurant reviews? You can get paid for that, so why are you composing them for free? Here’s one I wrote where I not only made money, I got a free meal for myself and a friend in the bargain.
The entertainment industry employs millions of people across the globe: actors, writers, directors, technicians, and many others, and most (thanks to the fact that the movie and TV industries are still widely unionized) make a decent living. The lucky ones get fabulously wealthy. (The lucky but stupid ones blow it all and are broke in ten years.)
But with the rise of social media, the founders of YouTube, Instagram, and other platforms found that people would be willing to do many of these jobs for free.
These platforms can sidestep the unions because the information and entertainment they provide is courtesy of people who are not their employees. Some content creators do make money through advertisements or by selling “how-to” courses. Sadly, the vast majority do not.
Do you know who is becoming fabulously wealthy? The shareholders in Alphabet, Facebook, and other social media companies whose only product is their users. That would be us, and they don’t pay us a dime.
People interested in the information they collect that we so willingly provide pay them plenty, though. Pretty slick business model, huh?
Here are the top three wealthiest social media entrepreneurs, according to Wealth-X (no surprises here):
- Mark Zuckerberg (left), co-founder and CEO, Facebook, U.S. Net worth: $15.8 billion
- Larry Page, co-founder, and CEO, Google, U.S. Net worth: $15.7 billion
- Sergey Brin, co-founder, and director of special projects, Google, U.S. Net worth: $15.4 billion
Keep in mind that without the unpaid labor of billions of users, they’d have nothing. Users are their product. Your thoughts, ideas, and photos of your cockatiel eating a donut are how they got so rich.
Platforms like YouTube allow advertisers to attach themselves to content creators who have a high number of followers. Those content creators, the most popular of which are called influencers, can do okay. A few even hit the jackpot, but that’s the minority.
CNBC.com reported the top YouTube content creators in 2019. Here the top three:
- Ryan Kaji — $26 million
- Dude Perfect — $20 million
- Anastasia Radzinskaya — $18 million
Way to go, Ryan Kaji! Those numbers are impressive but, while Ryan fritters his childhood away as his family’s principal breadwinner, Page and Brin are raking in a combined amount over $31 billion. Considering that a billion is equal to $1,000 million, Ryan’s take-home pay is a pittance compared to what he earned for YouTube’s parent company.
According to Omnicore, there are over 31 million YouTube channels. At the moment, fewer than 20,000 YouTubers have over a million subscribers. That’s just under 7%. If you’re in that group, kudos to you. If you’re not, you might want to ask yourself if this is the best use of your time.
After the novelty of appearing on YouTube wears off, unless you’re making good money from ads and from selling your “How to Wash Dishes Without a Machine” tutorial, you may end up being appalled at the time you spend content creating when you could be earning a living.
According to Yahoo Finance, a public relations specialist earns $60,000 a year or more. Most also get time off, paid vacation and sick leave, and health insurance. That means their salary plus benefits give them a significant financial advantage over a YouTuber with a million subscribers.
Many of the skills required in producing a YouTube channel are transferable to marketing and public relations. You might want to think about that. Of course, you would no longer be in charge of deciding what kind of content to create.
There are lots of good reasons for using social media that don’t involve a tangible monetary reward: keeping in touch with friends, expressing your creativity, sharing what you know with the world, building an audience to sell a product or service.
I’m not saying there isn’t value in using social media. Most of the platforms are free, sort of. You may not be spending money to use Facebook, Instagram, or YouTube, but you are spending time. You have a finite amount of that.
Use your time wisely. Make sure the cost to you is worth what you get in return. I guarantee it’s not going to be a fat check with Mark Zuckerberg’s name on it.
©2020, Denise Shelton. All rights reserved.
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