by johnnyanmac | 2025-12-11 23:31:59+00:00
>The content is not freely available. You pay for it with ads or premium subscriptions.

Okay, free with ads is "free" to consumers. That will get swamped by tiktok. Subscription is premium. People won't pay for slop. Those are both covered.

>There is a massive amount of money being passed around behind the scenes.

Yes. But who's making a profit? You can only shuffle money for so long, and we're hitting the breaking point of that. Ads won't invest into platforms they suspect are filled with bots and don't give ROI. Companies won't invest once saying "AI" isn't a get rich quick scheme. Customers won't invest once they run out of money.

It works, until it doesn't. Then it's suddenly freefall and people will act like they didn't hear creaking for 5- 10 years.

>When IP holders cut off Google's ability to host IP content, 50+% of YouTube immediately dies overnight.

YouTube isn't really known for "IP content". That debate ended in 2010 with Viacom. They in fact rampantly remove traces of IP content.

Meanwhile, they have a monopoly on video hosting and control payouts in an opaque way to millions of non-IP creators. unless you think it's the end of premium media as we know it, Disney is still going to host trailers on YouTube and Vevo will host music videos. There's no reason to go anywhere. Disney+ and YouTube can exist simultaneously.

>To be clear, this was made by some of the top humans in their field. And despite massive critical panning, it did print money for Disney (perhaps at the cost of long term engagement/interest).

Yeah, in complete agreement. Short term monies, long term damage. Media has a "lingering effect" where results on the prequel will pass into the sequel and vice versa. So you can still have a profitable but panned release simply because previous movie was that well received.

>It's the difficulty, cost, time, talent element. People consume more human content because more human content is created. Orders of magnitude more. It's easy.

Do you think that if we had the same amount of animation as we did live action content that they'd be consumed equally? I'm a huge animation fan and very skeptical.

Consider this phenomenon

https://erdavis.com/2021/06/14/do-women-who-pose-with-their-...

Even in art spaces, people will engage more with the presence of a human face. Females more, but even males get a noticeable boost You can chalk it up to lust or familiarity or anything else, but there seems there's some deeper issue at work than simply "there's more live action slop for now".

If we do get more animation slop, I think it will veer a lot more towards hyperrealism instead, for similar reasons. I always see it as uncanny, but it doesn't seem to hinder as much on others. It'll just be trying to mimic live action at the end of the day.

>Kids on twitch are watching each other become anime girls and furries with VTuber tech. They're willingly becoming those things and building fantasy worlds bigger than their public face identities. We just haven't had the technology to enable it at a wide scale yet.

Sure. Animation is more engaging with kids. Kids aren't profitable, though. Their parents are. Unless its with ads, but advertising targeting kids has so much red tape.

I dont see a profitable model out of a media empire focusing on kids. Even Nintendo gets a lot of its money off of merchandising despite selling premium games with rare sales.