The last time I visited YouTube, they gave me a name tag that read, Jonathan Mann, content creator. It made me really sad. Stop me if you've heard this one before, but Google is not in the search business. YouTube is not a video company and Facebook is not a social network. They're advertising companies and we're all working for them. Every day, I write a song and post it to the internet. To YouTube, it's not a song at all. It's not a video, it's content. It's quantifiable, it's interchangeable. An algorithm looks at how many users engaged with this particular piece of content and sells ads against it accordingly. The algorithm can't hear the song, it can't tell how the people that heard the song felt while they were listening to it, it doesn't know or care why I wrote the song, because it's just content. Now, I know some folks at work at YouTube and they're all great people, but the message from inside YouTube is pretty clear. We content creators should be optimizing our content for maximum advertising revenue. There's this story that my friend Ronan likes to tell about his videos. Some of his videos are seen by millions of people, which is always gratifying. But there's this one video that only got like 30 views, just 30. And of those 30 people, only seven made it to the end of the video. But out of those seven people, one became a lover, one became his best friend, and one became a collaborator and coworker with whom he worked on tons of really amazing projects. And I've had similar experiences with posting my videos online. These kinds of interactions are impossible for algorithms to track, but they are orders of magnitude more powerful when compared against things like how many views a video got or what kind of ad revenue he brought in. Okay, here's another word I hate. Consumer. I am the content creator creating content for you to consume. Be sure you're optimizing for the consumer when you're creating your content. They are, after all, who you are creating your content for. I hear people talking in this way, and I can't help but imagine the people in the movie Wally. Or this image I have in my head of the internet as a huge snarling beast with a gaping maw and an unseasing demand to be fed more content. But listen, every single thing you see online was made by someone. Someone took every photograph, made every gif and every meme. Someone wrote every tweet, post, and song. Someone designed every website. Someone drew every comic, illustration, and logo. Every single thing you see or hear online was made by someone. When we label what people are making as content, what we're really calling it is to quote Tim Bray, shit, we don't actually care about, but we'll attract eyeballs and make people click on ads. Words have tremendous power. They shape the way we see the world and are placed in it. And so there appears to be an inherent ephemeral quality to the things we make and share on the internet. And maybe that's true to some extent. But I believe it's more just a function of how we as a culture relate to it. The word content implies that it's disposable. We complain that people don't properly attribute on Tumblr or BuzzFeeder anywhere. We bimmone the aggregators that suck up other people's content and pass it off as their own. There's an epidemic of free booting on Facebook where super popular pages upload other people's videos, collecting millions and millions of views, and a whole lot of advertising revenue in the process. We're upset about the collapse of the music and publishing industries, and we're confused about why people don't want to pay for content. But who in the fuck would want to pay for content? Content means free. It means ubiquitous. It means meaningless. You are not a content creator. You're an illustrator. You're a designer, a director, a musician. You're a fucking artist. Jesus Christ. This comic by the Perry Bible Fellowship. This vine by Simply Silvio. This video by Pomplemus. This illustration by Mark Johns. These games by Anna Anthropi. This story by Lee Alexander. This poem by Samantha Reynolds. And this gift by Ronan V. This is the work of artists doing amazing things. And the day we stop calling it content. Is the day will be one step closer to fixing a lot of the problems that I just mentioned. What if the technology companies that make it so easy for folks like this to find and connect with an audience actually cared about the work they're producing beyond its value to advertisers? What if in addition to worshiping at the altar of big data? And it's amazing power to deliver more engagements and page views or whatever. We develop tools that put the needs of the so-called content creators at the forefront. YouTube and Facebook and Tumblr can and do pay lip service to this idea because it's in their best interest to appear as friendly as possible to artists of all stripes. Without us they have no value at all. But the reality is in the language that these companies use and it's in the priorities that they set. Carrying about this stuff is simply not in their DNA. They are advertising companies and at their core that it's all that they're ultimately gonna ever know how to do. We're not content creators. And you need to stop using that word. Another vlog. Over the last like a month and a half I've been working on these vlog videos. I did learn about Game Jew and what about this guy Jack Dolgan who made an excuse today instead of making a song a day. If you like these vlog videos and you like my song a day, if you like me, if you enjoy anything about what I do, consider donating to my Patreon. And for just as little as like 25 cents a week, it can make a huge difference to me and my family. Speaking of Patreon and I would say also Kickstarter, I think these are examples of companies that get it right. It's kind of ironic because Jack Conti who founded Patreon is a sort of a polychetic proponent of content creator as a way to describe bull who are making things on the internet. I apologize in advance. I've learned there are some exo exo no-nose and I will be saying some of those words. I will be saying the C word. In all seriousness, I don't feel like content creator is a derogatory term. I know it's putting people in a bucket but it describes at least sufficiently a new generation. The emergence of this creative class of small business people who don't have to be Lady Gaga to make a living. And so that's what I think of when I think of content creator. So clearly I vehemently disagree with him on that front. But because Jack is a musician and an artist, everything that he's done and that his team has done with Patreon has been thought through from that perspective. And it makes all the difference in the world. Anyway, if you've got like a dollar a month to spare, why not spend it on me?