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Who Owns Nerdfighteria?

2021-08-17 · letter vlog · John · 3:59 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Internet & YouTube (also: Nerdfighteria) · mode: Personal essay · tags: community lore

Prompted by Jennifer Burek Pierce's book Narratives, Nerdfighters, and New Media, John asks who owns the value made in an online community like Nerdfighteria (creators, YouTube, viewers who expand the work), notes that laws, norms and platform terms all govern it, and argues that money is far from the most important thing Nerdfighteria makes.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — Burek Pierce's book on Nerdfighteria; the community as an imagined place with real activity; Marianne Moore's imaginary gardens with real toads

  • ★★ John recently read Jennifer Burek Pierce's Narratives, Nerdfighters, and New Media, an academic book about online community and Nerdfighteria; he can't be objective about it, but loved it. — 00:00:00 · Nerdfighteria
  • ★★ John notes the book discusses how Nerdfighteria is often constructed as a place, with maps of Nerdfighteria and with its own rules and norms. — 00:00:00 · Nerdfighteria
  • ★★ In this imagined place there is lots of real activity, John says: social connections form, art gets made, memes are memed. — 00:00:29 · Nerdfighteria

  • ★★ The book reminded John of Marianne Moore's poem saying great poetry creates imaginary gardens with real toads in them: the place is imagined, but its people and work are very real. — 00:00:29

    “imaginary gardens with real toads in them”

00:00:58 — Who owns and captures the value: creators, YouTube, viewers, Pizza John; laws, norms and terms of service; Google's 45%; where the brothers' money goes and where the line is

  • ★★★ A chapter of the book on connections, commerce and philanthropy asks who owns these real toads, what to do about money, and how and by whom the value created gets captured. — 00:00:58
  • ★★★ The easy answer is that creators own it, so Vlogbrothers money is the brothers'; but that quickly gets complicated, since YouTube owns the channel and is part of the value equation. — 00:00:58 · Vlogbrothers, YouTube
  • ★★★ Viewers also make the videos more valuable by watching them, and their comments and art are not just responses to the videos but expansions of them. — 00:01:27 · Nerdfighteria
  • ★★ John's example is Pizza John: does he own it because it is his face from a screenshot of his video, or Valerie because they made the design? And who owns it when Alice makes one? — 00:01:27 · Pizza John, Alice Green
  • ★★★ John thinks current laws are a wholly insufficient guide to who owns such community creations. — 00:01:27

  • ★★ To be fair, John says, it is hard to make laws about who owns what when so much creative production is a remix of a reblog of a retweet. — 00:01:56

    “a remix of a reblog of a retweet”

  • ★★ Rather than by laws alone, Nerdfighteria's value is governed partly by norms (it is uncool to repost without credit) and partly by private corporations' terms of service, which tend to be a bit rigged. — 00:01:56 · Nerdfighteria

  • ★★★ Google receives just over 45% of all revenue generated by Nerdfighteria on the YouTube platform. — 00:01:56 · Google, Nerdfighteria, YouTube
  • ★★ That 45% share seems a little bit high to John. — 00:02:26 · Google
  • ★★ The other 55-ish percent of that revenue goes to Hank and John. — 00:02:26 · Hank Green, YouTube
  • ★★★ John says the brothers' share also seems high, because the money belongs to Nerdfighteria, not to them; that is why half goes to grants for educational creators and half to charity. — 00:02:26 · Nerdfighteria, YouTube
  • ★★ Jennifer Burek Pierce (quoted): Burek Pierce writes that Nerdfighteria's answer to the conundrum is, in part, to recognise that money accrues from creative work and to make a gift of it to others. — 00:02:26 · Nerdfighteria
  • ★★★ John stresses the 'in part': the brothers can afford not to make money from Vlogbrothers and DFTBA only because they earn elsewhere, John from books and Hank from his many jobs. — 00:02:55 · Vlogbrothers, DFTBA Records, Hank Green
  • ★★★ That other work is bound up in Nerdfighteria: John talked about his books on Vlogbrothers, they reached a wider audience, and he kept much of the royalties; he asks where the line is and should be. — 00:02:55 · Nerdfighteria, Vlogbrothers

00:03:24 — Ask for viewers' thoughts; money is not the most important thing Nerdfighteria makes

  • ★★ John says these are not rhetorical questions and he would love viewers' thoughts on them. — 00:03:24
  • ★★ The book helped John understand why he struggles with these questions, and how viewers over the years have pushed the brothers to consider value and ownership more carefully. — 00:03:24
  • ★★ Nerdfighteria has generated tens of millions of dollars for efforts aimed at social good. — 00:03:24 · Nerdfighteria
  • ★★★ Money is nowhere near the most important thing Nerdfighteria makes, John says: it makes joy, connection and chances to understand the universe and his place in it, which he would not price. — 00:03:24 · Nerdfighteria

In the description and comments

  • ★★ The description adds that money is not the only currency online: attention is a valuable resource exchanged online, and by paying attention to Nerdfighteria viewers essentially make it exist. — video description · attention economy, Nerdfighteria
  • ★★ In a comment John says YouTube's profit margins are extremely high mostly because it has no meaningful competition, which lets it set its price at 45% of all revenue. — creator comment · YouTube
  • ★★ In a comment John says the brothers' model rests on extreme privilege: almost nobody who makes videos as part of their job can afford to pass up ad revenue. — creator comment

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: intellectual property · Narratives, Nerdfighters, and New Media

Also: People: Alice Green · Marianne Moore

Projects: DFTBA Records

Works: Poetry (poem by Marianne Moore)

Organizations: Google · YouTube

Terms: Pizza John

Concepts: online community · royalty payment · social norm

Only in the description or credits: attention economy · Jennifer Burek Pierce · social privilege · Valerie2776

Also centred on intellectual property: On the Ownership of Ideas · The Bizarre State of Copyright

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