Fast and Furious Filmmaking YOUTUBE’S PROSPECTS FOR BUDDING AND VETERAN SCREEN CONTENT PRODUCERS

As ‘traffic cops at the intersection of Art and Commerce’, producers play a crucial role ‘in shaping the creative and commercial dimensions’ of Australia’s screen industries; so say media scholars Allan Cameron, Deb Verhoeven and David Court.¹ Traditional producers, however, have been impacted by ramifying digital disruption – what academics Michael Curtin and Kevin Sanson have called a ‘torrent of technological innovation’ driving the rise of new media via satellite, cable, internet and mobile devices.² Viewerships are fragmenting, with increasingly active audiences, especially from younger age groups, moving away from traditional broadcast programming and towards public and commercial broadcasters’ catch-up services, including ABC iview and SBS on Demand; subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) outlets, such as Stan and Netflix; and Google’s YouTube.³ Two centres of gravity have thus formed for screen content in Australia: longform storytelling’s popularity remains, but it is now prevalent on catch-up and SVOD services as well as traditional TV, while short-form works – whose average length is just four minutes⁴ – tend to predominate on advertiser-supported video-on-demand (VOD). It is therefore timely to better understand how Australian creators are faring on these new platforms: is the work they do sustainable, are their careers progressing and are their artistic talents developing?

With advertisers chasing online eyeballs, a cultural divide has opened up. On one side are traditional TV creators, who have spent years developing their craft. On the other are what theorists Stuart Cunningham and Adam Swift have defined as a proto-industry of younger ‘born-online’ creators who are disrupting mainstream markets by professionalising and monetising the entertainment they make for the web – what researchers Jason Potts and colleagues have described as ‘social network markets’. YouTube alone accounts for 1 billion hours of human attention daily, globally. Moreover, with 85 per cent of every dollar spent on online advertising going to either Google or Facebook, dominant technology companies have been critiqued for their ‘massive impact on artistic revenue’ due to copyright laws (although rights holders can opt to take down infringing content or receive monetary compensation for it under YouTube’s Content ID scheme ). The realities facing creators seeking to distinguish themselves in the contemporary landscape were put on display when speakers at the Australian Communications and Media Authority’s ‘Australian Content Conversation’ conference pointed to a YouTube tutorial made by a young woman instructing viewers how to do a high ponytail, which had been viewed over 2 million times. The value of content to Australian audiences, according to these speakers, should be based on much more than ‘clicks’ and ‘likes’; however, as researcher Richard Lanham has observed of the internet’s ‘attention economy’, ‘competition is fierce’ when ‘the only