Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Who pays for content
YouTube has paid creators from the beginning, and that is a much bigger drag on the business than people appreciate, because it has marginal costs for its content. Unlike Netflix, it doesn't pay upfront. It pays after the fact, so revenue sharing is a better model than Netflix's. Facebook and Meta pay nothing, and Instagram is an unbelievable product that generates all its money from content that costs $0.
AI changes the math
That changes what AI-generated content means. For YouTube, it could be a positive, because the inference cost of generated content could be less than what it shares with creators. For Meta, AI-generated content that Meta itself produces has a worse margin profile than today, because what it has today is free.
Time as currency
Time is ultimately Meta's currency, and AI takes up more and more of it. OpenAI tried Sora, which didn't really take off. Social networks are pretty hard to build, and they cost a lot of money.
How does YouTube's revenue share work?
YouTube pays creators a share of the advertising revenue earned on their videos through its Partner Program. Under YouTube's published terms, creators receive 55 percent of ad revenue on long-form videos. Payment comes after the ads run, so the cost rises and falls with revenue.
Why are social networks so hard to build?
A social network is only valuable if the people you know are on it, so a new one starts with no value and no reason to join. Network effects then favor the services that already have everyone. Google shut down the consumer version of Google+ in April 2019, years after launching it in 2011.
Why does AI-made content change platform margins?
When creators supply the content, the platform pays little or nothing for it. When the platform generates content with AI, it pays for the computing each time. Generating a short video takes many times the computation of generating a paragraph of text.
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