Question for the gallery: Is the revenge worth taking?

[graycardinal]

ADVISORY: This is not the post you may have been looking for....

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I have, over the last few months, arguably spent more time on YouTube than one should (specifically, in a couple of specific corners of YT that are not at all relevant to the present inquiry).

However, YT being YT, it is all too easy to be lured into other corners of the videoverse in the process...

...and thus did your correspondent discover the vast yet singularly redundant swampland in which one finds AI-generated revenge-fic. Herewith a very brief description of this sea of mire, madness and muckraking for those not familiar with the concept:

Your narrator, you learn at once, has been horrifically ill-used by those around him. He (or she) may be:

• a hard-working child whose parents liked their other offspring best
• a gifted technical genius cast aside by an employer out to profit massively from their breakthrough
• a highly decorated but now-retired member of an elite or classified military unit
• a newcomer to or neighbor of an HOA ruled by a "Karen" who recognizes no authority beyond her own, who destroys all who won't submit to her will

What none of these villains realize is that their plans have been foreseen, their schemes laid bare, their crimes anticipated, their every move planned for. For just as they swoop in to claim their unjustly gained rewards, Our Hero smiles a thin, calm smile and confronts them with reality:

• the inheritance they anticipated belongs to the child they ignored
• the patents they thought they owned are in Our Hero's name
• Our Hero has bought the company from the villains under their very noses
• Our Hero's former co-workers in black ops have assembled evidence to have the villains put away (or, occasionally, neutralized the villain's Evil Empire)
• the newcomer to the neighborhood is a Senator/Mayor/Police Chief/etc. (who owns the land "Karen" has been trying to co-opt, and/or is the parent of the child they've bullied or injured)

Which is to say that the formula for these things is extremely, well, formulaic. And yet the genre garners tens of thousands of views, and is thereby (at least in theory) tremendously profitable for its creators, who have built the vids almost entirely with AI narration, a handful of still images, and a means of putting narrative text on top of the images they've used.

And there is, evidently, a market for these things, such that people are evidently making considerable money off of revenge channels nowadays.

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Which makes one wonder...

How hard would it be for a veteran fic-writer to whip out a dozen or so revenge yarns with just a little more creativity than the formulas have so far demonstrated? To download the software the current creators are using? To set up a YouTube channel of this sort of thing that would, perhaps, be just a bit more, well, creative than that now dominating the current swamp? Could one make enough money at such a game to retire, if not to the French Riviera, at least to a corner of Darkest Suburbia with better bus and train service than he has now?

Inquiring minds want to know what your humble narrator is missing in this equation....

Comments

[sanguinity]

Some possible missing factors in your equation...

The AI-users can deluge the market with a zillion such stories at very little cost to themselves, so it doesn't matter much if they don't make much ad revenue off of any given one. Whereas yours will require at least some of your time and effort, and thus you have a break-even-per-story point you have to meet to make it worth your while.

Further, people have to be able to find your videos, which could be like finding a needle in a haystack of AI slop. Further again, I believe the YouTube algorithm rewards frequent updates, which is easier for the AI-users to meet than you.

Further, if I understand correctly, the renumeration system doesn't give the channel owner a cut of ad revenue until a certain number has been met -- number of views? Number of videos? (There's a historically-inspired costumer I follow who does great but infrequent videos, and last I heard, he hadn't met the monetization threshhold point yet.)

These are my vague notions of how all this works; each point above should be researched before you give it too much weight. And they can possibly be overcome, with a sound strategic plan! But I will be interested to hear what you decide to do, and how it goes.

btw, how is it going with bus and train service in Darkest Suburbia? We're getting hit with reduced frequency and eliminated routes here, and we're technically within the urban core...

[mundungus42]

As one who hangs out on r/AmITheAsshole and r/BestOfRedditorUpdates at ye olde Reddit, I frequently see posts of this sort for a short bit before the modearators delete them for being fake. Before this sort of thing became ubiquitous on YouTube, they were frequently aggregated by content scraping accounts chasing virality (thanks, Emerson Spartz, formerly of MuggleNet) and shared on Facebook.

I think Sanguinity is correct that you'd have to generate a LOT of content in order to get subscribers and likes, and also have it miraculously rise above the sea of AI-generated crap, which is hard to do with it's being to users by AI-powered algorithms, before there would be any chance at monetization. It seems like an awful lot of work for a cynical (though not unjustifiably so) thought experiment.

Unless it's something you think creativing a video like this could become a labor of love that you'd want to do at least once a week? In which case, sally forth with my good wishes! And if some week you need a guest writer to create one for you in rhyming verse or iambic pentameter, I got u. :D