It started a few weeks back when I started to see people doing zoom meetings more than usual. Then the OG videobloggers started to re-appear again and form groups on facebook, then zoom updated their software finally to deal with the explosive in usage.
Now, we are at the nostalgia stages.
Today marks 15 years since the very first video was posted on YouTube. It’s crazy to think that one of the OG services like YouTube is that old but there ya go, it’s one of the grand daddies and boy is it playing on it’s heritage right now — maybe because it’s Facebook gaming taking on twitch and they wanna flex a little, maybe because everyone is in self reflection mode, who knows but it’s nuts to consider that — I think I’ve been a user since 2006.
If there is one thing I’ve learned about the internet, even centralised platforms is that content and messages travel, content has a half life, like uranium, it stays around for what seems like hundreds of years stuck in the psyche like some kind of nagging tiktok.
It’s the one thing that keep you tubers making (aside from the adsense pay cheque of course) it’s that ability to have a voice, to make a video and post it on the platform, maybe it will resonate and you’ll find your people — or maybe today, nobody will see it and someone will share it on a reddit ten years later and it will blow up.
Isolation is certainly bringing about a lot of legacy and nostalgia around the web I’m seeing right now — I think the videobloggers came out again because they saw 200 million people using zoom and wanted to make sure everyone knew that they were first to the table, can’t have the young whippersnappers not knowing about their OG legacy now can we! kinda fun to watch.
What interests me most about the fusion of video into the web however is the way that content inspires and re-ignites other content. Take tiktok for instance, it’s this algorithm that gives anyone 15ms of fame many times a day over and over, it’s this gorging machine of fast, eyeball reacting streaming video juice that keeps on giving.
But if you end up being the viral maker, your audio track you used could be remixed by thousands of people and all of a sudden you end up with a trending video because they LOVED the track — that track then blows up and all of a sudden an artist from twenty years ago is blowing up on Spotify.
If you did your homework in the early days and you have a good manager chances are you’ve already been getting ‘play’ cheques from Spotify anyway for having your content delegated out to that platform.
Ok, so plays are pretty low but WOW, what’s this, all of a sudden I’m getting to the top of the charts again and now people are playing your track, where did they come from, how did they hear about you, all of a sudden you have a community of people not connected together using your music resource to have fun around — your plays go up on spotify and your monthly cheque get’s bigger than before! :)
I think a lot of the large ‘content creators’ these days understand the evergreen/replay value of content and what might not blow up today will probably at some point create value because of the legacy, mentioning it first, finding the source of the track etc. .
Digital legacy is an interesting one to me and I love the fact that you can create art in a time and space on the internet and that has a value that content has a journey of it’s own, it can be extracted and remixed to a brand newer younger generation and audience at the flick of a switch.
Data is the new oil, but unlike oil, it doesn’t have a negative figure, it’s always got the potential of rising your own personal digital stock — if you make any kind of digital assets you are effectively trading on the stock market of time.
Cheers!
__humble x
