John Green looks back on early YouTube in new video

When real-life brothers Hank and John Green began making YouTube videos on the vlogbrothers channel on January 1, 2007, the platform was a very different place than it is now. Not just in size, but especially in independent creators' ability to make money on YouTube itself.

In John's latest video (posted earlier today), he responds to Hank's previous video about Google stealing creators' content without permission by looking back at what it used to be like to be a YouTube creator. He then paints a picture of how things have changed, and how he forsees things continuing to change in the years to come.

He admits in the video that throughout the first year of making YouTube videos on the vlogbrothers channel, he and Hank likely lost money due to the equipment they needed to buy in order to create videos back-and-forth every day. They had originally planned to stop in December 2007, and if they had, they wouldn't have made any money at all.

And this was the case for many of the platform's "founding" creators back then. John mentions one extremely popular creator who had to ask her viewers for money so she could buy a computer for video editing -- support she never even ended up receiving.

Now, of course, YouTube has dedicated a fairly large percentage of its revenue to paying creators for their content. Many content creators are able to make a living because of YouTube. But knowing what Google is doing with the content many creators like Hank and John Green are making -- largely, making money off content that creators aren't getting a cut of -- is quite unsettling.

There is often a misconception about content creators and influencers not having "real" jobs. But content creation can be expensive, time-consuming, and extremely draining. Creators deserve to be paid for the work they do, and fairly, every time.