Savannah Bekkers
UNIV 112
Bonnie Boaz
Tuesdays Thursdays 2:00 PM
Ethics and Argumentation
It has become known that social media stars on sites like YouTube and Instagram are raking in millions of views, and six-figure salaries at the same time. Personally, I spend hours in total on social media sites every day, filling my brain with images of popular bloggers and advertisements on each separate site that I browse. Nowadays it is not unusual to see daily “vlogs” (video blogs) made by YouTube stars who are not only clearly very wealthy, but also unemployed outside of their YouTube channels. I have often found this emerging job field infuriating, because I saw this as a lack of legitimate contribution to society being rewarded and deemed it unethical. However, with further thought, it is completely ethical for social media personalities, specifically YouTubers (one who creates YouTube videos, usually popular users) to capitalize on their fame because they spent time and money to create this content, and deserve to monetarily benefit themselves and companies from an easy opportunity.
To clarify the “advertisement” referred to in this paper, there are two types of advertisements on social media. The more prominent is the overt commercialspromoting companies and products that are generally required before videos that are more popular in views. Then there is a matter of endorsement within the video content, through either product placement in the content or verbalization of endorsement of said product or company by the YouTuber. Initially, commercials will be discussed, followed by a discussion of implied advertising or endorsement.
Apart from social media advertisement being beneficial to large companies, social media users can make millions off of their online popularity. YouTubers have reached incredible heights in the past years, to the point that there are multiple events across the world entitled “VidCon”, where popular YouTubers give panels and sign autographs to the thousands in attendance, as if they are famous actors. Famous YouTube stars like “PewDiePie” can make as much as $7,000,000 a year as a partner of YouTube. Many users on YouTube and Instagram effortlessly promote products within their content, earning them money upon each posting, and earning money based of a post’s popularity.
Firstly, from a utilitarian point of view, advertising on social media websites is extremely beneficial monetarily to all stakeholders. Companies get the chance to advertise to millions on every social media site, while social media is becoming an incredibly engrained in American society. Advertising usually has the goal of exposing the most amount of people possible to their advertisements, increasing the chances of purchase or support of their product or company respectively. YouTube in particular is an incredibly popular site, with an average of 4,950,000,000 users daily (2016), with advertisements before each video of a content producer with more than 30,000 subscribers (2014). This presents a large opportunity for companies to profit from, and they do daily. YouTube even generates 6% of Google’s yearly advertisement revenue (2016).This opportunity is currently large, and growing day by day as more and more people use social media religiously.Clearly companies are large stakeholders in this situation, and also clearly have the ability to benefit monetarily.
As mentioned before, social media is a very prevalent and emerging electronic platform. The first official social media site, “Six Degrees”, was invented in 1997, making social media along with the internet extremely new territory for business. It was only natural that the internet offered a whole new media for businesses to advertise and use to its full advantage. Similarly, the television was invented in 1927, only to have its first commercial in 1941. Clearly, television advertising is a crucial platform for advertisements, but this was not always so. The internet, specifically social media sites are destined to become crucial advertising platforms. It is essential to consider the alternative to maximizing advertising opportunities on the internet as well as television.Imagine if television commercials did not exist. How many companies and products do you think you would even be aware of? It is easy to say not many. Companies would be wasting the opportunity of the century to not advertise constantly on the internet. The alternative to aggressive advertisements is not helpful to companies in any way. The average American adult spends about 2 and a half hours browsing the internet and social media each day (2014), and it’s easy to say that number will increase as time progresses. Companies can use even just 2 minutes a day and make an impression on millions of Americans with a tiny cost to the company and an easily distributable format. This does incredible amounts of good for the company advertising, good for the YouTuber who gets paid for allowing advertisements, and functions as a momentary inconvenience for the consumer. The advertising possibilities are endless, and begging to be taken advantage of on every social media site imaginable, to maximize companies’ potentials through social media as an important emerging platform
Besides this effortless money-making opportunity, each individual has the right to earn a living off of something they put plenty of work and money into.More specifically, each individual reserves what are called “welfare rights” (2014), which is the right to secure one’s livelihood, through work and nourishment. This is clearly applicable to the work many content creators put into their videos.
To further provehow much hard work goes into a YouTube video, let’s consider everything that goes into making a single four-minute video.YouTube stars such as the previously mentioned “PewDiePie” spend hours equivalent to a full time job working on their content. Each YouTuber, famous or unknown spends hours filming, hours cutting clips, then hours editing each video into its final product. Say you, a prominent YouTuber with about one hundred thousand subscribers, want to start your weekly video,you will have most likely already bought a very high quality camera, such as the Canon EOS DSLR which is currently listed at $1,150.You’ve probably already bought expensive lights to counteract the changing sunlight throughout your recording day. You’ve already spent about two hours brainstorming, planning, and writing the script for this video. Now that you’ve prepared the content for hours, and spent about an hour setting everything up, you can start to record your content. Today you seem to be annoyingly tongue-tied, so every segment you try to record, of which are only about thirty seconds, you require about five takes. In the end you spent an hour on what will yield a single four-minute video. Now it’s time to edit that video. Akin to the general YouTuber style, every new thought or sentence is a new take in the video, closely cut together. Depending on the video and person, this process can take various amounts of time. For most YouTubers, editing takes hours, depending on their personal degrees of perfectionism. Now, after maybe three or four hours of editing and three hours of preparing, you’re ready to upload your new video. But the work definitely does not stop here, because now you need to tell the world about your new video. So you spend the rest of your day posting a link and message about your new video on your Snapchat, Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and Instagram in order to incite more views. Besides from that, it is well known that many famous YouTubersand internet celebrities receive thousands of comments and emails from viewers, and many YouTubers take the time to read every comment and reply to many of those emails. Attention to these different elements of one’s channel adds up to many hours each week. Anyone who spends hours a week on a single hobby or interest reserves the right to just payment of this work. If you spend over forty hours making something every single week, you would like at least the possibility of profiting off of the final product, in the interest of fairness to your effort. If YouTubers and other internet stars were unable to profit from their content, social media would be the most expensive “hobby” in existence. Generally, once a “hobby” requires most of the work day and one could monetarily benefit from it, it becomes a job. If you spent two months working on a huge, grandiose oil painting, you would undoubtedly expect the opportunity to sell it and benefit from all of the time and hard work you spent on this masterpiece. If you did not even have that opportunity, no one would continue painting. Society cannot expect popular internet personalities to continue making subjectively good content without some sort of incentive. Considering YouTubers spend several hours a day creating and editing videos to publish and have the opportunity to profit from advertising, creating YouTube content should be considered a legitimate job, and legitimate jobs carry payment in some form or another.It is clear to see that being social media can easily pay off in the long run, for both the content creator and the companies sponsoring the creators.This issue further introduces the Justice and Fairness side of ethics. This side evokes an idea that one gets what one deserves, such as the case in which “Jack and Jill do the same work, and there are no relevant differences between them or the work they are doing, then in justice they should be paid the same wages” (2014). In the case of YouTubers, if a YouTuber creates content that has been deemed worthy by many people to watch, then that YouTuber reserves the right to be compensated for such work.
The biggest issue I’ve personally had with advertising on social media, specifically Instagram and YouTube, is that disguised endorsement by many popular personalities seems to violate an unspoken trust. Social media has been much more personal and honest than other types of media, such as television commercials. American society is more than used to the dishonest and cold content and advertisements on television for decades. Social media has been seen as a platform for each individual to voice their personal opinions, and before YouTube and other social media sites became extremely popular, content was mostly untainted by big businesses. Because of this assumed honesty and the feeling of intimacy that is created when a YouTuber shares their personal lives on the internet for thousands to see, many viewers, such as myself, feel the creator-viewer relationship is violated through sponsored endorsements and product placements. Many viewers feel as though they have a right to know exactly what goes on behind the scenes, but as evident in every television show and celebrity, no one truly knows this.At first glance this argument seems to be a valid opposition to relentless advertising on social media, yet when this relationship idea is further examined, does not hold up. Social media is inherently dishonest. No internet user has a negative right to anything on the internet in the case of social media sites. The American public discovers day after day that there is no requirement of honesty on any site, let alone a site like YouTube. There is no contract between the YouTuber and the viewer, because the viewer is watching content on a completely volition basis. Just as easily as a viewer can click on a YouTube video to watch, that user can click to exit said video. The YouTuber owes the viewer nothing, just as the viewer owes the YouTuber nothing.If a beauty YouTuber chooses to accept compensation for including a certain company’s products in their video, they can absolutely do so because in the end that video is content that said beauty YouTuber created themselves. YouTubers have complete control over what they wish to publish, and if they choose to endorse a product or company on their channel, they have the right to do so. It has never been stipulated that any internet user or television viewer has the right to advertisement free viewing, therefore there is no actual right to protect in this situation.
This argument evokes more moral reasoning than ethical reasoning. Business ethics are generally utilitarian, making this argument unimportant considering the businesses involved are taking advantage of this opportunity, or utilizing money-making opportunities. However, in a deeper sense, this dilemma is again seeded in an incorrect assumption made by internet users. Since the internet is perceived as more of a free usage, with subscriptions and memberships as a choice, it is perceived differently than television which is clearly paid for, when there is no true difference. Internet and television are essentially the same media in different formats. In that same vein, internet and television both have overt advertising through commercials, and inferred advertising through endorsement. Since the internet is not television, and has not always been embraced by big businesses, many people feel as though their time is spent on a fundamentally different platform that is somehow more honest and less commercialized than television. This idea is astronomically incorrect, considering it is widely known that Facebook itself is worth more than one hundred billion dollars (2016). Websites are not free, they make money through advertisements, and the misconception that they are free is what leads to this feeling of betrayal as previously mentioned. In reality, there is no betrayal whatsoever, just naivety and misunderstanding that everything can be turned into a money-making business.
A question of whether something is or is not ethical can be seen in many different ways, but often an overwhelming amount of reasoning trumps a few strong points. This can easily be seen in this situation. There is validity to the argument of the unethicality of social media advertisements, but their potential undoubtedly outweighs this emotionally driven perspective. YouTubers across the world are thankful for the possibility of revenue from their beloved hobby, and YouTuber viewers can easily deal with a short commercial before their videos. Advertisements before and inside of YouTube videos are ethical because they benefit many for a small cost, and every human has the right to benefit from their hard work.
References
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Brain, S. (2016, September 4). STATS | YouTube company statistics. Retrieved December 1, 2016, from Digital Technology,
Richter, F. (2015, March 13). Infographic: Americans use electronic media 11+ hours A day. Retrieved December 1, 2016, from