So I want to talk about how I got lucky.
I never looked at contracts that I signed for a very long time.
I was very eager to start a job, any job, and so I signed tons of freelance and full-time
contracts I never read, thirsty for a byline on any media site or blog that would have
me.
Fighting these potential employers on anything, even big red flags in the contracts, was terrifying
because I thought if I called attention to the fact that they were hiring me, they would
take the offer away.
And that's pretty common for young people fresh on the workforce.
And in their first adult jobs were especially vulnerable to big companies that are preying
on cheap and replaceable labor.
But at any age, marginalized people are also desperate for work.
And after all, we can't all be the “diversity hire.”
So LGBTQ people and people of color are also nervous to ask for any changes to contracts
that HR people have assured them, and I'm sure you guys have heard this, standard!
Nothing to worry about!
Everyone signs the same contract!
I'm a queer woman, I work in entertainment, and that is a field, like many fields, dominated
by straight, cis white men and so when I got a job at a big video site, I didn't think
twice about rushing to sign away anything and everything with a writing gig with benefits.
So after eight months at BuzzFeed.
[Laughter] Wink.
I went back to being independent because independent is where my comedy partner Allison Raskin,
who's out here somewhere, that's where she and I started.
We had this little YouTube channel called "Just Between Us" and before we began that
big job, that was what we were doing.
And so when we left, it was amid concerns over our intellectual property partly.
We wanted to own the work that we were creating.
And that, in my opinion, is the only way to have a long-term career.
I'll explain.
In a viral article that I wrote last year for Fusion.net, it was called Get Rich or
Die Vlogging.
I didn't come up with that.
That was Nona WillisAronowitz, a genius.
But I talked about in that article a former colleague of mine named Brittany Ashley who
spent more than two years as one of the most visible actresses on BuzzFeed's collective
17- million subscriber YouTube channel.
Brittany, who created, wrote, and acted in a LGBTQ series called Lesbian Princess, which
I love, and another video creator, Jenny Lorenzo, who wrote, produced, and acted in the company’s
Latino channel Pero Like, had been abruptly fired because they worked on weekends as actresses
in another webseries.
And their contracts had prevented them from doing any work outside of the company, which
my contract had as well, and that's a big part of why I left.
So many of us are asked to sign away rights to the work that we do for our employers.
Sometimes these clauses are incredibly broad.
And they can last for a while after you leave.
Not owning all of your ideas can limit your career, especially in an era of job-hopping
and layoffs.
Unlike the old days, when employee loyalty could transfer into a lifelong unionized job.
Many creators in traditional Hollywood studios are protected by powerful unions, but the
talent plucked for webseries or online video are usually young, inexperienced, and like
I said, marginalized and they are tasked with navigating companies and contracts that are
looking to exploit that.
I will say, after I wrote this, Hank Green has the Internet Creators Guild, which is
sort of trying to be a union for online video.
But I think they're on a uphill climb.
So I understand why companies ask this of their employees.
For certain industries or workers, these policies might be an okay tradeoff in exchange for
regular paycheck, experience, and EXPOSURE! [laughter] I wrote that in all caps.
For struggling artists and writers, especially ones often excluded from mainstream media,
being offered access to an audience — and then, “audience” with sparkles around
it — may seem worth toiling away at a company for a starter salary.
But the people that are signing these contracts, and this is my big drum that I beat, should
know what they're up against.
If you have dreams of, say, having your own TV show or writing your own screenplay, handing
over ownership of your best ideas to a media company could really, really backfire.
So I will give some examples of my own moronic work.
So three years ago I was looking for paid work in New York City, and I gave away a lot
of my rights and ideas.
Like I said, I never looked at my contracts.
In 2013, I was a staff writer for a website called Thought Catalog, and they asked me
if they could publish a book of my essays.
I was stoked, right?
I did not receive any bonus or book deal or commission on sales of the book.
But, guys, I got to publish a book.
That's incredible!
Okay, three years later, I don’t work at Thought Catalog, and I'm more well-known.
My fans find the book now and they excitedly purchase it thinking they're supporting me,
but I will never see any of that money.
The more high profile that I become, the more the book sells for Thought Catalog.
When you're 22 -- I say that like I'm so old now, I'm 28.
Am I old?
This is, like, an internet audience.
[Laughter] I've aged out of my own demographic.
Okay.
I think about that every day.
[Laughter] When you're 22, you're so excited to be doing
adulthood right that you go full steam ahead, regardless of the company's policy.
Your friends are stoked that you have a dream job.
Your family's happy to see you stable, like, what could be better?
When I later got hired at BuzzFeed, it was a similar situation.
I was hired first as on-camera talent and then as a scripted series writer for a $55k
annual salary.
I thought I would stay a couple of months, find another industry gig, and peace out,
which is the unusual in Hollywood.
I had just come from writing a Nickelodeon sketch show.
You bounce around.
I ended up staying eight months because the noncompete clause caused me to turn down other
work or meetings that would lead to other work.
There was a constant push and pull about how much we could do outside of BuzzFeed.
It became a cycle.
You can't create outside the company, so you can’t ever leave the company, so you can’t
ever grow, so you have to stay, and then you're trapped.
I left BuzzFeed in 2015, and they still own a Facebook fan page with my face on it.
They can promote whatever they want there using both my name and my image for the rest
of their career.
I still show up on their Snapchat account sometimes.
They could conceivably cut together all the videos I made for them into a series, sell
that series for millions of dollars and not give me a penny or tell me about it at all.
It's 100% legal.
So I enjoy being independent.
But as Andy mentioned earlier because of my podcast, the financial side is less stable
to being independent.
So I've written about this too.
What is it like to be too visible to have a real job but too broke not to?
[laughter] So these are some examples I wrote down.
So -- and it's not just me.
One week I was stopped for photos six times while perusing comic books in downtown L.A.
And then the next week, I sat faceless in a room of 40 people vying for a courier job.
I’ve walked a red carpet with $80 in my bank account.
Popular YouTube musician Meghan Tonjes told me she performed on VidCon’s main stage
last year to screaming fans without knowing whether she’d be able to afford groceries
later that day.
Moderately-successful YouTubers like Connor Manning have also told me they were recognized
six times at their job selling memberships at the Baltimore Aquarium.
Or Rosianna Halse Rojas, who had people freak out at her Topshop register.
Or Rachel Whitehurst, who was forced to quit her job at Starbucks because fans memorized
her schedule.
Yeah.
So Allison and I make money now from ads that play before our videos, from freelancing writing
or acting gigs, from brand deals on YouTube or Instagram.
Mostly we do a lot of our YouTube stuff for free.
And the influx of income is and remains unpredictable.
My Instagram account has 425K followers, sometimes 426k, it's fluctuating right now going back
and forth.
I don't know what the people want.
[Laughter] Is it more of my face?
Is it less of my face?
I don't know.
Okay.
[Laughter] My Instagram account has 425K followers, I've
never made $425K dollars in my life collectively.
I don't even know what that would look like.
So, like Andy said, recently I launched a podcast called "Bad with Money," and the name
couldn’t be more appropriate.
I never had money, so I never thought about how you got money.
I just assumed you hopped around different jobs like a writing mercenary or a gun for
hire.
I never wrote up a budget, I never kept track of where my money was coming from, but it
always came from somewhere, and I thought one day there would be a windfall, and that
will just fix all the problems that I'm doing right now.
And so, back to the internet.
An economist I interviewed likened trying to get famous on YouTube or Twitter or social
media to shelling out money for college.
In each case, one suffers from hard work and zero to negative income in the hopes of a
later payout.
The result is that the market is oversaturated with people vying for the same fame.
And if there's a line behind you for your job, companies and brands don't have to treat
you well.
Your subscriber numbers, which rarely make any sense — some channels have millions
of views and no subscribers and others the other way around — become the gatekeepers
for your financial success.
And whether they realize it or not, our fans dictate our every financial move.
Every time Allison and I post a branded video, we make money, but we lose subscribers.
A video we created for a skin care line, for instance, drew ire from fans writing “enough
with the product displacement!”
Despite this being our third branded video ever, after doing 200 videos for free.
[laughter] YouTuber Anna Akana, fed up with comments calling her a sellout, posted a video
explaining how without brand deals, YouTubers can't survive.
Some fans understood, others vowed never to watch her again.
Recently, Rosie of the channel Rose and Rosie, took to Twitter to express her exasperation
at commenters’ inability to understand that the people behind their favorite videos need
to eat.
Brand deals are even more important now.
In the last week or so, the hashtag #YouTubeIsOverParty, which I love, started trending in response
to new regulations on YouTube ads.
It turns out YouTube is implementing or trying or has started enforcing a new standard where
videos that don't meet certain moral or taste criteria are unable to be monetized.
YouTubers are freaking out.
It’s still unclear if these new rules will stick or if there will be enough noise made
in response.
I mean, I’m still parsing through.
Like, I have no idea what this means and every day, Allison and I are, like, are our videos
still monetized?
We’re hoping that YouTube just forgot we’re a channel.
But the good thing about this is that YouTubers are making a stink online about money.
Or their inability to make money, and that's a welcome change because it feels like YouTubers
talk to each other about money less than maybe the average worker, because there's an added
humiliation to not making a living wage when fans believe you're famous.
So it adds an extra layer of silence.
This system of not talking about these kind of things I think especially hurts women and
people of color and LGBTQ people and nonbinary people, marginalized people.
There are limited job opportunities in the entertainment industry for people in these
groups and YouTube is a really big foot in the door.
So though diversity is a big buzzword, in practice, nearly 80% of showrunners are still
white men.
For marginalized artists, a creative writing job, directing, acting, having their own channel,
being the be-all end-all of their own content, that's, like, a godsend.
And a major reason companies can get away with these one-sided agreements is because
I think we don't know our own worth.
We think we should be grateful for the chance, often given to us by straight, cis white men
and when they overwork us or underpay us, we should be thrilled with our own exploitation.
We're just lucky to be there.
So, marginalized people at media companies: protect yourself.
Know your worth.
They bring us in to make themselves look good, and they don't care about us as creators.
Not every workplace has such stringent policies.
Years ago while I was on staff for a small news blog, I got an offer to write a piece
for the New York Times Magazine.
My bosses understood.
It made their blog look more legit to have a writer that was also working for “The
Gray Lady.”
It was a win-win.
Other video places I’ve heard about have their writers go off and sell TV shows or
sell movies and they're welcomed back with open arms because their success means success
for that company.
So this company welcomed me back after I finished my big opportunity.
They were happy for my individual success.
In other words, there is a way for companies to produce good work while still supporting
their own employee's career growth.
As the writer Ashley Ford tweeted, “There's nothing wrong with making trade-offs, but
compromise shouldn't mean your employer always gets the better deal.
You should win too.”
Here's a story about this very festival.
A female speaker messaged me asking what my rate was going to be to speak with you guys
here today.
She and I were doing the exact same talk, and I told her what I was making.
She was making much less than that.
She was scared to ask for a higher fee in case they reneged on asking her to speak today.
I told her it's a festival for independent creators.
My talk is about money and valuing yourself.
Tell them I sent you. [laughter] [applause]
I like to cause trouble. [laughter]
She went to them and asked for more money and cited my rate as an example,
and they upped her fee.
So, thank you!
[Applause]