How has Australia’s internet connectivity strangled a local industry?

Originally posted: 28 August 2018
(T-Series is now the biggest on YouTube, and PewDiePie is up over 100 million…)

The world runs on the internet these days, and the signs have been pointing this way for almost a decade for anyone with the ability to look into the future with any sort of imagination.

We can all agree that Australia needs fast internet, doesn’t matter how it is delivered, it’s required.

One case study for this is YouTube.

The biggest YouTube star (by Subscriber count) is PewDiePie, with over 65 million subscribers, he earns between $1 and $18 million dollars a year depending on ad revenue.

The largest YouTube account from Australia is an account called How To Basic, which has 11 million subscribers.  And they earn between $100k and $2 million a year, which places them at 182nd in the world.

Australia’s second most popular YouTuber is Primitive Technology, with 8 million subscribers, he is ranked 352nd in the world, with estimated earnings of $73k to $1.2 million a year.

One of the major reasons that Australians aren’t in the top listings for YouTubers is our internet.

You need a fast connection with unlimited data in order to upload high definition videos every other day in order to keep up the content demands. And for years now, that has been an impossibility for most Australians.

And on the consumer side of things, Australian YouTubers can’t reach Australian audiences for the same reason… we are already going through our Quotas with various streaming services, why risk missing the latest episode of 'Game of Thrones' to watch an Aussie YouTuber.

The top ten YouTubers in 2017 earned a combined $127 million dollars.

In 2015 YouTube paid about $5 billion out to its creators.

That is a $5 billion dollar a year industry that Australia can barely dip a toe in.