Digital Labour: Digital Capitalism and the Alienation of YouTube Content Creators

YouTube is a digital platform that allows content creators to stream their videos in exchange for money earned through the YouTube Partner Program mechanism, motivates many people to join YouTube. However, what they do not realize is the hidden effect YouTube brings in the form of alienation experienced by YouTube content creators as digital labour. This article discusses this phenomenon of alienation experienced by digital labours. Using a qualitative approach with a descriptive research design, it offers a narrative research strategy to examine the narrative and discourse of alienation of content creators on YouTube. The unit of analysis of the study is the content of YouTube creators as digital labour. The findings show that YouTube is mainly a vehicle used by digital capitalism for the sake of profit accumulated by exploiting content creators from the videos they make. Content creators receive disproportionate or even no financial compensation from YouTube for the videos they produce for YouTube. As a result, YouTube content creators as digital labour experienced alienation from their work, their work activities, from themselves as a human species and from other humans. * Corresponding author: Panji Mulkillah Ahmad Department of Law Science, Universitas Gadjah Mada, Indonesia Email: panjimulkillah@mail.ugm.ac.id Digital Labour: Digital Capitalism and the Alienation of YouTube Content Creators Journal of Asian Social Science Research 2021, Vol. 3, No. 2: 167-184 https://cassr.net/jassr/ © The Author(s) 2021 Article 168 Journal of Asian Social Science Research Vol. 3, No. 2 2021

communication networks (internet, intranet, etc.), computers, software, and other related information technology. The digital economy also has characteristics that are different from that of the conventional economy. According to Potts (2016), the digital economy can be digitized and tracked, connected to the internet which then connects assets, suppliers, workers, and policymakers. Another characteristic is that the digital economy operates by sharing, personalizing customers, and creating direct relationships between buyers and sellers. These characteristics provide convenience for the community. In addition to the convenience obtained by the owners of capital, the convenience for the public in accessing the internet and a wide selection of products are the main attractions for conducting transactions. However, there are several obstacles when it is used for conducting conventional shopping transactions. The internet has now also turned into product windows and spoils the eyes of the people who are constantly thirsty for their consumptive desire. As a result, the digital economy has a strong capitalistic style and capitalist domination that will never stop even though times have changed to the digital era (Fuchs 2014).
The velocity of money in the virtual realm occurs in an astonishing number and grows higher every year. Data from Statista state that the revenue received by e-commerce in 2020 reached 4.2 trillion dollars, a three-fold increase from 2014 which was recorded at only 1.3 trillion dollars. The largest turnover of money occurs in e-commerce. For example, eBay revenue alone in the first quarter of 2021 amounted to 3.2 billion dollars. In 2020, Amazon's revenue reached 386.1 billion dollars. Digitalization has also created in the world's top companies that profit at a fantastic rate. Three of the top five companies in the world today are companies that are closely connected to the internet.
However, the money circulation on the internet is not only generated by e-commerce alone but also by various social media platforms. Facebook as a social media platform, for example, is included in the world's top companies that generated 870.5 billion dollars in 2020. Social media platforms can turn into giant companies with huge profits. Although these social media platforms are downloaded and used for free, profit-taking is a common motive behind the creation of such platforms (Elder-Vass 2016).
This article analyses YouTube, one of the most popular digital platforms in the world. It provides YouTubers (the video content creators on YouTube) with opportunities to produce videos on YouTube in exchange for dollars earned through the YouTube Partner Program mechanism. This motivates many people, including media corporations, to make YouTube their main platform for showing their videos. YouTube's economic potential is in line with the Indonesian government's agenda to encourage young people to engage in the digital economy. According to President Joko Widodo (2017), the potential money from the digital economy sector in Indonesia could reach US$ 130 billion in the 2017-2022 period.
What is not conveyed behind this big lure is that there is a hidden alienation experienced by content creators as digital labour. This article aims to uncover this alienation and to prove that YouTube as a digital platform is not just a space of expression, but also a capitalistic profitoriented corporation.
In doing so, this article uses a qualitative approach with a descriptive research design and uses a strategy Narrative Research (Ollerenshaw and Creswell 2002) to analyse the narrative and discourse alienation of creator content on Youtube. The rich narrative and discourse on digital labour who experience alienation as a social phenomenon is much interest of this research. The unit of analysis of this research is YouTubers as content creators who have unconsciously experienced alienation as long as they continued to create content.

YouTube and Digital Capitalism
YouTube is the largest video on demand platform today, which was founded in 2005. It has the slogan "Broadcast Yourself" with an ambition to be a place of expression through video. At first, users or content creators only made YouTube-like social media in general, as a space for self-expression. Then in 2007, YouTube introduced the Youtube Partner Program (YPP) which allows YouTubers to receive funds in return for the videos they upload with a certain mechanism. In addition to YPP, YouTube then provides support to creators in the form of YouTube Academy and YouTube Ambassador. The YPP is given to content creators to motivate them to monetize their videos on YouTube. While the role of YouTube Academy is to improve the quality of videos and channels, the YouTube Ambassador is to inspire other people/creators to be more successful in monetizing their activities on YouTube (Labas and Yasmine 2017).
The main way to earn money from YouTube is with YPP. To be able to join YPP, the content creator's videos must be watched by the public for 4000 hours for 12 months, and have a minimum of 1000 subscribers. Later, the YouTube team will review the channel of the content creator that has met the requirements. The content creator must then register for Google Adsense at a later stage. From here, content creators can earn money from ads and subscribers from YouTube Premium (2019).
Regarding the YPP money payment scheme, from videos uploaded by content creators and serving ads, Google pays 68 per cent of its AdSense revenue to content creators. A YouTube channel can earn an average of US$0.18 per view or the equivalent of US$18 per 1000 views (Geyser 2021). According to Social Blade (2021), world-class content creators such as PewDiePie that has 110 million subscribers are estimated to be able to earn up to US$6.3 million per year. Meanwhile, in Indonesia, Atta Halilintar, who is estimated to be able to earn up to US$1.2 million per year, is considered the content creator with the largest number of subscribers estimated at around 23.6 million.
The great content creators who have earned a lot of money from YouTube have motivated many people to become YouTubers. The Ministry of Education and Culture of the Republic of Indonesia even regards content creators as professionals and discusses the opening of a vocational study program in content creation at schools or universities (Kemendikbud RI 2019). YouTube has turned into a serious thing to work on. Initially, content creators used YouTube as social media in general, as a space for content creators to express themselves. However, along with the increased turnover of money on YouTube, the motivation of creators becomes material and fame (Labas and Yasmine 2017).
YouTube is an audiovisual social media platform, which was created as a for-profit corporation. YouTube can only exist with the creative activities of its content creators, whatever the motivation of content creators and viewers (idealism, fame, money, information, alternative entertainment, etc.). YouTube's role and position are on the logic of capitalism and follow the rotational speed of capital (Swara 2014).
To understand better the political-economic logic of YouTube as a platform for digital capitalism, it is necessary to first explain what is meant by digital capitalism. According to Schiller (1999), digital capitalism is an epoch in which digital media becomes the means of production and central control of an increasingly supranational market system. Capitalism can operate effectively on a global scale through digital network technologies. Various internal contemporary companies also operate based on this digital capitalism management. It is also characterized by private ownership of digital networks to generate commercial profits. Pace (2018) concludes that digital capitalism is the accumulation of processes, sites, and moments in which digital technology mediates the structural tendencies of capitalism.
One of the industries that developed in the era of digital capitalism is Social Networking Sites (SNS) such as Google, Facebook, and YouTube. The way SNS makes a profit is not like the conventional way of selling goods or services to consumers. SNS reaches a large number of viewers or users, and at the same time sells their personal information data to advertisers for the benefit of the company. SNS performs tracking and information gathering, turning collective subjectivity into profit (Bolano and Vieiral 2015).
The manifestation of YouTube as a platform for digital capitalism is seen from the benefits they get. YouTube has 2 billion active users, with 38 million channels worldwide. From that audience and content creator market, in 2019 YouTube revenue from its ads reached 15.1 billion US Dollars from advertising, which is an increase of 408 per cent in 7 years. This is not counting from YouTube Premium and the YouTube Music service (Dean 2021).
This article argues that the relationship between content creators and YouTube is a capitalistic production relationship. Karl Marx stated that there is an alienation experienced by workers in a capitalist production relationship. The next section will reveal the capitalist relationship found in the relationship between YouTube and its content creators.

Alienation of YouTube Content Creators as Digital Labour Alienation in the Marxist Perspective
The concept of alienation is closely related to Marx and Engels's analysis of work. In German Ideology, Marx and Engels stated that work is a conscious productive activity, which transforms and organizes nature so that man "produces the means of his survival" to fulfil human needs, as "the production of material life itself" (Marx and Engels 1932).
Work has different characters depending on the relations of production in society such as slave labour, feudal labour, and wage labour. The form of wage labour that exists today can only apply to a capitalist society, and cannot apply to a society of slavery or feudalism. As Marx argued: "Work is a natural condition of human existence, a condition of material exchange between man and nature, completely independent of the form of society. On the other hand, exchange-value labor is a specific and social form of labour" (Marx 1859).
In a capitalist society, work is divided into two forms. The first is 'work' that is an activity to produce products that have a use or usevalue and are determined qualitatively. Here, work aims to meet human needs. The second is 'labour', an activity that creates value that is only measured in quantity. Labour exists as a historical form of organizing work in capitalism. In this form of labour, the activity becomes alienated (Marx 1859).
Work that takes the form of labour is alienated because the product produced is not solely for the fulfilment of human needs but also produces surplus value for the capitalist (Marx 1859). Workers produce commodities that are then sold by capitalists to make a profit. However, the capitalist does not redistribute the profit to the workers who made it because the production of the commodity is considered the property of the capitalist. Workers only get wages as compensation for the labour they provide. Yet it is only through labour that a commodity can have value because only workers can produce value in that commodity. Capitalists, machines, and raw materials cannot work on their own so they cannot produce value in a commodity. The capitalist exploitation of workers is based on this theft of surplus-value.
Thus, exploitation and alienation have a close relationship. Alienation is both a condition and a result of exploitation. Both are the foundation of capitalism, in addition to private property rights and the commodification of labour (Fisher 2015). Work in a capitalist society is not devoted to meeting human needs, but to capital. Labour opposite capital "is alienated labour" and capital opposite labour "is alienated capital" (Marx 1857).
Marx further elaborates alienation in The Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. He mentions four situations in which workers are alienated: 1) Alienated for his work; 2) Alienated from work activities; 3) Alienated from himself as a human species, and 4) Alienated with other humans (Christ 2015).

Digital Labour in Digital Capitalism
What about alienation in the context of digital capitalism, especially on YouTube creator content? To answer this, it is necessary to examine the concept of labour in digital capitalism. This is to show whether the activities of YouTube creators are included in Marx's concept of work.
There are two types of labour. First, material labour that produces products for human material needs (clothing, food, shelter, etc.), and second, immaterial labour that produces immaterial products such as information, knowledge, and social relations (Hardt and Negri 2004). In the age of the internet, labour that produces information through digital media is called digital labour. Humans with their brains organize experiences in such a way to create symbolic representations, social relations, artefacts, and social systems (Fuchs and Sevignani 2018).
As Fuchs (2015) describes, digital labour on social media platforms such as YouTube has several characteristics as follows: 1. Digital labour on social media produces meaning, content, communication with other users, and social relationships; 2. Social media corporations monitor, store and review all online activities of users. Corporations have profiles about their users' activities, interests, interactions, and social relationships. Personal data is sold as a commodity; 3. Advertising on social media targets users based on their interests and personalization; and 4. Algorithms play a role in regulating the placement of targets, prices, and the number of advertisements on social media.
As conventional labour in capitalist production in general, digital labour in digital capitalism cannot be separated from the process of exploitation and alienation. In the context of digital labour in social media, Fuchs (2012) explains: Corporate social media sell the users' data commodity to advertising clients at a price that is larger than the invested constant and variable capital," making it partly the users and partly the corporations' employees that "create the surplus-value contained in this commodity. The difference is that the users are unpaid and therefore -in monetary terms -infinitely exploited.
In their study of Facebook, Fuchs and Sevignani (2018) view that activity on social media has alienated humans. They think that activity on social media is a productive work (to make commodities) that alienates humans from four aspects: labour, work activities, oneself as a human, and other humans.
First, the alienation of workers from their labour. Marx explained that workers produce commodities that are not under their control or decisions. The capitalist determines the decision. The capitalist, not the worker, then owns the commodity, which is ironically the result of the workers' production. Here, there is a separation between workers and their products. Marx (1884) said: The alienation of the worker in his product means not only that his labour becomes an object, assumes an external existence, but that it exists independently, outside himself, and alien to him, and that it stands opposed to him as an autonomous power. The life which he has given to the object sets itself against him as an alien and hostile force.
Second, the alienation from work activities. Because the workers' products have been separated from them, the workers in carrying out work activities are not based on their own decisions. Workers carry out products based on market and capitalist decisions. Workers lose their creativity and freedom, and work activities are only a condition to be able to obtain food and other necessities. Marx (1884) said: "His work is not voluntary but imposed, forced labour. It is not the satisfaction of a need, but only a means for satisfying other needs".
Third, the alienation of the worker from him or herself as a human species. Humans are species that live as part of nature with animals, rocks, air, light, and so on. Alienated labour makes workers no longer live as species, and live only as individuals. His life activities are merely used as a means for his physical existence. Marx (1884) stated: In tearing away from man the object of his production, therefore, estranged labor tears from his species-life, his real objectivity as a member of the species and transforms his advantage over animals into the disadvantage that his inorganic body, nature, is taken from him.
Fourth, the alienation of workers from other humans. In the capitalist system, human relations change from social relations to money exchange relations. This is a consequence of the previous three aspects of alienation (Marx 1884).

Alienation of YouTube Content Creators
What about YouTube content creators? We view that YouTube content creators are alienated from these four aspects. YouTube content creators are alienated from their work, due to the exploitation YouTube makes on content creators. This is because content creators produce more value than YouTube takes. Content creators in producing videos use work tools such as cameras, voice recorders, computers for video editing, which are owned by themselves and not provided by YouTube. Content creators also devote their labour which is not provided by YouTube, to work on scripts, corroborate with directors, producers, actors, camera people, doing editing, and so on. YouTube does not make its own videos. YouTube only acts as a platform provider that accommodates all the creativity created by content creators (Ulya 2019).
Indeed, when a content creator's video is uploaded on YouTube, it contains the name of the content creator's channel as a person who made the video. However, as explained by Wasko and Erickson (2009), YouTube is trying to invite people to become content creators with monetization bids. People then do not realize that what they have uploaded on the platform belongs to YouTube according to its slogan "Broadcast yourself (as long as the content it's ours)".
As seen from the statistics, it turns out that not all content creators are involved in YPP. A total of 84.2% of channels have fewer than 1000 subscribers (Geyser 2021), which means the majority of content creators do not qualify for monetization. YouTube does not pay them for their videos. In addition, content creators who are not or have not joined YPP do not receive copyright protection on their content (Ulya 2019). The outpouring of their labour is not compensated, while YouTube reaps such large funds.
In this context,it is clear that the content creators on YouTube or YouTubers are alienated from their products. They are alienated from their work activities. Unlike factory or office workers who work under orders from superiors, YouTube content creators invisibly produce videos without being ordered by anyone. They also do not have employer-defined work hours. Therefore, that content creators appear to have the freedom to make videos voluntarily, without coercion. Nevertheless, today's YouTube phenomenon suggests otherwise.
The YouTube content creators are not ordered by anyone to make videos. It is their decision whether they want to produce videos of comedy, music, dramas, or podcasts. However, not all types of videos can invite viewers in large numbers. Many YouTube channels are only watched by a few viewers so their creators cannot invite advertisers through AdSense and do not earn any money from the videos they have made. YouTube has an algorithmic system that recommends to viewers based on what is trending on YouTube and based on viewers' interests from their viewing history. The ability of YouTube's algorithm to direct what viewers should watch indirectly directs content creators about what videos they should make to earn money. This algorithm plays a significant role because, in 2018, YouTube's Chief Product Officer said that 70% of watch time on YouTube was spent watching videos recommended by the algorithm (Cooper 2021).
Several Indonesian content creators have exposed the problems of YouTube's algorithm in their videos. Some of them have ended their careers on YouTube because they viewed YouTube as an unhealthy ecosystem. SkinnyIndonesian24, a content creator who has worked for 10 years and finally ended his channel in 2020, said: If we look at the current YouTube system… rewards in terms of views, subscribers, likes, comments… these rewards are given to content whose content for me is not the best. There is a lot of good content out there that ends up being invisible. YouTube, if we look at the old days, gave voice to the voiceless. Our voices can be heard because we upload them to YouTube. Now the voices of people like us are dead because the entire spotlight is on the voices of great people. YouTube used to be cool, now it is just a business… Moreover, does this system benefit you? No, it benefits people who have money.
It seems that YouTube provides work time flexibility for content creators. However, this is wrong. The content creators who make YouTube their source of livelihood cannot simply disappear from YouTube. A content creator who has been inactive for 6 months will be de-monetized if his or her viewers and subscribers' time decreases. The content creators are forced to continue making videos for YouTube if they do not want to lose their source of livelihood. That way, content creators must work continuously in producing video content without a clear working time (Ulya 2019).
The YouTube content creators are distorted in terms of free time and work time. This is inseparable from the nature of work in digital capitalism which steals more value; not only did they steal formal work but also value. Working time remains work time, while leisure time is converted into work time. Digital technology allows capitalism to prioritize capital accumulation by breaking through space and time (Novianti and Wulandari 2017). It makes YouTube content creators alienated as a human species. The content creators can only be recognized as long as they are productive in making content for YouTube. They make the digital platform YouTube the world they live in.
Ultimately, the content creators are alienated from other humans. This sounds contradictory to the reality that YouTube makes collaboration between fellow content creators easier. Given the technical and social features of the unique social media platform, it has helped the formation of the involvement of its community members, thereby attracting the interest of its users to collaborate and produce media products that are creative, expressive, as well as original homemade (Jenkins 2009).
However, a thorough and clear investigation reveals a different reality. Because the spirit of capitalism as an economic system is based on the recognition of individual rights, including private property rights as Rand (1967) asserts, the collaboration between content creators, in this case, is not interpreted as an intention to build class solidarity but for the sake of profit needs that lead to capital accumulation. Social relations have now been hegemonized into production-based economic relations. This is reflected in various collaborative efforts among YouTube content creators that prioritize cooperation which is encouraged by two motives. First, to increase social and financial capital. For example, Aldi Taher in Ananta Rispo's video entitled "Aldi Taher Bikin Rigen Marahmarah." In the video, Aldi Taher clearly states that he earned three million rupiahs for his participation in Deddy Corbuzier's podcast. This can be interpreted as a profit-based collaboration if viewed from the point of view of Aldi Taher as the speaker. He wanted to collaborate with Deddy Corbuzier for financial capital. Regarding Deddy Corbuzier as the host, he spent three million rupiahs as capital to increase his social capital, considering that Aldi Taher was a rising figure at the time. Moreover, Deddy Corbuzier received financial benefits from his collaboration with Aldi Taher for his podcast content. Therefore, the collaboration between Deddy Corbuzier and Aldy Taher was not based on social relations among digital labour, but financial dan social capital.
Social capital is not merely non-material profit. When a person gets wider exposure as a result of his broadening and growing social capital, the impact is that his or her valuation increases. This valuation can then be materialized in the form of his or her contract rate as a public figure or an increasing number of viewers on his YouTube channel, which leads to profits from advertising. In Indonesia, the term "social climbing" (panjat sosial or pansos) then emerged as an effort to increase social capital. To be well-known, a novice content creator increases the number of viewers of his or her video by collaborating with top content creators with more social capital than him or her. This has resulted in criticism such as from VNGNC that criticizes YouTube rewind content carried out by content creators in Indonesia. In its video entitled "WTF Indonesia: The Finale Episode," VNGNC said: "And all of you who follow YouTube Rewind, Indonesia is funny, every year wanting gold, glory, and fame." This criticism is not without reason as the collaboration between content creators is at large motivated by profit-taking (VNGNC 2018).
Currently, media corporations are shifting the position of individual content creators. Around 30 of 50 YouTube channels that have the most subscribers in the world are media corporations such as T-Series and WWE (2021). In Indonesia, 9 out of 10 YouTube channels with the highest number of views are owned by media corporations, most of which are television station companies such as RCTI, Trans7, and Indosiar (2021). YouTube appears to be increasingly leaning towards corporate media over individual content creators. This is because media corporations can produce videos in large numbers regularly, and are watched by millions of people. Due to this, individual content creators are transforming by adopting the company's way of working. They recruit staff into their team to work as scriptwriters, editors, camera people, and so on. They include Atta Halilintar, Ria Ricis, Baim Paula, Gen Halilintar, Deddy Corbuzier, and Raditya Dika whose channel rankings on YouTube Indonesia are at the top. This kind of YouTubers who recruit working staff can no longer be called digital labour. In Marx's perspective as described above, the YouTubers who own the big channels like the above-mentioned ones do 'work' but not 'labour'.
On YouTube channels owned by media corporations or individual YouTubers, the context of digital labour refers to workers who are subordinated to the owners of these giant channels. These workers are subordinated to the channel owner, do not have full control of the channel, and are not fully entitled to the profits generated by the channel. They are digital labour who are exploited and, therefore, alienated. Alienation is experienced by YouTube content creators as digital labour. Nevertheless, this alienation does not mean it will last forever. Fuchs and Sevignani propose a remedy to this alienation: the content creators substitute the logic of capitalism with the logic of the commons and transform digital labour into playful digital work (Fuchs and Sevignani 2013).

Conclusion
This article has shown that YouTube is one of the platforms of digital capitalism. The production relationship that operates between YouTube and content creators is capitalistic. YouTube accumulates profits by exploiting content creators from the videos they make and upload to the platform. The majority of content creators are digital labourers who receive disproportionate financial compensation from YouTube or do not even receive financial compensation at all for the videos they produce for YouTube. As digital labour, the YouTube content creators have been alienated in four aspects: alienation from their work, their working activities, from themselves as a human species, and from other humans. This article certainly leaves some interesting questions to be discussed further as consequences of the alienation experienced by YouTube content creators as digital labourers: Can digital labour have class consciousness and organize themselves a social class? Is it possible that there is a class struggle carried out by digital labour? Further research is needed to answer these questions.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.