Call it the Jenna Marbles paradox, after the top YouTuber profiled in the New York Times earlier this year who, after more than one billion views and millions earned in ad revenue, still makes some of the most amateur videos you can imagine. As she put it, she makes “more money than I need, ever” and yet, if you had no idea who she was and watched one of her million-views-plus videos, you’d think this was the first time she’d ever turned on a video camera.

The same can pretty much be said about the rest of YouTube’s top “talent.” From Shane Dawson to Smosh, it’s almost universally bad content, bad jokes, bad premises, bad production value. I thought the same thing when I signed my first YouTube client to The Collective, in 2007--Dax Flame, a kid who had done millions of views on videos pretending to be mentally challenged. I just naturally assumed that over time, the content would get better, especially as the money poured in.

Check out some of the following videos, selected from top channels, all made within the last few months. Videos like KIDS in JAIL!!, How Guys Sleep, This was the FASTEST selling video game of 2006, Epic Epic Stunt, Ambercrombie & Fitch CEO Is A Dick, TWERKSANITY!!!, all have millions of views and subscribers but about $20 of production value and content investment between the lot of them. Even the best one, from The Young Turks network, could have been made in the studio of a high school media class.

Except the teams producing these videos are earning millions of dollars from it. This is what these people do for a living. As of 2012, there were literally thousands of YouTube partners making more than six-figures a year in advertising checks from Google alone, meaning that this is a damn well paying job to boot. As Benny Luo, founder and writer of NewMediaRockstars.com, a site which tracks YouTube closely, explained, there are “YouTube channels making $80,000-$100,000 per month in ad revenue."

Yet from what I see, their content has barely graduated from the original formula: webcam + person telling jokes that would get you booed off the stage of any comedy club / songs that no one would dare sing at even the worst open mic nights / low budget skits that would make Michael Scott squirm.

Make no mistake, the YouTube partners are professionals. Just really bad ones.

So, that raises the question: Why?

Why are YouTube videos still so terrible? Why hasn’t video content tremendously improved over the last half-decade? Why hasn’t the infusion of capital translated into quality art?

I ask for two reasons. One is pure fascination: How can someone do this for a living and be so bad at it? Two: YouTube has begun describing its viewers as Generation C--could it be that Generation C is just dumb or has low standards?

My answer is simple: Behind it all is the same old pageview problem we talked about in this column for the last year.

When content is 100 percent advertising supported and there is no paid subscription component, the quality of the content never rises above mediocre. The content may be cute, it may be controversial, it may generate lots of clicks but it will rarely, if ever, be good.

Why? Because there is no one for it to be good “for.” A newspaper supported by a subscription model has a daily reader it must deliver value for. How often have we said to ourselves about anything we subscribe to or pay to access: “$20 a month for this??? What a ripoff.” That is the pressure an old daily newspaper found itself under on a daily basis. If they are charging the reader for access to the content, they knew it must be good. A blog, on the other hand, charges no one for anything and is supported by pageviews so it doesn’t have any clue who it’s producing for--it just cares that it’s getting clicks, period. From who or how is irrelevant. Their only real customers are advertising networks whose demand is simply: volume, volume, volume.

Same, it appears, goes for video. Though many of the top YouTube personalities have more than a million subscribers (a status level that entitles you to a golden “play” plaque from YouTube) their relationship to those subscribers is very different that of television or Hulu or Netflix, where at least some of the subscribers pay in some form or another.

In other words, Generation C and the rest of the watching public are being shortchanged because their entertainers are motivated by bad incentives.

Professional YouTubers measure themselves by view count. The game--and the business--is to get as many views as possible for the channel and that means churning out videos in a low cost, high return model. If the video gets a lot of clicks, it must be good. It is profitable because it generated many ad impressions.

And there are lots of ways to get those clicks--gimmicks, low brow content, click-baity headlines, thumbnail bait, riding the Google wave, etc.--a few of which involve “making great stuff.” In fact, these YouTube pros play the same game as the Huffington Post or Business Insider: publish whatever you can as quickly as possible and have absolutely no compunction about bottom feeding in order to do so.

Google has tried actively to improve content over the years--to encourage producers to make the kind of premium content advertisers want to run with. Paying producers has clearly not had that effect. Like paying bloggers by the pageview, it just made them really good at gaming the system. Investing $100M in new channels didn’t work either--almost none of those new channels achieved success.

But now, I think there is reason to be hopeful. Google and YouTube have announced the launch of a subscription program where users actually pay for the content they are receiving. It’s only a little bit of money and a few channels right now (about 30 channels between .99 and $2.99). But it bodes well for the future of what should and could be a valuable source of art and culture.

It means we may be entering the next era in online video--one driven by subscription and therefore mutual value exchange rather than endless pandering and fighting for attention. An era that will hopefully have a much, much higher bar.

When someone like Jenna Marbles or Ray William Johnson actually take money from their fans, perhaps they will be obligated to innovate and grow. Or at least the producers who do produce content worth paying for will rise to the top. Perhaps with the luxury of guaranteed monthly income from subscribers, they will treat content production like a business and stop making videos from their living room on their laptop. Like any television program, they’ll know what each episode is “worth” and hopefully try to push that number higher by investing in the production of the content accordingly (as opposed to pushing what it costs lower and lower).

All mediums get professionalized at some point. Bloggers get book deals and then they start to care about typos and accuracy and writing something that will last. Television used to run crappy series sponsored by consumer products and defense companies, but now we live in a golden age of amazing TV.

It remains to be seen if the same will happen to online video. One thing we know for sure is that it can’t get any worse.

Ryan Holiday is the bestselling author of  Trust Me I’m Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator and a PR strategist for brands and writers.

This.

This is what our planet is all about.

These are 15 new reasons to embrace the future, all brought to us from an attempt to get Japanese people to eat rubbery disks of dough.

1. Domino's nail art.

(Screencap: YouTube)

2. The Domino's CEO trying to speak Japanese.

3. Man in bodysuit choreographing lady avatar moves.

(Screencap: YouTube)

4. Domino's CEO posing back to back and with peace signs next to anime avatar.

(Screencap: YouTube)

5. "Start the pizza stage live."

6. How much do you love us right now, Japan?

7. The number of takes it took the Domino's CEO to accomplish this level of enthusiasm.

(Screencap: YouTube)

8. "From the menu to the order, it looks very cute, just like Miku."

9. The Social Pizza Camera

10. Domino's CEO goes home and thinks to self, "Hmm, that Miku is really cute."

11. He begins writing fan fiction about Miku and pizza.

12. Sex scandal emerges following Domino's CEO's affair with Miku pillow.

13. World now consumes 12 billion Miku-o's™ pizzas a day.

14. Pizza becomes sentient.

15. The Domino's CEO finally merges with Miku.

(h/t Reddit)

(Screenshot: YouTube)

This is another reminder that just because you are capable of creating a YouTube account does not mean that you should make a rap video.

New York-based Google employee Andrew Fink decided to write a rap creatively titled "Welcome to Google," so he grabbed a couple of his co-workers, threw on some Google swag and danced around in the Google NY HQ with someone in a giant Droid costume. There was also an inflatable shark and a guy dressed as Popeye. Ya know, Google stuff. We're not really hip hop experts, so maybe we should just leave it to Rap Genius to decode the song's meaning.

In case you were wondering, YouTube commenters are already doing their thing. The top comment? "Yeah I really wish this guy worked for Bing. Leave the embarrassing (and terrible) videos to MSFT."

Lulz. (Photo: RyanSecrest.com)

Psy's "Gangnam Style" is a cultural phenomenon. Having already nabbed the most viewed spot on YouTube, today the video hit 1 billion views [insert your cliched Mayan apocalypse joke here].

A countdown site, Billioncountdown.com, quickly circulated across the Internet this morning, showing a mesmerizing counter tracking the views until the video hit one billion.

And when it did? An awesome feat of Internet trolling was unleashed. As soon as the video hit a billion, the site immediately began redirecting to some explicit porn sites upon refresh, including Cougardating.com.

Well done, Internet. You've truly outdone yourself.

(Screencap: YouTube)

In the wake of the tragic mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, social networks lit up with cries for gun control. Hundreds of thousands of people descended on We the People, the White House's official petition portal, to ask the President to take meaningful action to help stop gun violence. Today, President Obama released a video recorded especially for those who signed these petitions.

In the video, President Obama reiterates statements he made on Wednesday, including calling on Congress to ban "military style assault weapons and high capacity ammunition clips." He also said that Vice President Joe Biden is working on drafting a "comprehensive set of serious proposals to keep our children safe, including strengthening school safety, improving mental health care and addressing a culture that too often glorifies guns and violence." The proposals are slated to be reviewed by the President in January.

President Obama also thanked petitioners for speaking up, and asked that they continue engaging in a sustained effort to eradicate gun violence by calling members of Congress to express their concerns.

(Screencap: YouTube)

When one mulls over the future of manufacturing, naturally the first question that comes to mind is: How we can we as a nation effectively mass produce cornerstone products, like a plastic bust of performer Will.i.am?

Luckily, Mr. Am--who last we heard was hurtling our planet towards a Martian attack--has ushered 3D printing into the mainstream by including it in his newest video, "Scream and Shout," also featuring the eminently GIF-able Britney Spears. At around 1:38 in the video, a 3D printer sitting on a platform displaying the Makerbot logo is seen printing thin layers of plastic to create a bust of that vital American commodity: Mr. Am's head.

As VH1 notes, the entire video is really a holiday gift guide for gadget lovers. For the smug hipster in your life, there's an iPad plugged into a typewriter; for the person who has literally everything they could possibly want, there's a "scuba" case that lets you submerge your iPhone in water, which makes for a really neat party trick that won't make people think you're an asshole at all.

And of course, because Mr. Am is no stranger to the tech world, "Scream and Shout" also prominently features his new line of cell phone accessories, which Gizmodo notes are "worse than his band." High praise!

Meanwhile, YouTube commenters offered similar accolades for his new song. Wrote one, “This video gave me cancer.”

(Photo: YouTube)

Was it really only yesterday that we watched with muted glee as Apple fanboys everywhere lost their shit over a phone that is only mildly different from its now much cheaper predecessor? My, how time flies.

The iPhone 5 is slightly lighter and slightly longer than the iPhone 4s, but apparently even Apple fans can't really discern the difference. Jimmy Kimmel brought an iPhone 4s out on the streets of Los Angeles and told everyone he encountered that it was an iPhone 5.

"Oh, it's way better!" proclaimed a man in a Dave Matthews Band hat. "I only have the 4s," he admitted, not realizing that it's the same damn phone. You can't make this shit up, people.

(vooza.com)

Despite the fact that we love to spotlight the companies and characters that make this scene hum here at Betabeat, we occasionally grow weary of all the unbridled enthusiasm for the New York tech space. What can we say? We're journalists--we were born skeptical. So when this parody video of a soon-to-launch startup popped up, its light-hearted jabs at the more eyeroll-inducing side of tech were all too familiar.

"Vooza is a mobile web app that's real-time, cloud-based, social and local," begins the animated video. "What does it do? SHHHH! We're in beta!"

The video is really funny, and perfectly captures all the things that occasionally annoy us about the startup scene: ubiquitous acronyms and buzzwords, "it's like X for Y!", and mentions of Ashton Kutcher, who is perhaps the most irritating celebrity investor.

Despite its light mockery, Vooza seems to be winning over the hearts of startup kids. "Dude, if you're not signed up for the Vooza beta yet, you're so fucking behind," tweeted David Heinemeier Hansson, the creator of Ruby on Rails. "Please message me regarding angel funding! I have a jar full of Kennedy half dollars," quipped one Facebook user.

You can watch the Vooza vid here.