The "Contribution"

Another day, another glossy report telling us how much some shiny sector “contributes” to the UK economy. This week it’s YouTube creators, apparently worth £2.2 billion. Last month it was football, before that live music, and before that dog ownership. You’d think we were sitting on a gold mine if you believed all these press releases.

But “contribute” is a weasel word. It doesn’t mean £2.2 billion of new wealth, it means Oxford Economics have carved out a slice of GDP and declared it belongs to YouTubers. The same ad budgets that would otherwise have gone to ITV. The same £20 a teenager would have spent on a book or a T-shirt, now spent on a Sidemen hoodie. The same accountants, editors and camera crews who’d be working somewhere else if not here. The pie hasn’t grown, it’s just been rebadged.

The only bit that’s genuinely new is exports. When DanTDM pulls in dollars from an American kid, or Glastonbury sells tickets to Germans, that’s real growth - foreign money flowing in. But nobody ever subtracts the imports. British kids glued to MrBeast, billions in streaming fees sent to California, replica shirts of foreign clubs flooding the high street. Without that balance sheet, the “£2.2bn contribution” is just smoke and mirrors.

And here’s the political twist: Westminster laps this up. Every APPG and ministerial photo-op loves a big number with “billions” attached. It makes them look like they’re backing the future, the creative revolution, Britain at its best. In reality, it’s a convenient distraction. They can cheer a sector without doing the hard graft of fixing productivity, building exports, or grappling with the fact that Britain actually makes and sells far too little to the world.

So yes - YouTubers are a real industry, just like football and festivals. But let’s stop mistaking attribution for addition. Unless we start growing the pie rather than slicing it differently, we’re just clapping ourselves on the back while the net money flows out. It’s not a revolution - it’s an accounting trick dressed up as policy.