OT: Where do you think new woodworkers are going?

I think that AI will create a huge impact.  I am already seeing it in the painting world.  One can use AI to create images one can then paint.  I don't know how it will sort out yet, but it will.  I think it will make producing books much easier, though I don't know who will read them.

@MassiveD,
Thanks, those are some interesting observations with which I agree for the most part. Things have changed a lot over the past 20 years, where once having a .com domain had gravitas and enabled one to build a brand and audience. Now, it seems to matter little, and everything has moved to the major social players where brands piggyback themselves to their domains and platforms, building brands and audiences by becoming members of their ecosystem of existing millions of members and cross-linking among other platforms (e.g., YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Reddit, LinkedIn, etc. who each already have their existing millions (billions?) of members). 

Small sites are an increasingly small needle in the ever-increasing web haystack, and I wonder how long the traditional search engines (Google, Bing, etc.) are going to be relevant. They are already using AI to generate responses to search queries and putting those results at the top of most queries. And most previously organic searches are being done from within the platforms; i.e., finding a video using YouTube's internal search instead of a Google search, or finding a relevant group in Facebook or Reddit by using their own internal search functions.

Interesting times.

There is a YT  personality, Mary Spender, not one I follow, but YT seems to think I should.  She recently did video where she laid out her costs.  I had earlier seen one where she talked about what YT had paid out about 6 thousand dollars for 66 video she did of songs for almost 5 million views. I think she may have said 4K.  A  single video she did got almost 10 thousand dollars and 5500 views

(It was a shock to find that what look likes simple little videos are the result of 4 people, and an annual outlay of 250K.  She mentioned that some of the largest channels have staffs of 2-300.  I was surprised)

I have noticed a similar thing here over the years - Review videos get a lot more coverage.  Generally seems to help if they are positive.  People want to buy stuff, for the most part, and tend to be looking for permission.  A forum on reviews would probably do well.  I am not sure any other sights has member reviews as a specific forum.  The idea would be for people to try to put out a coherent review for something they use and know.  And then people could join in.  Might not work if people actually preferred those kinds of threads mixed in.  Since it hasn't been tested that I know of, it would have to be tried to see if it actually would work.  Presumably it isn't done because of commercial conflicts and the risk of it been a spammed.  On a positive, I think reviews often draw people to a site.

@MassiveD,

Easy enough to set up: https://www.woodcentral.com/forkbb/forum/85/Reviews

If this proves to be superfluous and only adds clutter, it can be deleted with one click.