YouTube is renting out billboards at a music festival, and the advertisers, predictably, want to know who's playing. "Well, I dunno, like, whoever shows up" has proven to be an answer that they can't get away with. YouTube's negotiating position with advertisers depends on how they can position their package of advertising space. Right now they're trying to sell a big bundle of uncertain providence, with loads of little no-namers mixed in with the heavy hitters.
But what can YouTube do? If they split it up, they now have a gold package, a silver package, and a shit package. The rates for the shit package would be so bad that current YouTube revenue starts to look like winning the lottery. The smallest channels are subsidised by the bigger ones, not in terms of views but in terms of reputation. So if you need to improve the reputation of the group, what's left to do but drop the weakest performers?
If you're thinking "but that's totally illogical! Smaller channels collectively contribute an enormous number of very valuable advertising impressions", you're right, but making the same mistake YouTube did. The advertising industry isn't logical, it's 18 layers of ticket-clippers and con men playing telephone with money. It doesn't run on economically rational real-time bidding systems, it runs on trend-chasing and reputation. That other stuff is just to keep the nerds happy.
So, like in every other field Goophabet has entered, the techno-utopianism lasts right up until it hits the balance sheet. Party's over, folks. YouTube is an advertising company and now it's realising it has to act like one.
https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/products/google-preferred/
> Google Preferred aggregates YouTube's top content into easy-to-buy packages for brand advertisers. Brands access the top 5% of content on YouTube and receive the measurement results they need to maximize the impact of their campaigns.
I'm not disagreeing with you, but just because you don't like something doesn't mean there's not a huge audience for people like PewDiePie, especially among the younger demographic - which still spends money, and which is a constantly-replenishing spring.
EDIT: And PewDiePie won't disappear. He provides the perfect wish fulfillment for kids that would love to stay in their bedrooms and be paid to play videogames all day long.
- people who will never earn more than this off youtube, but aren't motivated by earning money.
- people who are currently earning less than this, and are motivated by money but are on a trajectory to quickly exceed 1000 subscribers. they'll be minimally affected.
- people who are currently earning less than $100/yr, but are motivated by money and are unlikely to exceed 1000 subscribers anytime soon. If they're actively working to grow their channel but can't break 1000 subscribers, losing them is probably for the best.
I don't see how this is going to really harm youtube's content pool.
I remember when Google was known for actually thinking things through.
If YouTube monetizes only a few big channels it becomes much easier to track political content manually.
[1] https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/youtube-hate-preachers-sh...
So what is their aim? The only thing I can frame it as is a power play. Advertisers working together to collectively ensure they have more strict control on what they can be advertised on has the nice side effect of them getting to decide the fate of many companies dependent on advertising for revenue. If a company acts in a way contrary to the interests of advertisers, they thus gain the ability to destroy that company. Similarly, it allows them to elevate companies that further their interests. Put another way, I wouldn't expect a documentary detailing the behaviors of Coca-Cola in South America or Nestle's behaviors... anywhere... to see much in the way of funding. But a documentary detailing healthy at any size? That's some advertiser worthy content.
However, in the long-run the challenge is enabling the transition from small to big. Doing one without the other would be quite short-term thinking from YouTube - they would massively disincentivise the new users who become next year's big channels. I haven't seen many platforms both care and execute on this.
Advertisers don't have a choice - they need YouTube. YouTube could easily dictate this relationship. They choose not to.
They could but if you look at 2017, the stuff YouTube got in trouble from advertiser for is the stuff they got in trouble for from large segments of the public or the media. YouTube doesn't want to take a stand forcing advertisers to accept PewDiePie's Hitler jokes, some guy making fun of feminism, or Logan Paul filming suicide victims. If they do, they'll get destroyed by the media and advertisers will leave anyway.
Health insurance can be divided into the healthy-young-professional-who-pay-premium-and-never-get-sick package and the old-sick-people-costing-us-money package. Now one group is subsidizing the other and the premium the sick people package would have paid is so shit it makes the current premium look like winning the lottery. What to do? Drop the weakest performers.
Airlines make most of their money from first class which is essentially subsidizing all coach tickets? What to do? Just get rid of the average rider.
Politician X spent 1.2B$ campaigning for presidency and most of that money didn't come from private citizens? Now you have a rich voter coalition and a normal citizen coalition and the new normal citizens' influence on politicians would be so shit that the current resemblance to democracy start to look like normal citizens winning the lottery. What to do? Just get rid of universal suffrage.
Is this meant to be a revelation to anyone? Well back in 2007 when ads started appearing it became clear YouTube's remit has shifted. It was a transition that was perhaps fully realised by 2012, when they began to pay out in view hours.
I'm sure they're hoping fervently that this plan leads to more lucrative ad deals considering how knife-edge YouTube's chance at profitability has always seemed.
All the small creators also saturate the search space with all kind of topics and content, which drives people naturally via suggestions to the larger channels with fat advertisers, so the benefit is twofold.
Bet they did the math and they still come on top for now, but social are quite generational and live off the network effect, so there's that.
What do you mean by "trend-chasing and reputation"? I really want to understand this point, but I'm not seeing why an advertiser would care if their ad was shown once on 10 small videos, rather than 10 times on 1 big video. Do advertisers specifically ask for the most possible impressions on the least number of videos?
All of the above dread showing up next to eg some jackass going to a suicide forest and showing a dead person for kicks. Showing ads primarily against bigger videos means youtube has a chance to check the content. ie so-called brand safety.
See how the ad industry views the changes:
http://www.adweek.com/digital/youtube-is-finally-addressing-...
They want whatever is IN. Whatever is BIG. Whatever is the most POPULAR.
It's all about "big names" swirling around the community. "Have you heard of X?" Because "discovering X" and getting a big deal makes you famous.
"Driving profits up 3% over last quarter" is not what a hot shot maverick does. It's not cool.
So finding tens/hundreds/thousands of smaller (but successful!) channels isn't popular. Humans can't process that easily. And when it comes to impressing your boss in that industry, you want bite-size chunks. You want the next Macklemore, not 30 amazing electrical-engineering channels.
Youtube is. their official email explicitly says those changes are for the creators and that they were reached after discussions with said creators.
it's another PR shitfest like only google can do.
edit: ironically, it doesn't solve their content problem. which is advertisers buying into the expensive platinum package and their top content creator saying something racist and sexist.
The advertising industry is hardly a small market; are you arguing that billions of dollars in profit opportunities are just lying there untaken simply because the industry operates on trends? What's stopping the nerds from taking this money?
I think it's more likely that the ad industry simply knows what a liability those small channels present; your product could be associated with all manner of odious content, and YouTube has thus far failed to exclude that at scale.
But nah man that's the old way of doing things.
Still, getting paid something is better than getting paid nothing, right?
1) They should not have made this change retroactive to channels. If you already met the criteria you should be grandfathered into the new program. To terminate monetization entirely gives me no incentive to continue with YouTube.
2) For niche channels, like my own, it can be easy to have the views but difficult to have the subscribers. These two should not be tied together for purposes of monetization.
3) The ones that seem to be causing the biggest headaches on YouTube lately are the bigger creators.
4) Finally, their email to me says that they made this decision based on discussions with creators like me. I would be hardpressed to find a creator "like me" that suggested this. Instead, I suspect, they reached out to the creators with the biggest say and decided to squash the little guys for greater visibility.
I am curious if they will continue to monetize my videos while not sharing the revenue with me or if they will remove ads entirely from my videos.
I completely agree.
I've saved hundreds of dollars [and time] on car maintenance/repairs and plumbing by watching some guy or gal on youtube with very specific information (for a given make/model/year) for example.
I hope these kinds of instructional videos get a reprieve because many many people use them and save tons of money and time [finding manuals and reading them is arduous].
This could be a terrible loss for some audiences as well as the creators who get compensated, slim as it may be.
(I echo your agreement, for what it's worth.)
You're probably referring to the recent events where well-known youtubers have published questionable content and causing an outrage.
But I think this is about the low-quality spammers and copycat content farms that create videos automatically or semi-automatically or just otherwise with low effort, and aggressively optimize using analytics. To make matters worse, a lot of these target children and some of these have even been approved to the "for children" category.
Even though the outrage hasn't been as loud in the media (but there has been some discussion about it), I think it's a much bigger issue for them than a few high profile makers publishing questionable content.
From their point of view, the spam accounts are impossible to distinguish from individuals who have just a few videos or are just getting started. If they allow monetization with no barrier to entry, there will be spam content.
I'm not sure what other alternatives they would have, apart from manually vetting each and every account eligible for monetization.
I do understand that this is a pain in the ass for niche content production. I've been considering starting some niche video production too (I enjoy activities that others enjoy watching) but now it looks like it would take 6-12 months (at least) to get to the point where you could make a dime. For me, this would mean non-trivial time and money investment in equipment. I wouldn't do it to make money, but I don't want to be spending money with not hope of getting any back either.
Not quite:
* Paying for views/subs is a huge issue. The lifetime view count makes it so that you only need to pay once to reap the benefits of YPP. Making the requirement continuous gives less financial incentive.
* Elsagate and content aimed at children was a smaller but frequent controversy last year. I’m guessing they need more time/resources to vet that content and slow down the rate that spammers and low-effort content providers try to game the system.
This is a great observation. They're punishing the small, niche channels for the terrible shit pulled by the huge channels, with Logan Paul just being the most recent and which is probably the precipitating event here.
If Google is doing this with a "let's try and make it harder for idiots like Logan Paul to become successful" motivation, then shame on Google.
The only other reason I can think of is that smaller players have been abusing the system, and we see tons of tiny low-quality popups that film inappropriate stuff and get reported. I think this is more likely, than because of anything Logan Paul did.
This is to deal with the much larger problem of small channels posting awful content in such huge volumes that it's difficult to police, and causing headlines like this one: https://www.buzzfeed.com/charliewarzel/youtubers-made-hundre...
If you post a link we can see the sort of content they’re cutting out.
Edit: Well, all the comments are asking for suscribers.
I published ONE video about how to easily fix a head-scratching computer hardware problem, because there isn't any other guide on it.
I get about 1000 views a month, tons of thank yous and make a few dollars.
Because I won't get 4000 hours of watch time[1], and nobody will subscribe, I'll get squat.
And zero motivation to publish more videos.
The next time I figure out a life-trick[2], I won't bother.
Who subscribes to videos about fixing stuff anyway?
[1] Don't you hate those videos that are 5x longer than necessary? WHY ENCOURAGE THAT?
[2] That fancy French mustard you bought? Don't bother with your hands. You'll need to use a corkscrew to open it.
Youtube makes some strange choices with their monetization. I really wonder why they are so obsessed with finely controlling who can profit from producing good content on their platform. Why not let a) the users and b) the advertisers decide this? Who is losing out here, absent their preemptive interventions?
If they keep this up it might highly incentivize a decentralized video platform with a built-in monetization scheme.
Does a company like Google really need human review on videos? With 10k views, their AI/ML should detect what's risky content or not based on what they know about users.
Here's a great video that we'll see less of: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDB2QVEuy60
A well-produced 36 second video on replacing your Corolla's brake light, rather than a 5 minute video going blah blah blah. And I'll never subscribe.
>Why not let... the advertisers decide this?
The advertiser's have been pretty clear they want YouTube to be the content police. That's what the big advertiser revolt a few months ago was about.
I'd guess it's some sort of legal/accounting move, something beneath the surface. Doesn't really make much sense otherwise.
Most videos like yours aren't made to make $2 extra each month, they're made because people wanted to share the information. Youtube provides a platform, allowing people to distribute videos, for free. The most prolific content producers are given a cut of the profit, or make their advertising deals.
So they did an analysis and determined that only 6,000 or so of the products they carried sold in any significant amount. The other 12,000 were niche items that sold in small quantities and made little money.
Before they nixed the other 9,000 products though, the company decided to make one additional analysis, of who bought what in what combination. And it discovered all those little items were being bought in small quantities by people who bought large quantities of the big items.
The analysis further determined that if the supermarket nixed those 9,000 niche products, it would no longer be the "one stop shop" for its customers. Those customers would only be able to buy some of what they needed at the supermarket, and would need to buy the rest elsewhere. If a competing supermarket carried all of what a customer needed, that customer would eventually learn to do all his shopping at that supermarket to save the hassle of needing to journey to 2+ places to get what he needed.
After this final analysis, the supermarket chain decided to keep almost all the products it kept on its shelves, eliminating only 200 or 300 products, instead of 9,000.
It was not so much that the supermarket was very nice and charitable to niche spices and exotic Asian sauces and imported curries and whatnot.
Rather, it was that the supermarket realized that if its customers could not find everything they wanted on its shelves, they would eventually find everything they wanted on a competitor's shelves instead.
In YouTube's case, no good competitor presently exists. But a big part of the reason why is because YouTube has sucked all the oxygen out of the video hosting and streaming niche by being a one-stop shop. If it stops being that, there will be a lot more oxygen in that niche again.
(that said, I do not think demonetizing videos with low view counts / subscriber numbers constitutes injecting oxygen back into the market. "Not letting" niche video creators user their platform, however, probably would)
Your motivation for uploading that one video was money? Just wondering, because if that was the case I'd expect you to have more than one video.
And 1000 views a month is nothing. Certainly not enough to expect any kind of worthwhile revenue.
From googles perspective it's because they don't care about the user, and are cowtowing to the advertisers. Longer videos mean more ads, which means more $$$.
I wish google had never bought youtube... I knew they would ruin it eventually.
I think the real discussion here though is more meta than just google... we have allowed advertisers to gain way too much power on the internet, and if we aren't careful they will ruin us just like they did newspapers.
This isn't just advertisers though, this is the general business model of internet companies. Here is the pattern:
1) Create cool new thing, with no ads, no tracking. Users love it and it spreads like wildfire.
2) Slowly boil the frog. Start tracking users and selling user data to third parties, justified under esoteric EULAs and TOS. Start small, unobtrusive ads.
3) Make the ads more prominent, more frequent, and harder to skip/ignore.
4) Allow your platform to be used as a corporate promotion tool that's more like sockpuppet central than regular advertising. Bots talking to bots, subtle corporate products in memes, etc.
5) Now that you have completely aliented the userbase, now is the time to ramp up all of the above and then go public, ride the boom wave up, and at peak sell a massively overvalued company to some dumbass group/company/people, run away with the cash, and take video of your product as it burns to the ground.
The users will stick around until someone else starts at 1 and does the same thing but under a different name.
If Google hadn't bought YouTube, YouTube would no longer exist.
Why not? You're posting on HN without financial reward.
Me. I subscribed to a few DIY home repair channels, plus a channel on modding a Mark7 Golf R.
You get a centralized broker. In Google's case, between sellers and viewers, who are cast as buyers. This all happens under the shadow of "video content". Google feeds off of the creativity of everyone on YouTube, its own Hollywood. Then they decide who is worthy of reaping the rewards with their rules.
Something as simple as an organic comment promoting a product can actually drive real sales, and the John Doe that posts such a comment gets zilch. Why does he get nothing? Is it too difficult for Google to index all of John Doe's comments, crunch the impressions and counts and then give him the few dollars he would have accrued over the past few weeks? This should all just "work" without having to download Google Surveys, or whatever their community feedback/rewards app is.
If they can index the web, they can do some math on behalf of me and count me in their little MLM payouts equation ffs. /ranty This is the perfect move to put more YouTubers past the tipping point.
YouTube is dead for the ______th time. Now YouTubers will finally move to ______ with monetization strategy _______ and we will enter the golden age of online video.
I agree with the other (downvoted) poster - YouTube has no where to go. They literally have no competition, and bled billions of dollars for years to get where they are today. No one is lining up bleed money on user generated content like Google did.
If you think creators should be compensated for the work they put out anymore than YouTube is doing, then build that platform. Until then no other platform has come close to actually writing checks to actual creators - even Facebook has seemingly decided to not touch that landmine with a 50ft pole - and they were supposed to "dethrone" YouTube with their billions of minutes watched.
It's amazing people think that YouTube is screwing over creators when no other platform has even come close to what YouTube is doing at scale. Facebook/Twitter - heck even most ad networks give you zilch for putting content online.
YouTube isn't just deciding who reaps the rewards, their the only content platform sharing the rewards.
Moves like this are inevitable and allow those smaller companies to make some headway in the market.
Of course, if you incentivise this, you destroy comments entirely as they fill with people pretending to be organic product recommendation.
I (and I think quite a lot of other people) devalue information when someone has been paid to bring that recommendation to us, because it's in their interest and not ours.
Only if it's free to post, right? If no one has skin in the game, then you'll get spammers. Consider a simple system where people pay 10 gold to post and 1 gold to vote. At the end of the month, the pot of gold is paid out to the top posts and the voters who made the best bets.
I am not a game theorist/economist, but perhaps there is a set of rules such that every actor in the system is rewarded for their proper usage of the system, otherwise they get penalized, but this is only possible if it requires stake to be in the system, which is impossible in "free and always will be".
It needs to be expensive to go against the community, which is why actions should cost a nominal amount of money. If this is the case, dividends or incentives could be paid to users for participating in a productive protocol.
(Edit: Of course, there will always be the people who have tons of money and can manipulate the system, but how is this different than people with tons of money who buy account farms and drive impressions, e.g. fake news, ads, etc.?)
Isn't Youtube actually trying something like this, where community members can get paid to be moderators, essentially?
It's difficult to take your comment seriously when your opening line contains so much fail. YouTube isn't going anywhere but up. It has no rival and never will.
Likewise, it's difficult to take your comment seriously with this beast of a closing line ;)
I turned on monetization a few years ago and I think I've made maybe $20 so far. For a while, I actually considered investing time in making more videos with the idea that the present value of a large number of videos might be pretty considerable over the long term (say 30 years or so).
A few years ago one of my most popular videos (tens of thousands of views) was flagged as being 'not family friendly'. The video was a screen capture of me scrolling through a notepad.exe list of documentary titles with no audio. It was just a list of nature/space documentaries that were already on YouTube. Nothing offensive or controversial.
I guess this is the final nail in the coffin for my YouTube career.
Now they did eventually reverse it, but it just shows you that when you are dependent on X, you are dependent on X. It could be better or worse, but it's still a middle man in the system.
You could go to a straight donation model like using Paypal, but that limits your global subscriber network since Paypal isn't used everywhere and you will also be missing out on the platform benefits. Meaning if someone is donating already on Patron they will more likely donate to someone else. Likewise if someone is subscribed to one channel on Youtube they will more likely subscribe to a second.
I think ultimately there is a trade off here where you have to understand what you are exchanging in terms of freedom, control, and dependence, with the platform you choose to use.
1000 subscribers is going to be impossible if your content is niche.
That guy who put together that excellent 40 minute step-by-step video on fixing my garage-door opener (plastic gears, seriously?)... why would I subscribe?
Youtube is pivoting to being a TV-replacement.
Yeah the subscriber part is going to shut down my partner status. I'm not an active youtuber by any means, but I do have one long video which last year generated 10000 hours of watchtime and $100 as my ad revenue share. However because I don't pump out new videos I only have around 150 subs. Fortunately I don't depend on this income, but it does feel unjust. Especially if it's only about stopping paying me my share and the ads will still appear.
So only <1% of impacted channels might be materially affected.
$25/year for a video that took <1 hour to make is an excellent investment.
For sure some people will continue regardless but there will be a few who also won't pursue the growth curve [making more quality fixit videos, for example] because getting the traction is getting too hard for their niche.
This change removes that bootstrapping mechanism.
It reminds me of the time my bank canceled my credit card because I always back before any interest has accrued, I wasn't degenerate enough for them to make margins. Totally short sighted because, there is nothing to say I wouldn't need emergency cash tomorrow.
Likewise with youtube there is nothing to prevent todays small fry producing super engaging content tomorrow. After all, how does one get to the big time without going through mediocrity first?
Other video hosting platforms, such as the vimeo, suddenly got a lot more attractive.
It does nothing to address the ongoing grievances of YouTubers about monetisation. At this stage, it seems like getting paid is a complete crapshoot. Sometimes your videos will be classified as "not suitable for most advertisers", despite not breaching any of YouTube's policies. Sometimes your video will be taken down or demonetized by a completely bogus copyright claim. Sometimes you'll get lucky and actually see some ad revenue for a video. If you've got a problem, you're stuck with the usual Google tech support system of "personally know someone who works at the Googleplex, otherwise you're SOL".
Pretty much every sane YouTuber is moving towards a Patreon-first business model and treating ad revenue as a bonus. If someone solves the discoverability problem for videos hosted on other platforms, YouTube are done. Do not pass go, do not collect $200, lose all of your content creators because you've treated them like criminals for years.
I had ads disabled on my Youtube channel but was forced into the partnership program just so I could link to my website in a card.
Now those cards are going to disappear which means it's extremely unlikely someone is going to find my site since it's only listed in the description. As a content provider this makes me less interested in using their platform.
I'm only at 2,000 hours watched and 366 subs which isn't remotely close to their new threshold considering those are life time stats. The 4,000 hours and 1,000 subs have to be less than 12 months old.
The weird thing is, the channels with the largest amount of subscribers are the ones who are the most risky to advertisers. I don't follow Youtube drama but didn't some kid recently video record a corpse with tens of millions of subscribers, and now advertisers are ripping into Youtube.
That one video from 1 person with tons of subs is responsible for more negative advertising press than hundreds of thousands of people with smaller channels.
> Accordingly, this email serves as 30 days notice that your YouTube Partner Program terms are terminated.
feels like a pretty big fuck you.
It is a little insincere to use the 99% of the channels number here. Vast majority of the channels from Youtube makes barely better than nothing because the long tail effect. What is actually interesting is, how many of the channels that previously make around a sizable chunk of money from Youtube, like say 1000 dollars, now will not qualify. I bet it won't be as harmless as Youtube want people to believe here, but they probably believe it is inevitable casualty.
To be honest these new thresholds seem entirely too low to do any good. The spammers and scammers can easily reach the thresholds. But small scale operators who aren’t interested in gaming the system will be the hardest hit.
If you wish to compete with Youtube, consider a feature match of the followings:
1. Fast streaming, everywhere, on phones and browsers.
2. Super High resolution videos.
3. Huge content reserves.
4. Good search and discovery experience.
5. The ability to battle spams and handle external copyright claim to avoid lawsuit.
6. Robust ad platform and sales and the infrastructure to sustain operations.
Youtube has achieved this because they are part of Google, they enjoy all kinds of technological advantage: Storage/Serving/Spam filtering/Video encoding/Machine Learning, and years and years of accumulation of data, losing billions of dollars while getting constant cash injection from Google.
It is hard to replicate Youtube, heck, even Chinese doesn't succeed to copy one of their own. None of the video streaming websites in China is exactly the model of Youtube.
8. An ability to pay for bandwith costs without going broke as soon as your service starts to grow.
I think YT is in a unique position where the scale of your service has to be massive before your costs become manageable. This reason for this is b/c you need to operate as a network peer and have the ability to do edge caching. The vast majority of players in this space and startups simply cannot compete on that level.
One could probably mitigate high operating costs by charging for the service or limiting who can post on the site. But I think these two factors greatly contribute to YouTube's monopoly status.
If you went to Amazon videos for all of your video-consumption, Amazon would know exactly how to target you without having to pay Google.
Twitch has been attempting to compete in the video game space by adding uploads and comment systems on videos, but Twitch has its share of problems such as a haphazard dashboard and a terribly designed mobile app.
Vid.me was around for a while but recently shut down.
It's not a very competitive space imo.
But Vimeo's Samsung Smart TV app broke last year, and they haven't fixed it in months. They blame Samsung, and they're probably right, but Netflix, YouTube & Amazon have continued updating their apps during those months. It just feels like Vimeo isn't giving their product the attention that it needs.
In the meantime, download anything you enjoy today, because it may not be there tomorrow.
You basically need your own data centers and wholesale bandwidth, aka scale.
I think that YouTube has reached Google levels of optimization. Sure, it could be better, but not better enough that people are willing to switch.
Google isn't removing any videos, but they are using the demonetized videos as bait to get you to watch their monetized videos.
Basically niche videos will just be replaced by other people who will find ways to monetize it...or not even motivated by money at all but just to put content out there and for people to enjoy.
So far, all the comments on HN are about how they won't get paid, they will be replaced by people who do it without monetary rewards or saavy enough to monetize through external revenue sources.
Yeah, if there is an adequate substitute for your monetized product provided by an ever-refreshing pool of people willing to work for free, you're in a precarious position. Pretty much independently of the behavior of any middleman.
And now that I think about it, fake view time doesn't really seem difficult to put up either. The time is coming where you'll pay to have you video viewed so you can be payed to have your video viewed, looks a lot of fun :D
The first thing that came to my mind is that I can't imagine it is terribly difficult to purchase bot subscriptions. Their policy changes to focus on relevant watched hours in a set amount of time could, and probably will, open new demand for purchasing illegitimate traffic as well. Same game, different rules.
I wonder if this policy will be easier to spoof than pure views alone? Surely the risk has been evaluated by the policy makers but I am interested to see how things pan out, and what counter measures against bots/spam they may take as a result.
Since they've decided they need to vet all channels before ads are shown, and they can't do that to every channel, they've had to set an arbitrary view/subscriber limit. But now they're going to lose out on ad revenue for millions of previously-monetised videos, while still having to host them for free.
Ironically though, most of the controversy is from large content creators that won't be effected by this so, who knows.
How many dollars does it cost them to vet a channel?
My 3 minute video makes me ~.3 cents per view. It's actually less than 3 minutes, most don't watch the whole thing. 4000 hours in a year = $240 revenue. So, advertisers are paying $360.
If you have just 2000 hours of views per year, Google is throwing away $60/year in revenue.
My linked gmail account alone with 10+ years of data should scream legitimacy alone.
They tried to crowdsource it with YouTube Heroes. I guess that didn't end up being enough.
This is bad news for advertisers too. Say your product is in demand by people outside the supposed ideal target audience then you won't be able to reach them.
Or if you do not care who buys your product so long as it sells. What if half of your audience are watching stuff deemed to be not monetisable? It doesn't matter if you vote Trump or not so long as you could drink more cola.
Thank god for that.
Really her appointment was nepotism and she'd already have been replaced if she wasn't so close with Larry and Sergey.
Edit: Made all of my videos private.
For me as a consumer the main value youtube provides is its recommendation system for discovering [long-tail] content. Why not have a "show me more videos like this" button for paying subscribers out of which the video creator gets 10c or something.
Youtube is slowly becoming just another shitty mega broadcast outlet like NBC or netflix producing corporate-sanctioned mainstream content of little relevance to anyone.
Somebody has to find a way to make longtail content sustainable. The fact that people do sign up to pay into Patreon or pay to Twitchers demonstrates that this is possible.
Corporate involvement in content creation is poisonous.
Actors can and will still make fake accounts to remove traffic from the monetized accounts (and therefore from YouTube).
YouTube needs better search results.
At least Spotify/Apple still pays musicians per stream. The small musicians on youtube are no longer getting that privilege. Big Music(tm) screws the little guys again.
(I know this is more than about indie musicians, but this is the effect I am seeing most in relation to my usage of Youtoob)
They aren't solely to blame but I would wager they are a prevailing interest at mountain view and in the valley.
A smaller number of dedicated fans are willing to pay more money directly to the creators that they enjoy and connect with.
How does this affect their relationship with advertisers more than YouTube Red, if at all?
what about the expenses incurred for youtube for hosting small/niche channels? If its reputation that youtube is looking for, they can ask some third party to advertise on the smaller contents with a 33/33/33 split of revenue with content creator/advertiser/youtube.
Is this an annual check? Or is it a one-time enrollement eligibility?
The 4000 hours is a big entry bar... it’s already hard enough to gain subscribers. Indeed the small creators - those who get maybe 5k views per video + 1000 subscriber + 5 mins videos won’t be making money??
EDIT: 4000? That's 70 hours per week.
I won't wonder if we see a solution soon to provide fraudulent subscribers like Instagram/Twitter ecosystem has. (not sure if it exists)
And then I will wait for Google to fight the subscriber (vote) ring pattern.
It doesn't seem fair or to promote high quality content. Seems pushing more for low quality prank videos à la Jack Paul and co.
Watch the video and buy the parts all in one place.
Give the creator a commission on the parts/tools sales.
I suppose I was a waste of time to begin with (for them).
They’re trying to reward longer term contributors whom have lower viewer counts.
Basically people who continue to contribute content even though YouTube hasn’t rewarded them; they’re contributing because they have a small following of dedicated viewers.
2. The new requirement is 4000 annual hours and 1000 subs.
3. The default limit on a new YouTube account is videos of at maximum 15 minutes.
So for a new/low profile user, they're effectively requiring at least 16k annual views vs the previous 10k lifetime. Also, many videos are shorter than 15 minutes, so make that 20k. Except a view is counted for 10% of the video, not 100% so really the number is much larger again.
This isn't changing the numbers to favour smaller active channels over small channels that have just been around long enough, it's massively raising the requirements however you look at it.
I have put out 10-12 videos over the last few years, with 14k views and 2 subscribers, though frequent content and plugs in the video will obviously get a higher subscribe rate. I don't care in this case, I never bothered to turn monetisation on, but I can see someone who'd put more effort in more recently feeling like it's wasted.
I produce videos on using Cubase, and teaching it IRL was my main source of income until September last year (I got made redundant from 2 schools I worked at). The channel is a useful ad for the book I have written on the subject of Cubase and Music Technology [2], and has got me some sales - I don't have exact figures, but I've had a few people say they saw the channel, then the book ads, and then bought the book. The book sales in total are nothing remarkable (a year of sales is about a month's earnings from the jobs I no longer have), but better than nothing, and mean it's actually worthwhile putting the considerable amount of time needed into the book to update it each year when a new version of Cubase comes out.
The YT channel made $135 in the last year. Nothing to write home over, but it means that once a year I can buy a plugin that I wouldn't have done otherwise. A niche channel such as mine isn't ever going to earn real money, but it's a nice side bonus to get some spending money once a year from it - I put the videos up because they are a bit of an advert for my skills, and because I've got a lot of positive comments from people who have found the videos helpful. But I would feel somewhat aggrieved if I wasn't making this small amount of money, and felt that I was being profited from for making content for free. I know about the hosting costs, etc., but I'm sure YT makes money overall.
However, I had another video on my personal channel which had a MAME cabinet I made using a Raspberry Pi - back in the day when this wasn't that common. It made it onto the official Pi blog [3] - along with a write-up that I did for it, and currently has 180,000 views. I wouldn't have seen a penny from that if the new rules were in place, and that the new rules will stop the 'one hit wonders' who create something that goes truly viral (Charlie/Finger, etc) from earning anything is a little concerning to me - I'm sure YouTube will still place adverts on them (?), but if you're a one-off, then you get nothing. Won't this just lead to people sending potentially viral videos to a channel who specialise in redistribution who will take a cut of the revenue?
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/c/musictechtuition
[2] - http://tinyurl.com/cubase9book
[3] - https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/guest-blog-6-mame-cabinet-b...
