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Comment by CryoLogic | Hacker News Reader

I run a popular YouTube educational channel (in the top 10 for it's niche) and have had some serious issues with YouTube that have nearly made me quit.

I had a young (pre-teen) boy who filed copyright claims on several of my tutorials, and they where taken down instantly and took months to resolve via email. I lost about $1500 in revenues which was never returned.

Beyond that, YouTube is taking a ~50% cut of your ad revenue AND any donation revenue on the site which seems pretty extreme. They also don't do good when it comes to new content discovery, as the YT search promotes mostly popular content (basically, bad for new creators).

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YT recently made a change where they escrow revenue during disputes as opposed to just turning it off.

http://youtubecreator.blogspot.com/2016/04/improving-content...

True, it's pretty recent https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0a6K1NiUY2s

Do you have information about the 50% cut of donations?

This page says that for non-profits, Youtube actually pays the fees themselves so 100% of the money goes to the target.

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6327868?hl=en

And for Fan Funding it is a 5% + $0.21 fee.

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6052077?hl=en

They are probably confusing YouTube with Twitch

>I had a young (pre-teen) boy who filed copyright claims on several of my tutorials, and they where taken down instantly and took months to resolve via email.

I have a feeling no (big) video hosting site will be immune to this. This is a legal problem not a technology problem.

>Beyond that, YouTube is taking a ~50% cut of your ad revenue AND any donation revenue on the site which seems pretty extreme.

Yeah, I'm not sure what a 'fair' split is, but hosting and serving video is heavier than apps, and app-store collect 30% of revenue. With more competition that ratio may change in favor of content creators.

>They also don't do good when it comes to new content discovery, as the YT search promotes mostly popular content

Again, I think this is less YouTube and more the nature of the beast. You're in a typical long-tail market - where you compete with millions of other creators, with low barriers to entry. No search or discovery is going to get it right.

Google is notorious for not having 'human" customer service though. Their philosophy of automating everything means flagged videos will get removed, and then the content creator get directed to a community forum to vent.

This has happened to me before too.

Flagged videos aren't removed automatically; a human reviews them first. It would probably be better if it was more automated, because humans make mistakes and machines don't get tired after a long day of reviewing videos.

"YouTube staff review flagged videos 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and videos that violate our Community Guidelines are removed from YouTube.

...

Flagged videos are not automatically taken down by the flagging system. If a video doesn't violate our guidelines, no amount of flagging will change that, and the video will stay on the site."

Source: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2802027?hl=en

> >I had a young (pre-teen) boy who filed copyright claims on several of my tutorials, and they where taken down instantly and took months to resolve via email. I have a feeling no (big) video hosting site will be immune to this. This is a legal problem not a technology problem.

It's a basic support problem in the case of youtube. They only just started a program to actually give support to content creators.

Aren't some of those issues related to the DMCA copyright laws so any other company would have to conform to them? Also, I think Twitch(which is owned by Amazon) has the same 50% cut as youtube so I doubt whatever new streaming service Amazon comes up with will have a different ratio.

YT claim and contentID system is not DMCA. It is entirely voluntary and governed by googles 'whatever the f we want' rules.

If you are popular on Twitch you can get at least 60/40 split.

They've finally revised their policies about how those copyright claims work revenue-wise, but it took them far too long.

Only in cases where the video remains online. It wouldn't apply to the OP's case as no revenue was being generated at all.

They've added escrow for situations where the video remains viewable, but ad revenue is claimed.

OP says his video was struck from the site entirely. Escrow wouldn't have helped him.

Was the copyright claim against you a joke?

No the kid had similar tutorial videos and I think he wanted to be above me in search.

Were there any repercussions for his account?

Doubtful. YouTube doesn't punish false claims. It's one of the reasons content creators are upset with YouTube.

Wouldn't this also be really easy to game? Create a new account solely to make the copyright complaints?

Not if there were simple measures put in place to stop new or otherwise unused accounts from making copyright complaints. Just to be thorough there could be an outlet for unregistered users that had a higher threshold of evidence required before taking the alleged infringing video down.

Kind of funny how it takes more effort to earn the privilege of downvoting on hn than it takes to make a legal statement (perjury yada yada) but I imagine adding these constraints will lead to a lawsuit before you can spell class action. Even if the lawsuit ultimately fails, it costs a bunch to defend it. In the face of effective zero competition, how can they justify the expense/risk to their corporate owners?

Yes, it's one of the major issues with Youtube right now, even with then putting funds into escrow. It's also an opportunity to have fun, such as people uploading videos to deliberately trigger DMCA claims from multiple parties so that they can fight over it.

Well, the law does not allow YouTube to "punish" false DMCA takedowns, so in those cases there's not much they can do. It's up to the person who had their content taken down to file a lawsuit if they want the person filing the takedown notice to face punishment (which is one of the broken aspects of the DMCA law).

YouTube does punishes false claims through their Content ID system, though, as that's a system they control. From their website, "Content owners who repeatedly make erroneous claims can have their Content ID access disabled and their partnership with YouTube terminated."

YouTube says that, I've seen no evidence that they've ever actually punished a false claim, or even prevented that false claim from happening again.

For example, a video of mine was ContentID claimed for a public domain piece of classical music. I successfully contested the claim (the scammers give up quickly because their bread-and-butter is the 95% of victims who YouTube scared away from the "contest claim" button, or who never revisit the video page after posting). About a month later, I re-edited the same video and re-uploaded it, and I got the same fraudulent strike from the same scammer that I'd already successfully contested.

this comment isn't meant to be snarky, but as someone who deals with google as a vendor, it sounds like pretty typical google across the board, including the poor customer service.

> I lost about $1500 in revenues which was never returned.

I've always wondered how much people make broadcasting on Youtube, could you possibly provide any insight into this (# videos you've posted, views stats, revenues, etc), or point me to anywhere one could read up on this?

It varies, heavily. There are many calculators out there that try to answer this question, just drop "youtube revenue calculator" into your favorite search engine and a bunch will come up.

Take the estimates with a grain of salt, but they'll give you an idea of what's involved. I've seen some content creators laugh at the numbers that are predicted for them, and others have shown surprise at their accuracy. So again, it varies.

https://socialblade.com/youtube/ Is a pretty good tool for this.

I have some friends who are "professional YouTubers" (big enough to quit their day-jobs, not big enough to buy a Ferrari), who have told me they use that site for refernce. The estimate it gives has a pretty wide range, but it's typically in the middle of the two extremes. Just searched for one of my friends, and averaging the estimate gives just slightly more than what he's making in a month from YT.

Of course, it's all really variable and depends on the size of your channel. In January he had a video go viral and made as much as he did in all of 2015, but has since gone back to his more regular numbers (growing a little every month).

Wow, I've always wondered what someone like markiplier makes. Even at the absolute low end, that's a crazy amount of money.

DCTC toy channel, taking your middle of the road estimate = $6 million / yr.....unbelievable.

One little fact to shed some light on the scale of money flowing. Microsoft was caught paying under the table for shilling Xbox one exclusives, FTC released documents mentioning $15-30K _per one short video_ from Youtubers in 50-100K subs range.

YT ad revenue is nothing compared from what you can milk while astroturfing.

> I lost about $1500 in revenues which was never returned.

apparently (according to a podcast I listen to) they are actually dealing with this. I guess before if you filed a copyright claim you could just monetize and make off with the money on a video?

AFAICT, previously YouTube would turn off advertisements on any video in conflict, so nobody (including YouTube) made any money on a copyright claim.

Yup. I really don't get it. YouTube has so much potential, they have so much value and potential value in their content creators yet they continue to treat them generally very poorly. More proof that google is just bad at customer relationships. There are about a zillion very straightforward to implement things that google could be doing to significantly further YouTube and provide better service to their creators as well as build their revenue, but they haven't done any of them. It's maddening.

If YouTube is such a crap fest, why not use an alternative like Vimeo?

Not the original commenter, but:

1) Discovery's huge. People discover your video if it's on YouTube through YouTube similarity display, search, and similar. 2) Vimeo's still plagued with incompatibility issues. Every time I've done a major launch of a video on Vimeo I've had complaints. 3) People are just more comfortable with YouTube.

Overall, as a rule of thumb as an indie filmmaker, I'd expect to get 4x the views from a YouTube release that I would from a Vimeo release.

Vimeo doesn't have the audience, and it's not looking for the type of content most youtube channels create.

Vimeo has a reverse business model from YouTube, creators must pay Vimeo to host their videos. They also do not have an ad-revenue sharing program for creators to make money back from.

Brady Haran and CGP Grey discuss their YouTube business and their gripes with the platform on Hello Internet. http://www.hellointernet.fm/podcast/58

YouTube is a lot more than just a place to upload a video. It has discoverability, an ad platform, social...

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