Hacker News Reader

Comment by qwertyuiop924 | Hacker News Reader

Google still doesn't know what it's doing with YouTube. As a longtime consumer of YouTube videos, and somebody who is actually inside of the YouTube community, I understand that. The "Advertiser Friendly" policy was universally mocked for being absurd, and it is. Then there's the indication that it was behind the inexplicable monetization drops on major channels a few months back. The YouTube team has been seen to do some good stuff as well, like the Community tab, but if they want to keep the communities they've built, and the near monopoly on online video they have, they need to get out of their ivory tower, and actually understand that when they make decisions they have real effects on the monetary income of real people, and that when they change their algorithm or site design, people actually go out of business.

However, at least in this case, they're taking a step in the right direction, no matter how small.

View on HN

The policy wasn't universally mocked. Maybe you're in some specific subcommunity, but browse around a little. The opinion I heard most was that the policy is understandable (there is such a thing as advertiser-unfriendly content) but people want more transparency from YouTube so they can work the system effectively.

That's true, but the point that many made (and is correct) is that many forms of content cannot be advertised upon under the new policy. In fact, depending upon how YouTube interprets the policy, they can probably block monetization on any video they want, and still claim to be merely enforcing the policy. Finally, it's quite unlikely that this policy will be implemented fairly. If you want evidence, merely know that one of the most viewed videos on YouTube is Nicky Minaj's "Anaconda," which is rife with policy violations, but is on a VEVO channel, and thus technically published by part of YouTube itself.

Do you think they'll be blocking monetization on that?

No, it's not evidence, but until serious enforcing happens, it's the best I can do, and I think it's a reasonable assumption to make.

That always amazes me how pop music passes it.

Search for rap song Coco. It's about being love with cocaine and violence and it shows me Kia car ads with families before the video. And some semi amateur authors who TALKED about true crime events were banned from the YouTube adsense partnership.

It's because YouTube has a partnership with the record labels.

I don't see that as inconsistent. The term is 'advertiser friendly'. Plenty of advertisers are happy to be associated with popular artists because their popularity gives the advertiser cover. Equally, they might not want to be associated with a small-time true crime channel.

The term is not really advertiser friendly. Adsense (also YouTube) TOS makes it very clear ALL the content needs to be family friendly to begin with. Of course, I understand big labels are given an exception but it doesn't make it less hypocritical.

Why is it hypocritical to cut a deal with certain important clients? Even Stallman recommends selling license exceptions to GPL'd code.

Generally speaking, any startup on this site will give preferential treatment to a $50,000/month customer than to a $5/month customer.

Even your bank will treat you differently if you want to open an account with a deposit of $2 million than if you want to deposit $25.

I don't think "hypocritical" is the right word, since Youtube isn't making a moral judgment. They'd take any money they could if their partners would let them.

I understand how world and business work, no problem. I just lined out this is the reason they claim for banning those YT accounts from revenue. I have personally no problem understanding it, but it doesn't make it any less hypocritical.

The same with Google best the practices on showing content first, ads after, same time their search is covered with ads and the content is below fold.

...and the same with google heavily advocating web standards, while breaking their website for firefox users for the 16th time.

This is a direct avenue for advertisers to control what content is actually available on YouTube. If you want to make money on YouTube you need to make content that advertisers like first and foremost or you get to make no money at all. It's exactly the control they had during the television era. Smells like weak reason as a guise to gain control over the content presented on the site entirely.

That's always been true, it's just now moreso. This is why creators of content that is offensive (The Jimquisition), niche (Longer videos from people like CGPGrey), or that just want less strings attached are flocking en masse to direct sponsorship (a very old idea, common in the podcasting world, and perhaps most famously enacted by Rhett and Link), or more often to a donation/membership model à la NPR (typically through Vessel or Patreon, this is most successfully done by Crash Course, a show that has a massive budget and is largely payed for by viewers), or to other websites and networks (NormalBoots, HiddenBlock, Channel Awesome (formerly TGWTG) - anywhere that can get other advertisers, or pay the bills somehow).

If I use Google display network to show my ads, there is no category to exclude videos promoting violence and gang life. There is no way I can exclude that specific video.

What do they gain from removing advertising from any video? Any money you make is money they make.

Another thing you need to realize is that this is all automated, they don't come and manually remove monetization from your video. Yes, the algorithm could potentially be wonky, but again, it's in their best interest for it to be good.

Everything that has been spouted so far has been senseless propaganda and none of it is backed by any actual facts.

They would gain more advertisers paying them money to advertise with them.

Yes, it's automated, but there's some degree of oversight. Once again, there's no way they didn't realize that videos uploaded by one of their departments violated their monetization agreements.

And it's not senseless propaganda. It's already starting to happen, or is likely to happen.

Have you been paying attention to the YouTube scene? Like, at all?

>> What do they gain from removing advertising from any video? Any money you make is money they make.

> They would gain more advertisers paying them money to advertise with them.

I don't really understand what you're saying here. Why would more advertisers pay them money if less videos had advertisements?

Advertisers will pay them more money if they can be confident their adverts won't be placed on videos where they would negatively impact the advertiser's brand.

So you're telling me that this probably significant percentage of Youtube creators whose videos fully adhere to the rules and have never had any problems could potentially gain a lot more money for their hard work if these few rare cases decides to clean up their videos a bit to follow rules that have been there for years and that they've agreed to when signing up?

Sounds like a fantastic deal to me, and I don't see why all those other creators should be punished just so that a few can gain money making content that is against the stated rules.

And again, this isn't censorship, if that content is really important to you, it will still be there for everyone to see, just not monetized.

This time, you make a valid point, although I'm still not sure if you really understand the landscape.

The problem is, it's more than just a few rare cases: everyone from VEVO, to tiny channels, to the biggest channels on youtube, have been breaking these rules for years. And even if they don't think they have been, you can probably find violating content somewhere on the channel if you look hard enough, because the new rules are pretty broad. And the fact that the rules aren't being enforced equally makes it all the more BS, even if it's YouTube's prerogative to do so anyways.

Honestly they could have just left youtube alone, let it generate ad revenue in return for hosting videos, and that's it. No need for youtube red, youtube go, "advertiser friendly" crap. Just keep running youtube and use that revenue to fund other projects.

Apparently, Google disagrees. YouTube hosts a massive amount of video, so they may be right.

I actually don't think YouTube Red was necessarily a bad idea: People get to skip ads, and play videos offline/with their phone locked. We use that money to pay creators and fund premium content.

To counter, if you want to support the creators, it's better to subscribe via Vessel or Patreon that it is to get a YouTube Red subscription...

I've heard a few times already that Google isn't actually making a revenue off of YouTube and rather just paying to keep it alive. No idea, if that's true, though. There's also the consideration that having a YouTube-account gets you into the whole Google-ecosystem, so might actually pay off on other ends.

Still doesn't explain, though, why they keep making such bad investments...

I'm amazed they had to go all the way to India to figure this out. But I'm often amazed at how little Google understand "social." The cynical side of me wonders if their misunderstanding is all intentional.

Given how much they stand to lose if YouTube loses its position, it can't be. It's like Nintendo's LP policy: they're literally throwing away money.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com