Google acquires FameBit to connect YouTube creators with marketers | Hacker News Reader

Google acquires FameBit to connect YouTube creators with marketers

techcrunch.com

87 pointsventurefizz29 comments

One thing that is impressive about YouTube versus other social media platforms has been YouTube's willingness to help content creators to make money.

There's a path for people with a minimum of marketing savvy to start making revenue off of their videos.

Compare this to Facebook/Instagram which requires individuals to find other ways of getting paid while those platforms profit directly off of your content.

Makes me wish for a "cooperative" Facebook where all content creators (posts, pictures, etc) get a slice of the ad revenue much like YouTube.

I sometimes think of an advanced state of facebook where people actually get paid by how many legit likes they get. This would give value to likes like some sort of currency.

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https://steemit.com/

One thing that I have noticed recently is that some youtube creators from the gaming genre are moving to twitch because twitch stream subscribers are an even more direct way to make money.

YouTube has an equivalent of that too: https://support.google.com/youtubegaming/answer/6304294?hl=e...

Twitch, unlike YouTube, has a ton of experience dealing with gamers. They have direct contact with their streamers, organize events (TwitchCon, esports events etc). The Amazon acquisition has been incredible to twitch so far, too. The Amazon Prime/Twitch Prime promotion has gotten streamers a ton of income and has been overwhelmingly welcomed by the twitch community.

YouTube, in the mean time, has a broken DMCA/content-id/copyright claim system - a constant source of complaints with no support channel to actually help.

I find it fascinating how, in YouTube competition, where Vimeo and DailyMotion are failing, Twitch is succeeding because they are simply focused on their strength and advantage, rather than try to just provide the same service with a nonexistant community. And now with Amazon behind them, they have the money to double down on it.

I'd be surprised if twitch didn't get strong armed into doing a similar DMCA content id copyright deal to stave off attacks from riaa and friends. The issue there is a legal one :/

Is Vimeo failing? I don't know much about it, but doesn't it have its own niche?

It does, same as DailyMotion. But it failed as a YouTube competitor.

Watching the scene, it looks like some creators recently moved back from Twitch to Youtube.

Facebook has to solve the content piracy problem that they have. Drives me crazy when an original video goes viral and then you see other pages upload the video as their own..

I wish there were human editors matching videos, giving credit to the original author's page/upload. At least tackle the videos with 1,000,000+ views..

Yes, absolutely. If I share a video on FB I always take the time to try and dig-up the original source. It usually ends-up being on YouTube. Not that hard to do. I wish FB didn't obfuscate and people took the time to do this. If anything because it might represent revenue for the author and they deserve to receive it.

For the life of me I can't understand why anyone would down-vote my comment. Please educate me, what's wrong with my statement? I don't get it.

FB has no reason to ban it.

Time for everyone to start uploading RIAA and MPAA content.

I guess it should be relatively easy ( for FB ) to do something automated to detect copied videos - at least to where the later videos uploaded would have to do the same kind of tricks you see on youtube that decrease video quality when people are trying to sneak in copyrighted content (tricks like putting a big frame with some pictures on it around the actual video content).

On edit: take back relatively easy and say pretty doable, if they cared.

I wonder if vid.me will succeed.

Hey, I hired YouTubers via FameBit quite a bit ago to help make videos like this one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=1&v=Ko586_GPuR8

I have to say, it was a great experience. Famebit encouraged both sides to be open and transparent. They wanted to their YouTubers to include a note like "sponsored by so and so".

We wanted that too. As an advertiser, I'm not trying to sneak into the native content of unsuspecting viewers. I want everyone to know the scenario. The fewer surprises, the better.

And this type of thing works great on YouTube. Users aren't totally scornful of sponsored content. I wish more platforms were like this. Can you imagine how angry most reddit users would be if someone posted original content (even if it was great) and said "This is a paid posting by..."

Sadly, it didn't work out for long with FameBit. We were getting a lot of new storefront owners... but they seemed very young, and they had no concept of copyright issues. That's a story for another day.

A significant amount of revenue is being made through YouTube as a platform in a grey area that Google doesn't really currently touch (integrated content through creators).

Creators and MCN's benefit the most from this. By starting to control the medium brands and creators connect with, they at least get a piece of the action.

Serious question: when you say integrated content it has the same meaning as product placement right?

I would guess partly - product placement is a type of integrated content, whereas the broader spectrum can cover those passive placements, more traditional ad slots, sponsored event coverage etc...

this is a very interesting acquisition for Google. i wonder if they are concerned about adblockers and see native advertising as a solution. or, perhaps their data shows that native ads perform much better than traditional advertising.

I doubt it is the adblockers. The adblocker arms race is won by those who own the browser since the browser is the last place you can enforce DRM and the incumbants (Google, Apple, and Mozilla to a lesser extent) have the capacity to stage a power play that enforce trusted computing policies for ad-laden web applications. Ad blockers will lose their in-browser hooks and will need to instrument the browser from outside its process space using computer vision and memory exploits to detect and remove ads in the future. This cat and mouse game will relegate ad blockers to the <10% market share thus staving off a lost market for ad revenue and reducing any dependence on native advertising or product tie ins.

I've always wondered why youtube and twitch don't just make a platform for content creators to sign direct deals and get a cut. Seems like a no-brainer IMO.

Interesting. I've been working on a similar project in my limited spare time. I wonder if I should continue or throw in the towel. I searched for others like mine before I started and didn't find much. I guess I'll have to up my googling skills.

Youtube is a big, ever expanding ocean. Plenty of space for smaller fish. Important is to find your niche and target audience, and grow from there.

Famebit has been around for at least a couple years (I used them often about 15 months ago). Grapevine, Revfluence, Instabrand, Exposely....

This is pretty cool. I'd guess that most people making any money off YouTube are making a lot more from FameBit (and similar platforms) than from YouTube itself. Makes sense that Google would want a slice of that.

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