YouTube Stars Feel an Advertising Pinch
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Many of them are highly influential amongst their viewers and have more views than your average mid-tier TV show. Youtube also offers much better insight in the audience than TV channels ever can achieve.
And yet, the content creators need to rely on Patreon and selling merchandise to pay for their expenses.
I'm not saying all of them are struggling, in some niches (for example cosmetics) YouTube creators are known to make a pretty hefty buck in sponsorship deals, but the majority is highly undervalued.
Alejandro Salomon recently talked about this in his podcast [1], since this phenomenon is especially true in the automotive sector.
[1] https://youtu.be/fcIgvYzSFm4?t=1936
edit: typo
I think this is arguable based on the meaning of "value." For example, what I would say are the "highest value" channels, i.e. educational, review, informational etc are not getting as much payout as "Spiderman and Elsa Sit On Eachother's Heads" or "man blows out his microphone screaming at minecraft" videos. I mean, capitalism, yea, I get it, people like Spiderman and Elsa more than learning about stuff.
This interpretation seems to be supported by the supporting statements included. Their value to you might be entirely different.
I highly suspect if you look at what all the content creators and people receive via ads. Plus overhead of running YouTube. They are likely making tons more money in profit when main content creators are getting the short stick.
This is a value judgement and therefore it's subjective and function of personal preferences.
How much of a monthly contribution are you making to the content creator?
I find it hard to reconcile people arguing that they love content, and how it's "undervalued" on one hand, then stating that they pay <$1 for the product.
Having occasionally been pitching Patreon to the point that I almost feel like I'm shilling it, I do at least put my money where my mouth is.
People are spinning this as either incompetence of Youtube or the sheepish fears of advertizers, but I think the real story here is this serves as a good example when there isn't competition and there are a lack of alternate providers.
There is the temporal bit, a TV show ad hits all viewers at the same time and on a particular date so you can put time specific information in it. And there is a diffusion bit, you can spend $40,000 for your ad across all videos that are rolling with > 1M subscribers so your ad money hits a bunch of different people rather than one person.
If Google could convince advertisers to pay more for advertising, they could compensate their content creators more. But they can't so they don't.
Then again, I can't convince gmail that I'm not interested in local singles, despite the fact that 70% of my emails are sent to another gmail user that I share bunches of calendar events with.
For the record I do find those annoying, but I often let them roll so the content creator gets that cash.
What I do find annoying are the really long ads, ones that are several minutes long and are played before a short several minute video.
How far away are we from direct micropayments to creators, as envisioned by Scott McCloud?
http://www.scottmccloud.com/3-home/essays/2003-09-micros/mic...
Right now, YouTube has to deal with advertisers on behalf of its creators, which means the perverse incentives of advertisers leak through and affect YouTube's relationship with its creators. YouTube could seek to outsource the advertiser relationship to the "Networks" that aggregate YouTube creators. There could be a model where you have independent creators that thrive off of micropayments, while larger channels could be aggregated by networks which deal with the advertisers.
Right now, Patreon is great, but the friction is still a bit too high.
But they can be solved in the specific case. Spotify is basically micropayments: you pay a subscription, the site tracks plays, and then the site reimburses content creators proportionally to their plays.
I feel like you could create a "Youtube killer" that used the Spotify system pretty easily.
But, of course, you would need people to actually pay a subscription. Youtube Red doesn't seem to be doing very well. (That might just be because people expect Youtube content to be free, though. It might be different if all the content is behind the subscription paywall from the start.)
Either way, you'll lose Youtube's viral aspect, that comes down to millions of ten-year-olds with tons of time and no money spreading your content.
Either way, you'll lose Youtube's viral aspect, that comes down to millions of ten-year-olds with tons of time and no money spreading your content.
You can have advertiser-driven content for ten-year-olds and paywalled content for people who have money.
Not exactly. YouTube Red distributes funds in a manner similar to Spotify.
But everyone starts by consuming the advertiser-driven content, and this content anchors them on what the platform "should" cost.
How is it that growing up with a guardian doesn't "anchor" everyone on what everything "should" cost?
https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/4r683b/repudia...
Under Brin's system, now I've got to:
Decide if I want to read something.
Decide if I want to pay for reading something.
Decide if I've got buyer's remorse for having paid for something, and if so,
Wrestle with the vendor's reimbursement system in the event of any dispute.1
2) Can be automatic, so no decision applies. If the cost is low enough, it could just amount to some slightly varying small amount that gets auto-paid every month. It would be just like FastTrak toll payment -- something I don't really think about.
3) and 4) I don't think like this with regard to Patreon. If I decide a creator doesn't deserve my money anymore, I just stop paying them. I really couldn't give a rat's ass about the $1 I sent them last month.
So fundamentally at odds with information goods, particularly in mass media -- Wat!? Where is the evidence? Is Netflix massively out-earning Amazon Prime Video? If this was the case, why did video rental ever happen, and how does RedBox still exist? How does Steam and the Apple App Store exist and make money, for that matter? Apps and video games are just media, after all.
https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/search?q=information+ma...
Specific to your questions:
1. The problem with per-article paid access is that the question of access is tied to the question of cost. I'm working at a scale of information where I'm looking at thousands of books and articles. The overhead is nontrivial.
A library model -- where you simply have stacks access and don't pay per item viewed -- works out quite well. A rental model, where you're aware that each item carries some access cost, however low: $10, $1, $0.10, $0.1 -- adds up. For much of the world, any per-item cost is high.
The Internet offers us several such "library" models --Sci-Hub, LibGen, and BookZZ each provided unencumbered access to massive troves of published material. Extralegally.
Yes, you might find some way of wedging a paid-access metering model onto this, but to what end? Consider that the average American spends something on the order of $200 on direct media purchases (books, magazines, music, video) in a year, and an indirect $600 or so in advertising. Which has all kinds of distortionary effects on what is available, or produced. There are ~300k writers and editors in the country, whose core need is to a) keep a roof over their head and food on the table and b) have the tools for writing available to them. Seems to me that cutting out the inefficiencies and distortions of advertising would be a net win.
Your 2) is false: at some point, I've got to consciously decide whether or not I'm paying for content. Otherwise you're making a sham of the concept of a discretionary payment system.
For 3 & 4: it depends on what the granularity of the system is, on both payments and units of consumption.
First, with Patreon, you aren't paying for access to individual items of content, for the most part. The models vary, but range from "I'm pitching in to support someon I believe in" to "I'm gaining time-based channel access".
There's a word for that last, it's call a subscription. And subscription-based media access ... is very much a thing.
There's an entire industry that grew up around this, at a previous time when per-item access to media was expensive, and the joint problems of "how do I sample the wares" (for audiences) and "how do we keep our authors fed , housed, and clothed" (for broadcasters) came up.
The answer was the literary or publisher's magazine.
This was a regularly-produced (weekly, monthly, quarterly) publication, with a stable of writers, a compilation of works included with each issue, often publishing longer works in serial form, etc., etc.
It served as an advertisement for long-form books, should subscribers choose to buy them. It mitigated the risks (and bundled purchasing decisions), at the level of multiple authors (anywhere from a handful to 100s), on an annual basis, and generally offered something in any given issue worth reading.
It wasn't until the 1860s or so that additional advertising (beyond the books and publications themselves) became a significant component, though that grew rapidly through the last half of the 19th century. Hamilton Holt's Commercialism and Journalism, 1909, covers this in a brief 115 page booklet (available at the Internet Archive). (Holt was a magazine publisher, reporting on the industry.)
I see the present situation of one in which the question of where and how the bundling size has changed, and is shaking out. The previous regime served the needs and limits of paper-based publication, as well as vinyl & CD-based audio, and VCR and DVD-based video. In a world of ubiquitous digital distribution, those limits and gateways no longer exist.
And information is a public good, as Google's Chief Economist argues.
Prices should be in tenths of a penny.
Your 2) is false: at some point, I've got to consciously decide whether or not I'm paying for content. Otherwise you're making a sham of the concept of a discretionary payment system.
Much as bundling has made a sham of cable programming consumer choice? Micropayments done correctly would pay directly per view. You'd exercise consumer choice by visiting or not visiting. If you're dissatisfied with a content producer, you stop visiting. If micropayments are measured in tenths of a penny, it's not even worth getting the refund. Instead of having your eyeballs paid for indirectly through advertisers, both viewers and advertisers can be bidding for your eyeballs. Long tail advertisers will be better served, and long tail consumers will be treated better by advertisers.
For 3 & 4: it depends on what the granularity of the system...The answer was the literary or publisher's magazine.
Note that digital goods aren't as limited in granularity as they were in the days of paper, vinyl, & CD.
And information is a public good, as Google's Chief Economist argues.
There are problems with advertisements paying for public goods. That's subject to its own kind of "Tradgedy of the Commons."
Sorry, per item? Or graded in tenths of a cent?
On what basis? What do you see a total spend being? What kind of income do authors, composers, filmakers receive? Independent of work length or effort? What works are you incentivising as a consequence?
And again, to what end, and providing what kind of information structure.
Think through the pricing system, because 1) this isn't trivial, 2) what you incentivise matters and 3) what matters, ultimately, is whether and how those who can write are paid relative to other options.
> Micropayments ... would pay per view.
Why is that a desireable objective?
Should, say, healthcare, education, or fire prevention be paid on a per-service basis, by those who receive those services directly? Why or why not? What are the consequences of such a payments system? How do those consequences change with different social (or urban) environments, or shape those environments.
Bonus: Look up Crassus. After you answer. Adjust accordingly, if you like.
> Digital goods aren't limited in granularity...
No, but attention is markedly finite. Purchase decisions are a high-attention action.
> Advertising ... "Tragedy of the Commons"
I'm generally familiar with advertising, and quite familiar with the Tragedy of the Commons. I don't see how these two go together.
Look at this disparity:
"In 2015, more than 400,000 people on average are watching Food Network at some point during the day." [1]
Then check out Nerdy Nummies (a YT channel I found out b/c my 6yo loves it). [2] which is regularly breaking 1M views per episode, has 8+Million subscribers and lifetime has generated 1,949,110,170 views for YouTube [3]
And all of those numbers in a demographic that doesn't even realize the Food Network exists, with a pittance of the resources, no outside marketing and compensated a fraction as well.
1 - http://brandongaille.com/40-captivating-food-network-demogra...
Edit: My comment was not about advertising to children directly. I was using that as an example. I'm not sure if a view on YouTube has the same value as a view in more traditional media (e.g. Television).
Have you walked down the cereal aisle in a grocery store?
If I want to advertise my stand mixer, I don't want to have to pay when my ad is seen by a 5 year old just because a video about gummy bears was tagged "culinary."
I understand advertisers want to "get 'em while they're young" and want children to pester their parents to buy things, but 2 million views from children is not the same thing as 2 million views from the 18-35 bracket.
Hypothesis: maybe they're all like that?
(I do limit and monitor his YouTube use)
The example I'd like to highlight is the success Apple gained through placing Macs everywhere in education. Students almost certainly cannot afford these machines but everyone has one and that's better marketing than anything else.
All in all I get the impression that Youtube had difficulty commanding the kind of money that TV advertisements generate, even before the recent ad crisis.
If you were to make a food show worth mentioning, your standard for a presenter and production should be no lower. Take that with a different format, food, and possibly a theme and I'd say "general success" for one or two people to make a normal, middle class living is attainable.
I mean, there's a bunch of hassle and negotiations to organize licencing, but that's kind of what these organizations know how to do.
And that's just the US Food Network before international syndication rights (as well as rebroadcasting rights through venues like YouTube or cable channel's on-demand), so a relatively clean and monetizable demographics.
I don't even get what TV channels are doing anymore. Trevor James' video on street food in Mumbai has around 8.5M views. He is also awkwardly affable and a great, gracious host.
Why aren't TV execs giving people like him TV deals is beyond me.
Here, you have a guy who has nearly 700,000 subscribers, is fun to watch and averages over a million views for each video...and you hire some no-name moron to host your TV travel shows instead?
If you were making really good money making youtube videos, why would you want to sign on with food network (who probably demands things like good behavior clauses and stuff in their contracts), have to shoot a real tv show on the networks schedule, doing reshoots and promotional events, etc at the beck and call of some executive?
I absolutely agree that these youtubers are underpaid for the value that they create/the audiences they have accumulated; im just not as surprised that we arent seeing them convert into tv and movie personalities
because they'd pay you even better money!
That's assuming money matters :-)
Often people who are running their own world and in control of their own destiny are happy to stay that way regardless of better money.
Yes, there is that risk with anything you do (including your own website and your own email list), but surely by now they have heard enough people complain online that it is very unwise to build a tall building on a shaky foundation.
Aside: why don't they use competitors such as Vimeo and post the videos on Vimeo [1] first, and then post those same videos on YouTube after two weeks? If their audience is really that engaged, shouldn't they be following them to Vimeo also? It would be a two in one deal - the creators create competition between two online video services (which is usually good for them), and if more creators move away from YouTube the consumer also benefits from greater choice and is more likely to go check out Vimeo, leading to a possible virtuous cycle. A third and unexpected side benefit - less data collection about your online practices by an internet behemoth.
[1] From what I can see, Vimeo also has options to monetize your videos. https://vimeo.com/blog/post/learn-how-vimeo-on-demand-helps-...
At some point you spread yourself too thin and it's better to concentrate on an ecosystem with a critical mass that actually cares about your content.
Do I feel bad about someone who built up a ghost hunting video empire on YouTube see their castle crumble as advertisering industry pivots on standards? Abstractly, no. But just compare the trending content on YouTube to Vimeo and try to imagine the likelyhood of the majority of your users inconveniencing themselves by introducing a rift in their YouTube subscription consumption flow. It's a stretch.
It also stands to reason that if there were competition, and say half the users used one platform and half the other, that you would get half the viewers on each, the possibility for massive growth on either is smaller as more channels compete over fewer users. Even if you were on both, it would be harder. This is one of those situations where as a creator and a user, it would be nice if one monolithic platform just worked out well for everyone.
People may not diversify their streams of income for a lot of reasons, but if you are a YouTube star, you already have some advantages which are extremely valuable:
1. You have already shown that you can wait for the months/years it takes to get to the point of becoming a star. That is time you could have instead invested (at least a portion of) in other platforms. 2. You are obviously tech savvy - or atleast savvy enough to get someone who is tech savvy to do the work for you 3. You are already in possession of a very valuable commodity - the attention of people who actually like you. Why don't you get people into your email list from your channel? Why don't you give them special incentives to take them out of YouTube (over which you have no control) into your website (where you have so much more control)?
>> Even if you were on both, it would be harder.
Derisking any business is hard. If anything, YouTube stars, who usually do not have additional constraints such as employee payroll, unsold inventory, a board to answer to, stock prices to take care of etc. should be able to add this derisking if they actually want a business.
Otherwise it is just a hobby. Then why complain?
Netflix has raised prices[1]. They raised it from $8.99 to $9.99 (+11%) - they even scrapped the previously grandfathered $7.99 subscription from early adopters.
1. http://money.cnn.com/2016/04/19/technology/netflix-prices/
It is a bad idea to rely too much on your job. You should have investments and multiple streams of income as soon as possible if you want anything resembling security.
If my user behavior habit is "go to youtube and check out what new videos are available from my subs", I'd only visit a non-youtube site if I'm really into that non-youtube content. Otherwise whatever comes up in the queue in a low friction manner is "good enough".
Some exceptions exist of course. Conan O'Brien would be a good example.
YouTube is technically superior product and it's much easier to use. If Vimeo wants to attract users, they first need to get on par with YT.
Gotta support "well behaved" brands and cut the small man out of the picture. Insipid low brow content that'll please advertiser is all these will be.
Sadly it seems certain parts of the internet are turning into cable...
Let's not even get started on the appalling support YouTube offers content creators when things go wrong. If you are not Coca Cola I guess you basically don't exists.
Shame bandwidth is such an expensive part of the video market, because Youtube deserves to have some stiff competition thrown at it.
Things like Patreon help offer alternatives but it could help with being better integrated into the platform.
There is a very strange mentality among YouTube creators that they are somehow "entitled" to have advertisers run ads on their channel and pay them.
Like you said, bandwidth is expensive. YouTube is already giving you something for free.
I really don't get it.
And that's what this article shows - concern. Concern about laying people off. Concern about having to find another job. Nobody's is acting like they're entitled to money, just concerned about the sudden changes they have no control or visibility into.
That's our assumption. But all we can do is assume; nobody seems to have a way to verify those assumptions. It appears that the content creators can't even see what category their content has been assigned to, WRT advertisements, to make changes to regain their revenue.
Content creators are the ones feeling the pinch now, but we'll all be poorer in the long run.
H3H3, for example, made the video "Christian moms against dabbing" as a test for ad-friendly content, but was demonetized because of the word "Christian" in the title. It was not a controversial video, actually quite light-hearted, but the algo still triggered.
The frustration you hear/read is that many creators do understand the advertiser issues, but find nevertheless find it difficult to work with YouTube's automated systems.
Advertisers and Google have a risk avoidance incentive. It doesn't matter if they pass up good ad friendly content. They definitely don't want to take a chance to put their brand in front of ad unfriendly content.
Now unlike television where ad inventory is limited, on the internet, it's a buyers market. Even if the advertiser passes on something potentially good, he can always find some other content to place on. Indeed what he is buying is actually access to the people watching content, not the content and since the same people on YouTube will probably watch other videos as well, why not de-risk by automatically screening out everything potentially controversial?
A lot of creative professions are tied into a single point of failure, but what choice do they really have? Where else can a video content creator make a living wage? Or is your suggestion that they find a different job?
As for what can be done about it, everything from hosting on multiple sites to self hosting so that you can't be censored by a corporate entity. And yes, it's an example of why centralizing services on something like AWS is a terrible idea.
But that's too hard, easier to just cry louder and continue to enable the behavior.
If you have something popular and hosted outside YouTube, someone will repost it to YouTube and you will lose the revenue as everybody goes that direction.
The problem is that Google subsidizes YouTube's bandwidth and sucks the oxygen out of the entire online video space.
If YouTube were allowed to go bankrupt, we might actually see some innovation in the space a la Nico Nico Douga (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nico_Nico_Douga).
I remember Leo Laporte saying a long time ago that Google uses Youtube bandwidth for leverage in peering agreements with other networks.
I know almost literally nothing about peering agreements.
Does anyone know how this works or if its true? What are the economics of Youtube?
I thought YouTube had a specific prohibition against sponsored content they weren't getting a piece of? Product placement, "this video brought to you by"-style bumpers, etc?
So I'm not sure that they do - maybe they prohibit turning on ads and "double dipping" the videos? But I've ran an adblocker for years so couldn't tell you if the "brought to you by ____" videos have ads or not.
“The great promise of YouTube is the potential for this to be an important job, for there to be more professional, independent creators than coal miners in the U.S.,” Mr. Green said. “If we’re just going to remake TV and put all of the power to make money and distribute content back into the hands of a few people, then burn it all down.”
Not sure about the second half; doesn't a stable of "well behaved" brands make your platform a more palatable 'name' to advertisers generally? Any ads advertisers would buy because of this would run on the "small man"'s channels as well.
[Maybe a bit of a stretch—] this is more like 1940s America importing German nuclear physicists: you're taking eminent people from outside your society, and inviting them to consider themselves part of it, in the hope that their efforts will help save all the people who already were a part of it, even if it's just as a byproduct of those eminent people working to save themselves.
Yeah it's called capitalism.
YouTube is being tempted by corporate money to turn it into another TV channel. But as soon as the only good content you can get is made by NBC or CBS, then why would people go to YouTube?
It's amazing that they seem to promote these TV shows when their own creators get pushed to the side. I mean, talk about bad business.
They should have the Jimmy Fallons on youtube, but why wouldn't you push your own creators? That's what makes youtube unique.
The small Youtube creators are the ones that should be protector and promoted by Youtube and it seems like it is the opposite. They are ones hurt the most by these changes to youtube's systems. It's like youtube just wants them to leave.
Look at how they treated their #1 overall channel. He freaking left for Twitch. Are you kidding me?
I'm a bit ignorant of both the YouTube and Twitch scenes. Who are you referring to?
Twitch, incidentally, banned IcePoseidon because he was doing IRL streams and attracting too much attention (getting threatened with guns) who moved to YouTube's streaming format.
Twitch and YouTube are looking more and more like a little proxy war for Google and Amazon.
I'm actually surprised more programmers/engineers have not set up a Patreon. (in disclosure, I have one set up, but have zero expectation of it replacing a full-time salary.)
Their YouTube channel has free, ad supported content to develop an audience, and Patreon subscribers get that content ad-free, as well as extra content.
It's a decent model, but as I find myself watching more YouTube than Netflix/Hulu these days, I really wish this concept was supported by YouTube itself. They have YouTube Red, but that doesn't directly support my favorite YouTubers.
Twitch has a clearer subscriber model, I think. When you "subscribe", you're actually giving your actual real money to the channel. I'm not sure why YouTube doesn't have that. (Different horses for different courses, I guess. YouTube is more about the "1 billion people will watch this and some people will see an ad", versus "I know I like you, here's some money." Both can be profitable for everyone involved, but the models are very different. Scale vs. curation, or something.)
At least that's what seems to be happening as far as I can see from the various articles written about it.
I'd hope not, but stranger things have happened.
The least regressive model would be for viewers to pay per time unit of video, say in 5 min blocks (round down) and probably with a decaying rate of compensation on a series per block of content produced (recovery time would probably vary depending on the popularity of the series, really popular things would recover more quickly, the producer should have some feedback from this metric).
That kind of a model avoids penalizing groups of content creators, having them compete against each other (other than for viewer time, which is unavoidable), and it reduces the advertiser influenced network effect of more popular creators being over-paid compared to more niche / rising creators.
* Australia
* Korea
* Mexico
* New Zealand
* The United States
I'd buy it in an instant (in fact, I already have all access which is bundled with red) but it's just not available in most of the world.
I buy the ESPN Magazine. I buy ESPN Insider. And I still have to watch ads on ESPN videos.
It'll be interesting to see if this kind of thing continues.
While initially promising, this theory didn't seem to bear out in practice. Many creative people replied that the numbers just didn't add up. Margins are too thin, expenses are too high, promotion is too difficult. Unless you're absurdly lucky, you can't make a decent living without access to a mass audience via the traditional media.
Patreon seems to be the technology that brings this theory to life. A huge variety of creative people now have a regular, sustainable income thanks to their Patreon subscribers. If you can find 1000 people willing to throw you an average of $5 a month, you're earning more than the median US household. With those subscribers paying your bills, your merch sales and ad revenue and whatever else are just gravy. It's SaaS for creatives - recurring revenue always trumps one-off sales.
Think about the reaction pewdiepie had after being dropped by disney. If he was a tv star it would have meant the end of his career. Instead it was just a big "meh" and moving on.
Tv networks are easy to control. Networks are often owned indirectly/in part by the very same people who ask for the ad space.
It is not about the value of the ad, it's about not giving too much power to normal people and risk too much decentralization. Having so much voices it's bad, globalist billionaires and corporations risk losing an amount of control over population they don't want to lose, also because they often crave total domination, both in politics and in the markets.
I know this could be difficult to understand, because many of us are sane people and don't crave that kind of power. It's difficult to put ourselves in the shoes of the people with the very big money, but they really do think in term of having absolute power and control (in fact they did get there).
They think "okay, those people have an audience, they make people I can easily control lose the audience, I need a solution", and they do it immediately. Instead it's difficult to us to imagine being so big and rich, and yet feeling treatened by some kids on youtube. It looks crazy to us, but that's really how they think. Yet that's how corps and billionaires often thinks, because they have a complete different mindset from normal people.
Of course I could be completely wrong, it's just an opinion, no math involved so can't really prove it. Use your gut.
Youtube made a tip jar where people (from a select list of countries) could tip a creator whatever they liked but they scrapped it before ever making the feature international.
They've released early-access subscription-based material before through the defunct Vessel platform (which exited successfully via buy-out). Now they're building that platform themselves for their audience.
Whether they can expand it successfully to other creators is another question, but I see no reason why they wouldn't...
I'm wondering it this is just a coincidence, or whether Youtube are trying to shift advertisers to these "family friendly" channels, and away from anything that might cause controversy.
This is why the automotive Youtube "celebs" are launching GTCon a convention for car enthusiasts to get fans to meet them IRL and buy merch!
You have to post frequently and build a community to be successful now.
Fan patronage in the likes of what Vidme (disclaimer: I’m a co-founder) and Patreon are offering help creators diversify their revenue streams and make content for their fans, rather than to please advertisers.
Google and Facebook aren’t well incentivized to offer this kind of model on platform because they can make considerably more money allocating resources towards optimizing ad revenue. Hunter Walk, an ex YT employee turned investor, writes about this in this blog post: https://hunterwalk.com/2017/03/26/why-were-paying-for-conten...
Youtube in general seems very poorly run lately. The app on my phone right now won't play videos unless I update or wait 30 seconds. Who okayed that? You might as well just tell me to fuck off. I'd happily use something worse out of spite at this point. "Don't be evil, but really annoying is ok"
I suppose gaming has a large user base that is quick to download and try new tech. It also has a way of slow "dopamine dripping" its audience into spending countless hours of viewership. Does this not exist in other genres?
i.e. When a business encounters a major problem like this, fix the problem ASAP but also use these opportunities to try to add new profits (another example of how this works: when Uber faced criticism about driver background checks they used the negative publicity to add a $1.50 "safe ride fee" to every ride)
Q: Could enough YT stars with 7 and 8 figure subscriber counts band together and move to a different platform or get staked by a well-funded new startup to create a YT competitor site?...In theory sure anyone can try to compete with a google product...but how realistic is this here? And if it's not realistic then YT can cut the % it has been paying content creators and get away with it.
I have no clue if ad revenue $ will return to previous levels for YT content creators. I hope so. But I wouldn't be surprised if YT used this opportunity to change how it has been doing things and grab a bigger piece of the ad money profit pie at stake. Either way this is a fascinating story: on one hand YT has almost a monopoly when it comes to this kind of monetized online video content. On the other hand, YT is dependent on a pyramid of quite powerful content creators to maintain the very monopoly they are subject to.
And the whole advertisers don't like that content is stupid and complicated. I can't remember the name but some popular guy made series about serial killers, no NSFW pictures but probably something you wouldn't your kids watch. Most of his videos were banned completely. Yet we have a shitload of rap music that sings literally about killing people making money with big brands. Go figure. This song gives me nice Amazon.com ads: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJwKKKd2ZYE
There are reasons those videos exist, get off your god damn high horse komali2.
So no, don't get off your high horse. Encourage everyone you know to spend more time educating themselves for entertainment and less time wasting away watching pointless drivel - whether it's on YouTube or broadcast tv.
Cash (via ads) rules everything around me :)
We may be onto something here!
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14294494 and marked it off-topic.
You don't know what fop means; you just typed into google and looked at the first dictionary definition to come up. Look it up better this time, and don't (pettily) correct people unless you actually know what you're talking about imo.