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Comment by themagician | Hacker News Reader

You aren't entitled to money just because you post stuff on YouTube. Brands want to advertise on "insipid low brow content" specifically because it has mass appeal and caters to advertising. Nothing stops you, as a content creator, from finding your own advertisers.

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.

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In reality, you don't get a choice about hosting your content on YouTube.

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).

The problem is that Google subsidizes YouTube's bandwidth and sucks the oxygen out of the entire online video space.

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?

Here's a very old article on the subject

https://www.wired.com/2009/10/youtube-bandwidth/

Has nothing to do with youtube. This is the definition of a peer agreement. Basically each operator negotiates a price based on the traffic the agree to pass for the peer. In some cases, very large operators agree to pay nothing because they are passing essentially equal traffic.

So if google is spidering all over the internet, pulling pages from other networks, would having a service like YouTube which will most be traffic leaving google's network be a good way to balance that?

When a creator's videos go from making $700 per video to $150 per video, without being caused by any action on the creator's part, and without any kind of transparency from YouTube's part... I think they are absolutely justified to be concerned.

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.

The content likely was not attractive for an advertisers to put an ad on in the first place and so revenues dropped the minute ad controls for advertisers were added. Google didn't really have a choice but to do this given the billions that were pulled. Will be interesting to see impact on AMJ quarter results.

> The content likely was not attractive

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.

There are specific issues, mostly regarding clarity with regard to demonetization. It's all automated, and there are lots of errors.

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.

You need to understand the economic incentives in operation.

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?

Of course they should be concerned. They should be concerned that their entire business model exists on the whims of a single company and proprietary technology stack. They were happy to live in ignorance of this problem for years and are now living with the consequences of that.

This describes every programmer who writes code for Apple, Windows, or even AWS, and a good portion of professional musicians, writers, songwriters, lawyers, etc.

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?

Something something this is why we need snowdrift.coop

Microsoft and apple could disappear tomorrow and it would have zero immediate effect. It is an example of how regressive the app store model is and why we should have never allowed it.

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.

No. The problem isn't with advertisers wanting to avoid controversial videos. The problem is with YouTube's classification of what is controversial. Their definition of controversial does not match what advertisers think they're buying, partly because of the intractability of trying to classify the billions of videos on their platform in real-time.

And YouTube isn't entitled to thousands of people producing high quality content on a daily basis, just because they provided a means to do so. Nothing stops those same people from leaving for other platforms, and the number of people switching over to twitch.tv means that's already happening. Having a user hostile attitude and making life harder for small content creators is probably an unwise long term play for YouTube to make.

Your argument would be fine if there was a competitive market on the supply side of on demand videos. But there isn't. Youtube has a monopoly.

> Nothing stops you, as a content creator, from finding your own advertisers.

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?

JonTron and a number of other video content creators on YouTube are sponsored/brought to you by Audible or Audiobooks or some other name I can't actually remember because by the time they do that bit I've already closed the video (thankfully most of the creators do it at the end of their videos, not the start of them).

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.

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