Changes to the YouTube Partner Program
youtube-creators.googleblog.com
youtube-creators.googleblog.com
YouTube is renting out billboards at a music festival, and the advertisers, predictably, want to know who's playing. "Well, I dunno, like, whoever shows up" has proven to be an answer that they can't get away with. YouTube's negotiating position with advertisers depends on how they can position their package of advertising space. Right now they're trying to sell a big bundle of uncertain providence, with loads of little no-namers mixed in with the heavy hitters.
But what can YouTube do? If they split it up, they now have a gold package, a silver package, and a shit package. The rates for the shit package would be so bad that current YouTube revenue starts to look like winning the lottery. The smallest channels are subsidised by the bigger ones, not in terms of views but in terms of reputation. So if you need to improve the reputation of the group, what's left to do but drop the weakest performers?
If you're thinking "but that's totally illogical! Smaller channels collectively contribute an enormous number of very valuable advertising impressions", you're right, but making the same mistake YouTube did. The advertising industry isn't logical, it's 18 layers of ticket-clippers and con men playing telephone with money. It doesn't run on economically rational real-time bidding systems, it runs on trend-chasing and reputation. That other stuff is just to keep the nerds happy.
So, like in every other field Goophabet has entered, the techno-utopianism lasts right up until it hits the balance sheet. Party's over, folks. YouTube is an advertising company and now it's realising it has to act like one.
https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/products/google-preferred/
> Google Preferred aggregates YouTube's top content into easy-to-buy packages for brand advertisers. Brands access the top 5% of content on YouTube and receive the measurement results they need to maximize the impact of their campaigns.
I'm not disagreeing with you, but just because you don't like something doesn't mean there's not a huge audience for people like PewDiePie, especially among the younger demographic - which still spends money, and which is a constantly-replenishing spring.
EDIT: And PewDiePie won't disappear. He provides the perfect wish fulfillment for kids that would love to stay in their bedrooms and be paid to play videogames all day long.
Maybe if YT wasn't so fixated on ad revenue it wouldn't be missing out on a huge potential market.
- people who will never earn more than this off youtube, but aren't motivated by earning money.
- people who are currently earning less than this, and are motivated by money but are on a trajectory to quickly exceed 1000 subscribers. they'll be minimally affected.
- people who are currently earning less than $100/yr, but are motivated by money and are unlikely to exceed 1000 subscribers anytime soon. If they're actively working to grow their channel but can't break 1000 subscribers, losing them is probably for the best.
I don't see how this is going to really harm youtube's content pool.
- There are people who just need to do some work and get out of their house and aren't motivated by earning money.
- There are those who make it their career and want to work up the chain. They will be minimally affected.
- There are those who are part time and but can't make it into full time any time soon. Let's hypothesize that they're not actively trying to be the best workers so let's just get rid of them. No harm done.
That sounds like a pretty scary world.
I remember when Google was known for actually thinking things through.
"The YouTube Partner Program (YPP) lets creators monetize their content on YouTube. Creators can earn money from advertisements served on their videos and from YouTube Red subscribers watching their content."
And in order to apply for YPP you just try to enable Monetization per: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/72857#apply
The two (YPP and Monetization) seem to be the same thing?
If YouTube monetizes only a few big channels it becomes much easier to track political content manually.
[1] https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/youtube-hate-preachers-sh...
So what is their aim? The only thing I can frame it as is a power play. Advertisers working together to collectively ensure they have more strict control on what they can be advertised on has the nice side effect of them getting to decide the fate of many companies dependent on advertising for revenue. If a company acts in a way contrary to the interests of advertisers, they thus gain the ability to destroy that company. Similarly, it allows them to elevate companies that further their interests. Put another way, I wouldn't expect a documentary detailing the behaviors of Coca-Cola in South America or Nestle's behaviors... anywhere... to see much in the way of funding. But a documentary detailing healthy at any size? That's some advertiser worthy content.
However, in the long-run the challenge is enabling the transition from small to big. Doing one without the other would be quite short-term thinking from YouTube - they would massively disincentivise the new users who become next year's big channels. I haven't seen many platforms both care and execute on this.
Advertisers don't have a choice - they need YouTube. YouTube could easily dictate this relationship. They choose not to.
They could but if you look at 2017, the stuff YouTube got in trouble from advertiser for is the stuff they got in trouble for from large segments of the public or the media. YouTube doesn't want to take a stand forcing advertisers to accept PewDiePie's Hitler jokes, some guy making fun of feminism, or Logan Paul filming suicide victims. If they do, they'll get destroyed by the media and advertisers will leave anyway.
Internet culture is taking over the mainstream, demonetisation of edgier content might have a shortterm effect of restricting content, but ultimately, it's unlikely to stop the cultural shift - people want edgier humor, and if it's popular enough it will eventually appear on Twitch, Vimeo or elsewhere.
Brands are happy to be associated with edgy humor if Jimmy Kimmel is producing it: check out the examples on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pj8n78AuN3w. They'll soon be comfortable if a YouTube equivalent is doing the same.
Youtube's problem as I see it is differentiation. Howard Stern was "edgy" for his time, similar to how some Youtube producers are "edgy". Yet he has no problem attracting advertisers as far as I know (Googling suggests his radio rates in particular were quite high). But it seems like it was/is much easier in traditional advertising to say "I [do / do not] want to advertise with Howard Stern" then it is to say "I [do / do not] want to advertise with PewDiePie". That's really the crux of the problem as I see it, it flat out sounds like Youtube can't do targeted marketing very well (a ding made more painful considering this is the success story of Google Search). Heck, "I do not want to advertise for ISIS recruitment videos" seemed to be a request Youtube couldn't fulfill for a while.
I don't think "edgy" in itself is a problem to many advertisers per se (except for certain step-over-the-line moments) and I agree with you that Youtube is tackling things in a way too crude manner.
It doesn't help that there are apologizers who spread the idea that YouTube is somehow targeting "the bad stuff", when that is a very small fraction of what is happening. Everyone focuses on the sensationalist garbage reported by the media; meanwhile all the small channels that are playing by the rules are being left out to dry.
Health insurance can be divided into the healthy-young-professional-who-pay-premium-and-never-get-sick package and the old-sick-people-costing-us-money package. Now one group is subsidizing the other and the premium the sick people package would have paid is so shit it makes the current premium look like winning the lottery. What to do? Drop the weakest performers.
Airlines make most of their money from first class which is essentially subsidizing all coach tickets? What to do? Just get rid of the average rider.
Politician X spent 1.2B$ campaigning for presidency and most of that money didn't come from private citizens? Now you have a rich voter coalition and a normal citizen coalition and the new normal citizens' influence on politicians would be so shit that the current resemblance to democracy start to look like normal citizens winning the lottery. What to do? Just get rid of universal suffrage.
Is this meant to be a revelation to anyone? Well back in 2007 when ads started appearing it became clear YouTube's remit has shifted. It was a transition that was perhaps fully realised by 2012, when they began to pay out in view hours.
I'm sure they're hoping fervently that this plan leads to more lucrative ad deals considering how knife-edge YouTube's chance at profitability has always seemed.
All the small creators also saturate the search space with all kind of topics and content, which drives people naturally via suggestions to the larger channels with fat advertisers, so the benefit is twofold.
Bet they did the math and they still come on top for now, but social are quite generational and live off the network effect, so there's that.
It will be interesting to see the shift in the suggestion algorithm since so many more videos will be non-monetized.
Any YouTube video that currently shows an ad, the uploader has chosen to do so in order to make money from it.
I have no monetization enabled for my account and still get text ads because of that.
Or to one of the other sites.
Lets face it most of the stuff on YT has very little ad revenue.
Plus Amazon purchased Twitch and then removed the app from the Roku which does not help grow the platform.
https://www.cordcuttersnews.com/amazon-pulls-twitch-channel-... Amazon Pulls Their Twitch Channel from Roku - Cord Cutters News
What do you mean by "trend-chasing and reputation"? I really want to understand this point, but I'm not seeing why an advertiser would care if their ad was shown once on 10 small videos, rather than 10 times on 1 big video. Do advertisers specifically ask for the most possible impressions on the least number of videos?
All of the above dread showing up next to eg some jackass going to a suicide forest and showing a dead person for kicks. Showing ads primarily against bigger videos means youtube has a chance to check the content. ie so-called brand safety.
See how the ad industry views the changes:
http://www.adweek.com/digital/youtube-is-finally-addressing-...
Which does fall down somewhat when the jackass going to a suicide forest is one of the biggest creators (estimated 4th highest paid in 2017) -and- was a Preferred Partner.
> means youtube has a chance to check the content
Sure but they apparently approved his suicide forest video.
https://www.polygon.com/2018/1/9/16869430/youtube-logan-paul...
"[...] YouTube moderation team had reviewed Paul’s video and deemed it acceptable."
No, the thing is advertisers do not want their brands associated with thing x. YouTube already has automated classifiers for demonetization. This is recognition that these classifiers do not work - from the side of advertisers.
Google could tell them "deal with it" and they'd probably oblige. The manual side was Google Preferred program.
That watershed moment is what caused YouTube to develop the whole demonetization algorithim in the first place
They want whatever is IN. Whatever is BIG. Whatever is the most POPULAR.
It's all about "big names" swirling around the community. "Have you heard of X?" Because "discovering X" and getting a big deal makes you famous.
"Driving profits up 3% over last quarter" is not what a hot shot maverick does. It's not cool.
So finding tens/hundreds/thousands of smaller (but successful!) channels isn't popular. Humans can't process that easily. And when it comes to impressing your boss in that industry, you want bite-size chunks. You want the next Macklemore, not 30 amazing electrical-engineering channels.
Didn’t Google crush their directory of vetted content model because they were able to give users what they actually wanted?
Youtube is. their official email explicitly says those changes are for the creators and that they were reached after discussions with said creators.
it's another PR shitfest like only google can do.
edit: ironically, it doesn't solve their content problem. which is advertisers buying into the expensive platinum package and their top content creator saying something racist and sexist.
The advertising industry is hardly a small market; are you arguing that billions of dollars in profit opportunities are just lying there untaken simply because the industry operates on trends? What's stopping the nerds from taking this money?
I think it's more likely that the ad industry simply knows what a liability those small channels present; your product could be associated with all manner of odious content, and YouTube has thus far failed to exclude that at scale.
But nah man that's the old way of doing things.
Still, getting paid something is better than getting paid nothing, right?
1) They should not have made this change retroactive to channels. If you already met the criteria you should be grandfathered into the new program. To terminate monetization entirely gives me no incentive to continue with YouTube.
2) For niche channels, like my own, it can be easy to have the views but difficult to have the subscribers. These two should not be tied together for purposes of monetization.
3) The ones that seem to be causing the biggest headaches on YouTube lately are the bigger creators.
4) Finally, their email to me says that they made this decision based on discussions with creators like me. I would be hardpressed to find a creator "like me" that suggested this. Instead, I suspect, they reached out to the creators with the biggest say and decided to squash the little guys for greater visibility.
I am curious if they will continue to monetize my videos while not sharing the revenue with me or if they will remove ads entirely from my videos.
I completely agree.
I've saved hundreds of dollars [and time] on car maintenance/repairs and plumbing by watching some guy or gal on youtube with very specific information (for a given make/model/year) for example.
I hope these kinds of instructional videos get a reprieve because many many people use them and save tons of money and time [finding manuals and reading them is arduous].
This could be a terrible loss for some audiences as well as the creators who get compensated, slim as it may be.
About 30% of my consulting revenue last year came directly from "I saw you on Hacker News and--".
It is rather harder for a car mechanic to do that.
If you benefit from a disruptive technology, you can't expect the "new normal" to persist indefinitely. The ride certainly may not be free or easy, but it would be abnormal for it not to change.
This whole thing seems very reminiscent of SEO about a decade ago. It was still fairly new and thousands of people built incomes and entire businesses with employees around it. In some cases a search algorithm update wiped out all of their audience. Of course, in nearly every case those impacted immediately blamed Google.
When something is fairly new, the first movers often get outsized benefits. You have less competition which makes the ability to both capture and monetize an audience easier. As the market matures more competitors appear. If the pie doesn't grow as fast as the new competitors arriving, all participants earn less profits.
The results of what Google/Youtube is doing now is just bringing the same effects early. The future of Youtube producers will consist of less search visibility combined with ad revenue divided more ways. 15+ years of double digit only advertising growth has gone a long way to mask the audience problem (and when it ends it is going to result in massive changes to Google.)
We participate in these places for the intangible rewards and one of those, I believe, is feeling that we are helping to foster an egalitarian community. When the community is explicitly tiered and money-based, is that still something people will want to chip in to out of the goodness of their hearts?
But will they backtrack if they’re wrong, or just accept it as collateral damage?
Speak for yourself.
You could just plug it verbally and skirt the enforcement of the YouTube rules that way, but if they became concerned enough they have automatic transcription and did start enforcing it on annotations/descriptions...
Mentions among creators drives me to new channels and I add to Patreon.
(I echo your agreement, for what it's worth.)
"how to replace xx on 1998 honda",
"2002 winter olympics highlights",
"insert 1980s tv show name theme song"
I don’t want to watch what everyone else is watching, I want to watch whatever I want to watch, no matter how obscure, niche or unpopular.
Often paying a premium to get the part tomorrow.
The manual review shouldn't take more than 7 seconds.
Those videos get me to YouTube in the first place. Once there they can try to get me to watch 'better' videos and the videos I do watch gives them lots of useful information about me that they can sell to advertisers.
Econ 101 is that you should match marginal cost to marginal revenue.
YT is leaving money on the table here.
You're probably referring to the recent events where well-known youtubers have published questionable content and causing an outrage.
But I think this is about the low-quality spammers and copycat content farms that create videos automatically or semi-automatically or just otherwise with low effort, and aggressively optimize using analytics. To make matters worse, a lot of these target children and some of these have even been approved to the "for children" category.
Even though the outrage hasn't been as loud in the media (but there has been some discussion about it), I think it's a much bigger issue for them than a few high profile makers publishing questionable content.
From their point of view, the spam accounts are impossible to distinguish from individuals who have just a few videos or are just getting started. If they allow monetization with no barrier to entry, there will be spam content.
I'm not sure what other alternatives they would have, apart from manually vetting each and every account eligible for monetization.
I do understand that this is a pain in the ass for niche content production. I've been considering starting some niche video production too (I enjoy activities that others enjoy watching) but now it looks like it would take 6-12 months (at least) to get to the point where you could make a dime. For me, this would mean non-trivial time and money investment in equipment. I wouldn't do it to make money, but I don't want to be spending money with not hope of getting any back either.
Not quite:
* Paying for views/subs is a huge issue. The lifetime view count makes it so that you only need to pay once to reap the benefits of YPP. Making the requirement continuous gives less financial incentive.
* Elsagate and content aimed at children was a smaller but frequent controversy last year. I’m guessing they need more time/resources to vet that content and slow down the rate that spammers and low-effort content providers try to game the system.
This is a great observation. They're punishing the small, niche channels for the terrible shit pulled by the huge channels, with Logan Paul just being the most recent and which is probably the precipitating event here.
If Google is doing this with a "let's try and make it harder for idiots like Logan Paul to become successful" motivation, then shame on Google.
The only other reason I can think of is that smaller players have been abusing the system, and we see tons of tiny low-quality popups that film inappropriate stuff and get reported. I think this is more likely, than because of anything Logan Paul did.
This is to deal with the much larger problem of small channels posting awful content in such huge volumes that it's difficult to police, and causing headlines like this one: https://www.buzzfeed.com/charliewarzel/youtubers-made-hundre...
If you post a link we can see the sort of content they’re cutting out.
Edit: Well, all the comments are asking for suscribers.
I published ONE video about how to easily fix a head-scratching computer hardware problem, because there isn't any other guide on it.
I get about 1000 views a month, tons of thank yous and make a few dollars.
Because I won't get 4000 hours of watch time[1], and nobody will subscribe, I'll get squat.
And zero motivation to publish more videos.
The next time I figure out a life-trick[2], I won't bother.
Who subscribes to videos about fixing stuff anyway?
[1] Don't you hate those videos that are 5x longer than necessary? WHY ENCOURAGE THAT?
[2] That fancy French mustard you bought? Don't bother with your hands. You'll need to use a corkscrew to open it.
Youtube makes some strange choices with their monetization. I really wonder why they are so obsessed with finely controlling who can profit from producing good content on their platform. Why not let a) the users and b) the advertisers decide this? Who is losing out here, absent their preemptive interventions?
If they keep this up it might highly incentivize a decentralized video platform with a built-in monetization scheme.
Does a company like Google really need human review on videos? With 10k views, their AI/ML should detect what's risky content or not based on what they know about users.
Here's a great video that we'll see less of: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDB2QVEuy60
A well-produced 36 second video on replacing your Corolla's brake light, rather than a 5 minute video going blah blah blah. And I'll never subscribe.
"Risky" material is subjective. Something even humans can't make out reliably very often.
I think, this is the result of the tech firms putting content creators of old out of business, but not investing in the necessary editorial power, subscribing instead to the "wisdom of the crowds" school of thought.
They have not paid for (and will not be able to afford) the distributed human editorial power which was lost.
A 2 minute video titled "How to fix your computer's _______", that is linked from fixit forums, that is universally liked with comments stating "Wow, that worked, thanks!" shouldn't even need human review to determine risk.
The comparison alone to other videos with similar characteristics should do it.
And that’s over the naturally noisy data set of human behavior.
Not to mention cultural norms across all nations in the world - I know many Indian user forums where even mildly helpful or unhelpful videos/posts will receive “thank you, could you help with...” posts.
the average bla bla bla video instead has a much higher chance of driving multiple view per user via the suggestion mechanism, giving a multitude of views on each video and ads.
of course that strangles quality, focused content in favor of generalist episodic blogs/devs, but a single view video will earn them many times more than a video with a strong network effect trough past/previous episode suggestion, watch again, see this other blogger on the same topic etc.
>Why not let... the advertisers decide this?
The advertiser's have been pretty clear they want YouTube to be the content police. That's what the big advertiser revolt a few months ago was about.
I wonder how much video CPMs (particularly mid-roll) and the premium big brands are willing to pay plays a role in this vs something like a desire to growing engagement. If you incentivize creators to attract subscribers, and you have more direct ability to control messaging channels to subscribers as a platform, you might gain some levers in driving revenue that may not have existed or had as large an impact before. You also nurture desirable user-base behaviors.
You can pay more if you only want your ads against thoroughly vetted content.
Or pay less if you don't care.
Less video to bid against will raise ad costs for everyone.
I'd guess it's some sort of legal/accounting move, something beneath the surface. Doesn't really make much sense otherwise.
Most videos like yours aren't made to make $2 extra each month, they're made because people wanted to share the information. Youtube provides a platform, allowing people to distribute videos, for free. The most prolific content producers are given a cut of the profit, or make their advertising deals.
So they did an analysis and determined that only 6,000 or so of the products they carried sold in any significant amount. The other 12,000 were niche items that sold in small quantities and made little money.
Before they nixed the other 9,000 products though, the company decided to make one additional analysis, of who bought what in what combination. And it discovered all those little items were being bought in small quantities by people who bought large quantities of the big items.
The analysis further determined that if the supermarket nixed those 9,000 niche products, it would no longer be the "one stop shop" for its customers. Those customers would only be able to buy some of what they needed at the supermarket, and would need to buy the rest elsewhere. If a competing supermarket carried all of what a customer needed, that customer would eventually learn to do all his shopping at that supermarket to save the hassle of needing to journey to 2+ places to get what he needed.
After this final analysis, the supermarket chain decided to keep almost all the products it kept on its shelves, eliminating only 200 or 300 products, instead of 9,000.
It was not so much that the supermarket was very nice and charitable to niche spices and exotic Asian sauces and imported curries and whatnot.
Rather, it was that the supermarket realized that if its customers could not find everything they wanted on its shelves, they would eventually find everything they wanted on a competitor's shelves instead.
In YouTube's case, no good competitor presently exists. But a big part of the reason why is because YouTube has sucked all the oxygen out of the video hosting and streaming niche by being a one-stop shop. If it stops being that, there will be a lot more oxygen in that niche again.
(that said, I do not think demonetizing videos with low view counts / subscriber numbers constitutes injecting oxygen back into the market. "Not letting" niche video creators user their platform, however, probably would)
This isn't exclusive to supermarkets but many other industries and the problem is always the same. Someone looks at the bottom line and realizes that hey 50%, 60%, 80%, of revenue comes from product A, and B through F are just producing 10%, so why not get rid of them, or call them a failure. But what they are missing is the bigger picture because the user experience that drives to go with Product A needs the other products.
It's really interesting that such simple concepts are missed by most people in management roles, and even though here you have a brilliant and simple explanation, most people don't get it.
This is a bit off-topic in a sense, but this one comment just really hit on something for me that I've been dealing with for two years and I'm going to be sharing this explanation with other people because it really captures this specific problem is so perfectly.
Thank you!
On the subject of Youtube, this is a pretty massive change, it is definitely not a benefit to a lot of creators, but as others have said, Youtube is really the only game in town. Vimeo basically disappeared into a premium offering, so they are acting a bit more monopolistically.
The funny thing is if they never really had low standards to share monetization, I don't think that would have affected the way creators create and upload content, but now that they gave it to them, and are taking it away, it's going to cause a backlash for sure. Unfortunately, there's no clear #2 for those creators to goto.
They had ran studies and determined that they were the same as or better than Google for a large percentage of the most popular queries. Therefor they must be better, right?
Well, when you apply the principle you described it’s clear that everyone would have different obscure searches unique to them. When people learned that Google worked better universally they’d go there instead, because with Bing it wasn’t good at some of the more specific searches and it just wasn’t worth using it if it didn’t work for all cases.
Your motivation for uploading that one video was money? Just wondering, because if that was the case I'd expect you to have more than one video.
And 1000 views a month is nothing. Certainly not enough to expect any kind of worthwhile revenue.
From googles perspective it's because they don't care about the user, and are cowtowing to the advertisers. Longer videos mean more ads, which means more $$$.
I wish google had never bought youtube... I knew they would ruin it eventually.
I think the real discussion here though is more meta than just google... we have allowed advertisers to gain way too much power on the internet, and if we aren't careful they will ruin us just like they did newspapers.
This isn't just advertisers though, this is the general business model of internet companies. Here is the pattern:
1) Create cool new thing, with no ads, no tracking. Users love it and it spreads like wildfire.
2) Slowly boil the frog. Start tracking users and selling user data to third parties, justified under esoteric EULAs and TOS. Start small, unobtrusive ads.
3) Make the ads more prominent, more frequent, and harder to skip/ignore.
4) Allow your platform to be used as a corporate promotion tool that's more like sockpuppet central than regular advertising. Bots talking to bots, subtle corporate products in memes, etc.
5) Now that you have completely aliented the userbase, now is the time to ramp up all of the above and then go public, ride the boom wave up, and at peak sell a massively overvalued company to some dumbass group/company/people, run away with the cash, and take video of your product as it burns to the ground.
The users will stick around until someone else starts at 1 and does the same thing but under a different name.
If Google hadn't bought YouTube, YouTube would no longer exist.
Why not? You're posting on HN without financial reward.
Me. I subscribed to a few DIY home repair channels, plus a channel on modding a Mark7 Golf R.
You get a centralized broker. In Google's case, between sellers and viewers, who are cast as buyers. This all happens under the shadow of "video content". Google feeds off of the creativity of everyone on YouTube, its own Hollywood. Then they decide who is worthy of reaping the rewards with their rules.
Something as simple as an organic comment promoting a product can actually drive real sales, and the John Doe that posts such a comment gets zilch. Why does he get nothing? Is it too difficult for Google to index all of John Doe's comments, crunch the impressions and counts and then give him the few dollars he would have accrued over the past few weeks? This should all just "work" without having to download Google Surveys, or whatever their community feedback/rewards app is.
If they can index the web, they can do some math on behalf of me and count me in their little MLM payouts equation ffs. /ranty This is the perfect move to put more YouTubers past the tipping point.
YouTube is dead for the ______th time. Now YouTubers will finally move to ______ with monetization strategy _______ and we will enter the golden age of online video.
I agree with the other (downvoted) poster - YouTube has no where to go. They literally have no competition, and bled billions of dollars for years to get where they are today. No one is lining up bleed money on user generated content like Google did.
If you think creators should be compensated for the work they put out anymore than YouTube is doing, then build that platform. Until then no other platform has come close to actually writing checks to actual creators - even Facebook has seemingly decided to not touch that landmine with a 50ft pole - and they were supposed to "dethrone" YouTube with their billions of minutes watched.
It's amazing people think that YouTube is screwing over creators when no other platform has even come close to what YouTube is doing at scale. Facebook/Twitter - heck even most ad networks give you zilch for putting content online.
YouTube isn't just deciding who reaps the rewards, their the only content platform sharing the rewards.
Moves like this are inevitable and allow those smaller companies to make some headway in the market.
Of course, if you incentivise this, you destroy comments entirely as they fill with people pretending to be organic product recommendation.
I (and I think quite a lot of other people) devalue information when someone has been paid to bring that recommendation to us, because it's in their interest and not ours.
Only if it's free to post, right? If no one has skin in the game, then you'll get spammers. Consider a simple system where people pay 10 gold to post and 1 gold to vote. At the end of the month, the pot of gold is paid out to the top posts and the voters who made the best bets.
I am not a game theorist/economist, but perhaps there is a set of rules such that every actor in the system is rewarded for their proper usage of the system, otherwise they get penalized, but this is only possible if it requires stake to be in the system, which is impossible in "free and always will be".
It needs to be expensive to go against the community, which is why actions should cost a nominal amount of money. If this is the case, dividends or incentives could be paid to users for participating in a productive protocol.
(Edit: Of course, there will always be the people who have tons of money and can manipulate the system, but how is this different than people with tons of money who buy account farms and drive impressions, e.g. fake news, ads, etc.?)
Isn't Youtube actually trying something like this, where community members can get paid to be moderators, essentially?
It's difficult to take your comment seriously when your opening line contains so much fail. YouTube isn't going anywhere but up. It has no rival and never will.
Likewise, it's difficult to take your comment seriously with this beast of a closing line ;)
If you'd (re-)read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and take that spirit to heart when commenting here, we'd appreciate it.
I turned on monetization a few years ago and I think I've made maybe $20 so far. For a while, I actually considered investing time in making more videos with the idea that the present value of a large number of videos might be pretty considerable over the long term (say 30 years or so).
A few years ago one of my most popular videos (tens of thousands of views) was flagged as being 'not family friendly'. The video was a screen capture of me scrolling through a notepad.exe list of documentary titles with no audio. It was just a list of nature/space documentaries that were already on YouTube. Nothing offensive or controversial.
I guess this is the final nail in the coffin for my YouTube career.
Now they did eventually reverse it, but it just shows you that when you are dependent on X, you are dependent on X. It could be better or worse, but it's still a middle man in the system.
You could go to a straight donation model like using Paypal, but that limits your global subscriber network since Paypal isn't used everywhere and you will also be missing out on the platform benefits. Meaning if someone is donating already on Patron they will more likely donate to someone else. Likewise if someone is subscribed to one channel on Youtube they will more likely subscribe to a second.
I think ultimately there is a trade off here where you have to understand what you are exchanging in terms of freedom, control, and dependence, with the platform you choose to use.
>> I'd definitely use all the most popular subscription services available
I have about five of them bookmarked. There definitely exists more.
You need to rely on someone at some point, but redundancy and decoupling can make the potential backstab less hurting.
1000 subscribers is going to be impossible if your content is niche.
That guy who put together that excellent 40 minute step-by-step video on fixing my garage-door opener (plastic gears, seriously?)... why would I subscribe?
Youtube is pivoting to being a TV-replacement.
Yeah the subscriber part is going to shut down my partner status. I'm not an active youtuber by any means, but I do have one long video which last year generated 10000 hours of watchtime and $100 as my ad revenue share. However because I don't pump out new videos I only have around 150 subs. Fortunately I don't depend on this income, but it does feel unjust. Especially if it's only about stopping paying me my share and the ads will still appear.
So only <1% of impacted channels might be materially affected.
$25/year for a video that took <1 hour to make is an excellent investment.
For sure some people will continue regardless but there will be a few who also won't pursue the growth curve [making more quality fixit videos, for example] because getting the traction is getting too hard for their niche.
1. missing a boat
2. pulling up a drawbridge
3. cutting down (like a tree)
Now I am confused if the boat they missed was actually in the moat over which their drawbridge was positioned, and the tree they cut down was actually their boat mast?
Or have I got it wrong?
This change removes that bootstrapping mechanism.
It reminds me of the time my bank canceled my credit card because I always back before any interest has accrued, I wasn't degenerate enough for them to make margins. Totally short sighted because, there is nothing to say I wouldn't need emergency cash tomorrow.
Likewise with youtube there is nothing to prevent todays small fry producing super engaging content tomorrow. After all, how does one get to the big time without going through mediocrity first?
Other video hosting platforms, such as the vimeo, suddenly got a lot more attractive.
It does nothing to address the ongoing grievances of YouTubers about monetisation. At this stage, it seems like getting paid is a complete crapshoot. Sometimes your videos will be classified as "not suitable for most advertisers", despite not breaching any of YouTube's policies. Sometimes your video will be taken down or demonetized by a completely bogus copyright claim. Sometimes you'll get lucky and actually see some ad revenue for a video. If you've got a problem, you're stuck with the usual Google tech support system of "personally know someone who works at the Googleplex, otherwise you're SOL".
Pretty much every sane YouTuber is moving towards a Patreon-first business model and treating ad revenue as a bonus. If someone solves the discoverability problem for videos hosted on other platforms, YouTube are done. Do not pass go, do not collect $200, lose all of your content creators because you've treated them like criminals for years.
I had ads disabled on my Youtube channel but was forced into the partnership program just so I could link to my website in a card.
Now those cards are going to disappear which means it's extremely unlikely someone is going to find my site since it's only listed in the description. As a content provider this makes me less interested in using their platform.
I'm only at 2,000 hours watched and 366 subs which isn't remotely close to their new threshold considering those are life time stats. The 4,000 hours and 1,000 subs have to be less than 12 months old.
The weird thing is, the channels with the largest amount of subscribers are the ones who are the most risky to advertisers. I don't follow Youtube drama but didn't some kid recently video record a corpse with tens of millions of subscribers, and now advertisers are ripping into Youtube.
That one video from 1 person with tons of subs is responsible for more negative advertising press than hundreds of thousands of people with smaller channels.
> Accordingly, this email serves as 30 days notice that your YouTube Partner Program terms are terminated.
feels like a pretty big fuck you.
It is a little insincere to use the 99% of the channels number here. Vast majority of the channels from Youtube makes barely better than nothing because the long tail effect. What is actually interesting is, how many of the channels that previously make around a sizable chunk of money from Youtube, like say 1000 dollars, now will not qualify. I bet it won't be as harmless as Youtube want people to believe here, but they probably believe it is inevitable casualty.
To be honest these new thresholds seem entirely too low to do any good. The spammers and scammers can easily reach the thresholds. But small scale operators who aren’t interested in gaming the system will be the hardest hit.
If you wish to compete with Youtube, consider a feature match of the followings:
1. Fast streaming, everywhere, on phones and browsers.
2. Super High resolution videos.
3. Huge content reserves.
4. Good search and discovery experience.
5. The ability to battle spams and handle external copyright claim to avoid lawsuit.
6. Robust ad platform and sales and the infrastructure to sustain operations.
Youtube has achieved this because they are part of Google, they enjoy all kinds of technological advantage: Storage/Serving/Spam filtering/Video encoding/Machine Learning, and years and years of accumulation of data, losing billions of dollars while getting constant cash injection from Google.
It is hard to replicate Youtube, heck, even Chinese doesn't succeed to copy one of their own. None of the video streaming websites in China is exactly the model of Youtube.
That's also vital. Otherwise you're risking your entire platform on lawsuits from film and music companies when copyrighted content is inevitably uploaded.
8. An ability to pay for bandwith costs without going broke as soon as your service starts to grow.
I think YT is in a unique position where the scale of your service has to be massive before your costs become manageable. This reason for this is b/c you need to operate as a network peer and have the ability to do edge caching. The vast majority of players in this space and startups simply cannot compete on that level.
One could probably mitigate high operating costs by charging for the service or limiting who can post on the site. But I think these two factors greatly contribute to YouTube's monopoly status.
If you went to Amazon videos for all of your video-consumption, Amazon would know exactly how to target you without having to pay Google.
Twitch has been attempting to compete in the video game space by adding uploads and comment systems on videos, but Twitch has its share of problems such as a haphazard dashboard and a terribly designed mobile app.
Vid.me was around for a while but recently shut down.
It's not a very competitive space imo.
But Vimeo's Samsung Smart TV app broke last year, and they haven't fixed it in months. They blame Samsung, and they're probably right, but Netflix, YouTube & Amazon have continued updating their apps during those months. It just feels like Vimeo isn't giving their product the attention that it needs.
(Well, sort've... I get a blank white screen at launch for 30 seconds, then a blank grey screen for another 10-15 seconds. But after that, it actually works! This is with v2.0.8. I'd never thought to keep waiting through the white screen. Thank you!!)
It is showing v2.0.8 as a 2016/11/10 release in the Samsung App Store, but their store also shows it near the top of "What's New" today. (I'm sure Samsung have been 'fun' to deal with.)
My email is in my HN profile, happy to help if I can!
In the meantime, download anything you enjoy today, because it may not be there tomorrow.
You basically need your own data centers and wholesale bandwidth, aka scale.
Building a reliable service, handling peak, etc. is hard, and driving down latency will probably cost more... But 40TB can be done a lot cheaper than 3-4k USD.
I'm sure if you rented hundreds of those and actually used the bandwidth they would kick you out.
I think that YouTube has reached Google levels of optimization. Sure, it could be better, but not better enough that people are willing to switch.
For any specialized market, probably a lot; YouTube may be the ultimate least-common-denominator user-submitted-video streaming service, but it's not the only one there is room for.
This is doubly true for services like Google Search, and yet (for example) security-oriented engines like DDG are barely making a dent.
I honestly don't think niche is the way to go if you're trying to go after Google/YouTube/Facebook. You'd need to figure out a core issue or core need that has been overlooked. And I just don't really see one.
DDG is making a huge dent in the narrow segment it is designed to appeal to, which is all any specialized service can hope for. I think DDG fans persistently overestimate how many people find Google’s personalization a net cost.
> I honestly don't think niche is the way to go if you're trying to go after Google/YouTube/Facebook. You'd need to figure out a core issue or core need that has been overlooked.
Sure, if you are trying to replace one of those as the dominant mass market player in its domain you need to do that.
Also, I think you are more likely to find a core need by dealing with a need that seems niche but is really just more pronounced and visible in that particular niche than by digging around in the dark for a core need.
The parent post was discussing disrupting the major player -- YouTube. Me making some tiny website that caters to videos of, say, amateur astronomy, while interesting and successful in its own right, would not so much as make a dent (let alone disrupt) YouTube.
That was my point: that disrupting YouTube (like disrupting Google) seems, to me, nigh impossible.
Unless your niche audience is willing to pay per minute, it is going to be difficult to pay the bills.
Google isn't removing any videos, but they are using the demonetized videos as bait to get you to watch their monetized videos.
Basically niche videos will just be replaced by other people who will find ways to monetize it...or not even motivated by money at all but just to put content out there and for people to enjoy.
So far, all the comments on HN are about how they won't get paid, they will be replaced by people who do it without monetary rewards or saavy enough to monetize through external revenue sources.
Yeah, if there is an adequate substitute for your monetized product provided by an ever-refreshing pool of people willing to work for free, you're in a precarious position. Pretty much independently of the behavior of any middleman.
And now that I think about it, fake view time doesn't really seem difficult to put up either. The time is coming where you'll pay to have you video viewed so you can be payed to have your video viewed, looks a lot of fun :D
The first thing that came to my mind is that I can't imagine it is terribly difficult to purchase bot subscriptions. Their policy changes to focus on relevant watched hours in a set amount of time could, and probably will, open new demand for purchasing illegitimate traffic as well. Same game, different rules.
I wonder if this policy will be easier to spoof than pure views alone? Surely the risk has been evaluated by the policy makers but I am interested to see how things pan out, and what counter measures against bots/spam they may take as a result.
Since they've decided they need to vet all channels before ads are shown, and they can't do that to every channel, they've had to set an arbitrary view/subscriber limit. But now they're going to lose out on ad revenue for millions of previously-monetised videos, while still having to host them for free.
Ironically though, most of the controversy is from large content creators that won't be effected by this so, who knows.
How many dollars does it cost them to vet a channel?
My 3 minute video makes me ~.3 cents per view. It's actually less than 3 minutes, most don't watch the whole thing. 4000 hours in a year = $240 revenue. So, advertisers are paying $360.
If you have just 2000 hours of views per year, Google is throwing away $60/year in revenue.
My linked gmail account alone with 10+ years of data should scream legitimacy alone.
They tried to crowdsource it with YouTube Heroes. I guess that didn't end up being enough.
It's Google. They'll tell advertisers that every channel will be manually reviewed to make them happy, but the degree of manual review will vary.
They'll score most channels as low risk and do a cursory manual review to 'check-the-box', and the degree of review will go up from there.
This is bad news for advertisers too. Say your product is in demand by people outside the supposed ideal target audience then you won't be able to reach them.
Or if you do not care who buys your product so long as it sells. What if half of your audience are watching stuff deemed to be not monetisable? It doesn't matter if you vote Trump or not so long as you could drink more cola.
Thank god for that.
Really her appointment was nepotism and she'd already have been replaced if she wasn't so close with Larry and Sergey.
Edit: Made all of my videos private.
For me as a consumer the main value youtube provides is its recommendation system for discovering [long-tail] content. Why not have a "show me more videos like this" button for paying subscribers out of which the video creator gets 10c or something.
Youtube is slowly becoming just another shitty mega broadcast outlet like NBC or netflix producing corporate-sanctioned mainstream content of little relevance to anyone.
Somebody has to find a way to make longtail content sustainable. The fact that people do sign up to pay into Patreon or pay to Twitchers demonstrates that this is possible.
Corporate involvement in content creation is poisonous.
Actors can and will still make fake accounts to remove traffic from the monetized accounts (and therefore from YouTube).
YouTube needs better search results.
At least Spotify/Apple still pays musicians per stream. The small musicians on youtube are no longer getting that privilege. Big Music(tm) screws the little guys again.
(I know this is more than about indie musicians, but this is the effect I am seeing most in relation to my usage of Youtoob)
They aren't solely to blame but I would wager they are a prevailing interest at mountain view and in the valley.
A smaller number of dedicated fans are willing to pay more money directly to the creators that they enjoy and connect with.
How does this affect their relationship with advertisers more than YouTube Red, if at all?
what about the expenses incurred for youtube for hosting small/niche channels? If its reputation that youtube is looking for, they can ask some third party to advertise on the smaller contents with a 33/33/33 split of revenue with content creator/advertiser/youtube.
Is this an annual check? Or is it a one-time enrollement eligibility?
The 4000 hours is a big entry bar... it’s already hard enough to gain subscribers. Indeed the small creators - those who get maybe 5k views per video + 1000 subscriber + 5 mins videos won’t be making money??
EDIT: 4000? That's 70 hours per week.
I won't wonder if we see a solution soon to provide fraudulent subscribers like Instagram/Twitter ecosystem has. (not sure if it exists)
And then I will wait for Google to fight the subscriber (vote) ring pattern.
It doesn't seem fair or to promote high quality content. Seems pushing more for low quality prank videos à la Jack Paul and co.
Watch the video and buy the parts all in one place.
Give the creator a commission on the parts/tools sales.
I suppose I was a waste of time to begin with (for them).
They’re trying to reward longer term contributors whom have lower viewer counts.
Basically people who continue to contribute content even though YouTube hasn’t rewarded them; they’re contributing because they have a small following of dedicated viewers.
2. The new requirement is 4000 annual hours and 1000 subs.
3. The default limit on a new YouTube account is videos of at maximum 15 minutes.
So for a new/low profile user, they're effectively requiring at least 16k annual views vs the previous 10k lifetime. Also, many videos are shorter than 15 minutes, so make that 20k. Except a view is counted for 10% of the video, not 100% so really the number is much larger again.
This isn't changing the numbers to favour smaller active channels over small channels that have just been around long enough, it's massively raising the requirements however you look at it.
I have put out 10-12 videos over the last few years, with 14k views and 2 subscribers, though frequent content and plugs in the video will obviously get a higher subscribe rate. I don't care in this case, I never bothered to turn monetisation on, but I can see someone who'd put more effort in more recently feeling like it's wasted.
I produce videos on using Cubase, and teaching it IRL was my main source of income until September last year (I got made redundant from 2 schools I worked at). The channel is a useful ad for the book I have written on the subject of Cubase and Music Technology [2], and has got me some sales - I don't have exact figures, but I've had a few people say they saw the channel, then the book ads, and then bought the book. The book sales in total are nothing remarkable (a year of sales is about a month's earnings from the jobs I no longer have), but better than nothing, and mean it's actually worthwhile putting the considerable amount of time needed into the book to update it each year when a new version of Cubase comes out.
The YT channel made $135 in the last year. Nothing to write home over, but it means that once a year I can buy a plugin that I wouldn't have done otherwise. A niche channel such as mine isn't ever going to earn real money, but it's a nice side bonus to get some spending money once a year from it - I put the videos up because they are a bit of an advert for my skills, and because I've got a lot of positive comments from people who have found the videos helpful. But I would feel somewhat aggrieved if I wasn't making this small amount of money, and felt that I was being profited from for making content for free. I know about the hosting costs, etc., but I'm sure YT makes money overall.
However, I had another video on my personal channel which had a MAME cabinet I made using a Raspberry Pi - back in the day when this wasn't that common. It made it onto the official Pi blog [3] - along with a write-up that I did for it, and currently has 180,000 views. I wouldn't have seen a penny from that if the new rules were in place, and that the new rules will stop the 'one hit wonders' who create something that goes truly viral (Charlie/Finger, etc) from earning anything is a little concerning to me - I'm sure YouTube will still place adverts on them (?), but if you're a one-off, then you get nothing. Won't this just lead to people sending potentially viral videos to a channel who specialise in redistribution who will take a cut of the revenue?
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/c/musictechtuition
[2] - http://tinyurl.com/cubase9book
[3] - https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/guest-blog-6-mame-cabinet-b...