Hacker News Reader

Comment by torgoguys | Hacker News Reader

I wish there was more transparency here from both the MCNs and especially YouTube, but I'm also leery about some complaints from channel owners. Specifically the ones that sound like they feel entitled to the services YouTube provides them (free distribution, tooling, outsourced ad sales, audience, cross promotion, etc) at zero "cost" (not necessarily monetary costs) to themselves.

Creators should feel free to try and lobby YouTube to make things better for themselves (YouTube depends on creators), but please try and steer clear of things that look like entitlement. It's a bad look.

And if things really are so bad, don't distribute via YouTube if the downsides of their policies outweight the benefits. If your content is good and a larger movement starts, that's the strongest message you can send to YT.

View on HN

From everything I've read/watched from the creators' side, what most of them really want is more clear communication from YouTube about why their livelihood is playing hide and seek seemingly at random. It's not about rights as such.

Correct.

Demonitization is arbitrarily enforced.

There are entire categories of subjects on YouTube that are verboten just because they might come close to mentioning something that might bother advertisers.

Here's another take on it if you don't mind listening to someone speak about YouTube politics over video people playing games.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xARpOT1gnw

tl;dr;

Military history content creators get demonitized for content that's too close to guns.

Freelancers concerned about stability? You don't say.

> steer clear of things that look like entitlement

How is wanting to know why you got pulled entitlement? For example, Justin Rabbit claims that he had no "strikes" against him, but nobody would tell him why his channel was being removed. It's not entitlement, it's just wanting to understand what went wrong maybe so he could fix it, or not do it next time, or whatever.

Why would you be entitled to an explanation? I’m not asking to be rude, and I think it would be a decent service to provide, but it’s also that, a service, not a right.

The word 'entitled' is loaded, and tends to derail these discussions. They want an explanation. To reduce their financial uncertainty. I don't know why every discussion needs to veer straight to legal policy and human rights. We're talking about 'good business' which I hope is still a thing.

I don’t really buy that argument. Google have been impossible to reach when they decided you were bad for their business and this cut you off from their services since the beginning of their company.

So have most companies you interact with. Yet these companies are doing better than fine. They are doing extremely well.

We live in a world where great content services such as GitHub are bleeding money and I think you should keep that in mind when you talk about what is “good business”. I understand the feeling of unfairness, but if you zoom out to the bigger picture, then it often doesn’t matter that much. YouTube is the one of the few profitable content hosting networks of a massive scale.

Maybe part of the reason they are profitable is because they don’t waste too many resources on people who aren’t making them money?

> don't distribute via YouTube

The issue is that even if video hosting can be done 'cheaply' (and it can't if you want speed!), the ad money won't come to a self-hosted video site. Youtube advertisers pay for the large aggregated traffic. The small youtubers won't have enough to bring in the same amount of advertising dollars.

Patreon is the only real way, and even that requires a decent amount of subscribers willing to pay to make viable. Youtube is the only option, which is why the complaining from small creators are so loud right now.

> The issue is that even if video hosting can be done 'cheaply' (and it can't if you want speed!), the ad money won't come to a self-hosted video site.

That's definitely the big barrier to all of this. There's been a few groups trying to build another platform to compete with youtube. So far most of them seem to either have found small niches that are working for them (vimeo et al) or they've got belly up (vid.me, etc.). I'm aware of a ffew that are trying but haven't fully launched yet, such as Linus Media Group's (linus tech tips primarily on youtube) FloatPlane venture, which seems like it's going for more of a youtube-red like model where you pay a subscription fee, and what you watch determines who gets a cut of the fee.

I really do hope that someone manages to get even a modest competitor going for content creators, even if it doesn't smash youtube down it could do a lot to give them a bargaining position on what kinds of content can survive.

>I really do hope that someone manages to get even a modest competitor going

Hey, I did it for cheap.

https://tinydatacenter.com/2018-04-10-ispooge-live.html

It uses a static site generator, CDN for delivery, RasPi's H264 hardware to HLS encode at >1x, and of course Docker. It include scripts to mirror YT playlists and videos.

It's more of a boilerplate site than SaaS/framework/etc. But that's how we do it in Clojure land for the most part anyway. I'm enhancing the RSS and added a Passwordless login and have a history with XMPP.

Features are being driven by taking my own channels off of YT/Twitch as their primary home, and move to the Pi with the POSSE pattern (publish on your own site, syndicate everywhere). There's a video systems compared table + video in the link.

That’s an interesting view on “entitlement.” How about, the reason YouTube is where it is today is because of the content creators since its birth. Without quality content it wouldnt be where it is today. YouTube grew because a large chunk of its early content has copyright infringement and other sorts of material which would be deemed “offensive” by its current standards.

So I would hope that given its history, YouTube would try to fight for the content creators as opposed to fighting for its ad partners.

YT is not doing it for fun though. They get paid because they slap ads around the content the creators provide. What you said here means "don't complain you got fired, steer clear of looking entitled" for some creators.

You wouldn't like to hear someone saying that about you losing your job, would you?

Yes I pointed out that YT needs the creators.

And I was recently told by my employer that due to budget cuts, a bunch of my services were no longer needed. Of course I'm bummed, and I think they made the wrong cuts, but I didn't go around b*tching that they owed me a job.

It's becoming more and more clear to me that Youtube's business model is even less ethical than Uber's. Youtube expects you to produce massive amount of content for them free of charge. You may win the lottery and get paid for your work or not. If you get paid you might decide to make a business out of it. Then Youtube can arbitrarily decide to go back to not paying you anymore. At least with Uber you're going to get paid something.

How different is this really from traditional publishing or TV? There's a lot of upfront development work required to create something that's pitchable. And then a person or a show may be deemed too much of a hot potato to continue with it. It's true that there are more potential channels to monetize than in the case of online video, but no one's owed advertising dollars.

The biggest difference is that Youtube has clearly encouraged small time entrepreneurs, mom and pops, to create businesses relying on the Youtube platform. Youtube will put ads in your video whether you get paid or not. If you do get lucky and get paid Youtube retains the right to destroy your business after the fact with no explanation and little recourse. Since google pays hopefully-maybe-after-the-fact, you are out of luck.

Compare this to traditional media. You make a pilot episode and sell the show. Usually the "you" in this case is a multi-million dollar studio. The network then pays you to produce one or more seasons of the show or they don't. They may decide to cancel your show, but you still get paid.

They've encouraged it in the sense of people are seeing other small time-y video channels making money. So they want to get in on the action. Nothing wrong with that obviously. But it's not unreasonable that they should appreciate they're getting in bed with an elephant.

Most of them don't really have an option if they want to capture an audience and make money but it's the reality of a market where there's basically one buyer.

And with Uber, you can pick up and go to lyft if/when they treat you poorly, without completely losing an audience you spent years building

You might argue that the audience is YouTube’s and not yours, but in practice it doesn’t really work that way on the internet.

For a decade we told you "careful, don't rely on giants like google, they are not your friends, they are centralized, they are a private for profit black box, if it's free you are the product, etc".

Now you wake up and say those investments of your years of work are in jeopardy ?

Google is just google. It's nature is clear from the beginning. Their business model is clear from the beginning. The pros and cons of using youtube and the potential future pitfall were known from the beginning.

And even after that, they demonstrating by their actions that you could have problems with them. Many times before today.

It's like complaining about your weight after years of drinking soda.

Soda is not the problem.

Well you do expect them to host and stream your video for free, no matter the quality and quantity of it, of the size of your audience.

If you want to have control of the deal, use something like dtube, otherwise remember you are __doing business__ with google.

Of course you're doing business with Google. Just like you're doing business with Uber.

Google may arbitrarily choose to place ads in your video and still not pay you for it. The behavior of Google is completely arbitrary with no real accountability. Google has clearly encouraged people to create businesses around Youtube video creation. And yet they retain all the power to destroy your business on a whim with no explanation and no legal recourse.

> Youtube expects you to produce massive amount of content for them free of charge.

I think that's a rather one-sided entitled point of view, and here's why.

YouTube provides a hosting service for video content with no up-front hosting fees. They do charge advertisers to host their content and use a large portion of those fees to run their business, turn a profit themselves, etc. Also, they share a percentage of those fees with the content creator so they have a financial incentive to create more content.

Now, if those advertisers don't like your content they shouldn't be forced to pay for it. The creators only get paid if the advertisers don't disapprove of the message; YouTube is the middle-man in that scenario and basically bears all of the risk for the advertisers and have to "police" the content.

Granted everyone is better off if there is clear communication between all three parties and sure it would suck to rely on that as your sole source of income but that's some of the risk when you're in business for yourself. Content creators are basically throwing a video up on a market and hoping someone will pay them for it, right? Or am I completely off base here?

Please, can we stop saying that this is about advertisers not wanting to be associated with certain things? It is clearly not true.

I really hate to post these links three times in one thread, but I feel it really drives home my point.

This is not about advertisers disapproving of the content that their ads are displayed over. Coca Cola had no objection to spamming people watching coverage of the worst mass shooting in history[1], nor did other advertisers[2]. The evidence clearly shows that they will associate their brands with the worst acts of horror and violence, and YouTube will pay corporate channels to show us horrible violence to an almost fetishistic degree.

And YouTube discloses none of this. YouTube entices people to spend their own time and money creating content, and then misleads them about their monetization policies, and secretly picks winners for monetization. I also think that this gaslighting on their part is part of a concerted effort to "gentrify" their platform, and drive away independent creators, without openly admitting that they are no longer welcome on their platform.

> Content creators are basically throwing a video up on a market and hoping someone will pay them for it, right? Or am I completely off base here?

You are completely off base. For years, YouTube was very loose with their monetization. Now, they are imposing self serving and byzantine rules on independent content creators, which are virtually impossible to follow properly if you are doing anything other than makeup tutorials. Except if you are someone they like, then none of these rules apply.

If YouTube is handling money, then they have a responsibility to be more transparent. Both morally and I think legally.

[1] https://twitter.com/h3h3productions/status/91474720399799091...

[2] https://twitter.com/PhillyD/status/916132444662751259

> please try and steer clear of things that look like entitlement. It's a bad look.

Ugh, "entitlement" as a pejorative. God forbid someone advocates for their own interests.

Users are entitled to certain rights when it's a monopoly. And YT is essentially a monopoly.

Think of it this way: Why are you entitled to privacy from Facebook? You can simply stop using Facebook, right?

What's the difference between FB and YT?

A key difference with the FB privacy analogy is that FB tracks you off the site. If YT monetized content that isn't hosted on its own platform, then we might see a similar reaction.

YT is part of google, which definitely follows your YT login around the web and monetizes it, and more effectively than Facebook.

>Users are entitled to certain rights when it's a monopoly. And YT is essentially a monopoly.

YT is essentially a monopoly in what market specifically? You have tons of options to host content you make. They are under zero obligation to provide services to you.

>Think of it this way: Why are you entitled to privacy from Facebook? You can simply stop using Facebook, right?

I don't follow. Please clarify what you mean. I didn't say I'm entitled to privacy from FB. (And FWIW, I don't use FB.)

YT is essentially a monopoly in the small producer content discovery market.

Hosting is not YT’s primary service. Discovery is.

Indeed. It's very much the Amazon model: lose money as long as necessary, even if that's 'forever', in order to be the one key player in the sector and be recognized as such.

The stock market absolutely does not think some schmoe with a Raspberry Pi constitutes 'competition' to YouTube, and I think they're right in that assessment. Sometimes power isn't just 'getting paid money': everybody knows you shop Amazon to buy stuff over the internet, everybody knows you put up videos on YouTube, search with Google, etc.

I think the difference between this and something like MySpace is, the heavy hitters today have figured out they can't risk the slightest betrayal of that 'category killer' instinct. YouTube will function as a monopoly at all costs, no matter how much money they lost, and part of this behavior is so they can retain a lock on the big advertisers even if that's not keeping them in the black: it would be much worse if the big advertisers decided some other platform was relevant, and Youtube was MySpace or Geocities.

Hence, this situation. Right now, it's safer for them to whack a bunch of content creators (and manipulate the climate for what goes on their platform) than it is to alienate advertisers. Not because they're doing that great off the advertisers (it's a failing model), but because they must continue to appear to advertisers like they're the only platform in the world.

>YT is essentially a monopoly in the small producer content discovery market.

You can slice and dice markets until you say anyone has a monopoly. I know this guy who has a monopoly on hair cutting services in the main downtown block in the town I live in, that type of thing. That doesn't mean it is a "monopoly" that regulation would confer any rights to the consumers (which is the sort the upstream comment was looking for).

Same thing for "small producer content discovery market." It's a stretch to say that's some sort of regulated monopoly, or that it should be. YT steers their users towards particular content. So does Netflix, Amazon, The New York Times, Lego, and everybody else. You wouldn't expect YT should have to steer people towards Vimeo videos.

Which section of antitrust law grants rights to users who aren't even paying customers?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com