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Comment by etatoby | Hacker News Reader

From Google's point of view, the Blender Foundation are the bad guys. They host a very popular channel on their servers, using up a lot of bandwidth, storage, and resources, they don't pay a cent to the hosting provider, and on top of that, they actively try to prevent their content from paying up for itself. I don't see it as shocking that Google is forcing them to enable ads.

What I find surprising is that Google did not see this coming and thus A. never limited ad-free content to small channels in their ToS, and B. does not provide a paid hosting option.

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Or doesn't at least C) clearly explain what the policy is. You want to require ads on channels over x views, make that your policy.

But these guys have priority support, and still go around for months with youtube without getting any answers, only to then have their whole channel killed without comment.

Why do so many tech companies have these Kafkaesque exception paths?

I concur. YouTube need to have a clear policy, explain it, give people a notice period, then implement it.

If they want everything to be monetised in order to fund the ongoing existence and development of YouTube that's entirely their choice, but they need to be very explicit about it.

Especially when they're wiping out entire channels with misleading error messages as a consequence of maybe possibly changing something that they haven't told their support people about.

> Why do so many tech companies have these Kafkaesque exception paths?

Support doesn't scale. Better that a million users have a terrible experience than one user takes up staff time getting their problem fixed.

> Support doesn't scale.

If you cannot (or don't want to) scale support, create the policies from beginning in a way that hardly needs any support. Just like you plan your database from beginning how it is supposed to scale.

I don't understand if you truly believe that or are trying to be sarcastic (poorly).

Either way it's a comment that adds nothing constructive to the discussion.

Those popular channels, is what drives customer acquisition and stickiness at YouTube. The costs associated to this are simply marketing costs, so I think it’s just greedy to charge your content providers to drive down the retention and acquisition costs.

The minute I can't just find everything on youtube though their entire model begins to go down the toilet. What's that going to cost them.

This is a totally fair point. But wouldn't it make more sense to either (a) continue to pay the hosting costs to stay known as the 'one true place' to find online videos, or (b) allow the Blender Foundation to pay to host their vidoes on YouTube if they want to stay ad-free?

Yeah, I totally agree. It's a very bad look for them to essentially disallow ad-free non-profits if they get popular enough. Given how small of a segment this is (the vast majority of massively popular channels monetize, after all), and the fact that they already have the infrastructure to support it, it should be a no-brainer for them to keep Blender on. The reputation cost is clearly worse than the actual loss in hosting costs here.

However, they're a big company, and it makes sense that they have a policy of "if your channel is big enough, you have to put ads on it to support hosting cost". Making policy exceptions in a big company like this is tricky, and it seems Blender just fell through the cracks.

If this is the case, they must be transparent about this and basically be able to tell it like it is.

This isn’t true at all. Publishers have the ability to choose which of their videos have ads in them: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/72857?hl=en https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/94522?hl=en

Given some of the very brand unsafe videos that show on YouTube, it is obviously in google’s best interest to not require ads for all videos.

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