Going sponsor-free – 3blue1brown
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I'm pointing out the widespread belief among the techies that the second option is inherently more noble than the first.
If I create content that caters to the local population of, say, Mombasa, am I more likely to produce more if I rely on donations, or if I rely on google displaying ads of Mombasa businesses? Would you, a techie in the USA/Western-Europe with disposable income, even hear about my channel?
(edit: That said, I don't like brand promotion from the creator within the video either since that introduces a huge bias. But I'm all for algorithmically generated ads where the creator has little control)
That's fairly different from where only people with disposable income get to see things because only they are able to pay for them. If a lower-middle-class recent mother can view a maths video after viewing an ad for a specific brand of diapers (that sets out to get her to switch from a different brand), that's a better outcome than if she can't because she's not a middle- or upper-middle-class person.
I suspect the difference is actually fairly high in practice. Judging by some ad campaigns that are facilitated through our middle-ware, it's not all Maseratis and fancy wines. Quite a bit is for the bottom 80%.
It's not about capturing the highest income audience its capturing the largest audience in the income demographic of your product.
Think something like (amount a customer will spend) * (% of demo willing to spend at all) * (size of income demo). Naturally more people are less rich and the first two terms are highly product dependent.
Stereotyping a bit, McDonalds isn't going to be making big inroads showing all of their ads in opera houses and Lamborghini is not making any sales advertising at Goodwill.
I'm not sure there's a way around that, but I do think that not all revenue sources are created equal. I think the danger with advertisers is that they seem focused on increasing consumption. Not all consumption is bad and it's up to the consumer to decide, but there are certainly aspects of it that are wasteful or dishonest.
With donors, at least some are probably helping because they genuinely believe in the cause or have visions of improving life beyond their own generation.
Not all donors are better than all for-profit companies, but if I'm throwing darts at who is going to have nobler intentions, I'm picking donors.
If you have algorithmically generated ads, by definition you will have little control for how they fit visually around/within your content. Bias be damned, but if I want my product to look a certain way, ads are a non-starter.
I'm also not sure that producing ad-driven content for business in Mombasa necessarily aligns with the content the people of Mombasa want to see any more then it does here.
The big benefit of independent funding is that the creator is solely responsible for her audience, and not beholden to third parties.
Another hypothetical scenario: I make videos of mobile phone reviews, and I'm an amazing reviewer. And I rely on donations. I start with the noble intent of not biasing towards expensive phones, and treat all phones the same, because I've a noble intent of catering to all segments of society.
I'm also reliant on the donations for my livelihood because I hate ads.
Over time, I notice that I get more donations (Say $12) whenever I review some feature of iPhone, or Samsung Galaxy. It doesn't even have to be about a new phone - just a tiny feature. When I review a $10 phone that folks in Mombasa use, I get none.
I have finite time, and I need money. But I'm completely against ads, algorithmic or otherwise. So I now talk more about mundane iPhone features than I do about that $10 chinese phone.
Choice 2: I rely on google's targeted ads. It's learnt to show pre-roll Mercedes ads on my channel when someone in Manhattan views it, and a local business ad when someone in Mombasa views it. I make $11 from Manhattan ads and $1 from Mombasa ads.
I still don't get as much money as I do with donations. But if it's noble purpose we're talking about, my latter choice seems more noble than the former to me.
It's still the same incentive structure. If you review iPhones then you get visitors from Manhattan and make $11. If you review $10 phones you get visitors with no money that advertisers won't pay anything for.
If they have nothing to donate to you then they have nothing to buy the advertiser's product with.
Doing work for people with no money is charity. And charity is great, but if you're expecting it to maximize profits, you're doing it wrong.
I don’t really mind product placement as long as the brand matches the content of the video (a gun channel promoting gun manufacturers is fine by me) but I’m getting so tired when a totally unrelated video promotes some shitty pay-to-win mobile games or forex/binary options exchanges/betting sites.
This isn't as simple as it seems though because with the transition to that model the global economy would take a serious hit, as there would be less demand (of the emotion-driven kind).
For me and many though (which may not have a say in the market as big as the consumerist group), the choice is clearly the self and planet-conscious one.
For example, if I created a service to file taxes for free [0], what's wrong if I advertise it so that more people can gain from it? Most people don't even know that CalFile exists, for example.
If you have a service to file taxes for free, and it really is good, shouldn't it spread by mere word-of-mouth? Wikipedia never ran any ads, for instance.
> If you have a service to file taxes for free, and it really is good, shouldn't it spread by mere word-of-mouth?
In an ideal world, yes. But my point was that a service for filing CA state taxes for free already exists, but most people still don't know about it because it's never advertised.
Imagine I provide some good or service that is extremely valuable to people, but there is a law preventing me from telling those people. Now those people cannot receive my goods or services. Is that not also "lying" by omission?
Advertisements can be misleading, yes, and there should be regulations to prevent misleading advertisements.
A great deal of advertising is about attaching desirable lifestyles to a particular brand and paying attractive celebrities to endorse the brand.
None of this is information. It's psychological manipulation targeted at the natural human inclination towards group affiliation and status seeking. I consider it unethical for the same sorts of reasons that I consider microtransaction mobile games and gambling unethical.
Unfortunately, this entire set of practices seems to be eating the world. [1]
So for example, advertising influenced me to start smoking tobacco. And them I was hooked, off and on for 20 years. Finally off, I'm glad to say.
Maybe closer to home for many here, some years ago I was shopping for a server. But well over half of online reviews were pretty clearly advertorials for one brand or another. It was very difficult to find objective comparisons.
Or VPN services. Virtually all VPN review sites are pay-for-placement. That's obvious if you look at their history in archive.org snapshots.
But I would expect that all advertising -- including advertorials, compensated "reviews" and product placement -- should be clearly disclosed. As in "this is an advertisement.", prominently displayed.
To me the idea is that a company will build something that amounts ultimately to garbage, then back it with an exciting advertising campaign and catchy tune targeted at childen. Often it's a set of toys, so you're encouraged to collect them all. The children will then nag their parents for such a thing, until the parents relent.
An example from my childhood would be the Mighty Max toys (or Polly Pocket for the female demographic). I know that once I was finally given a Mighty Max toy I quickly moved on to other things, with a total play-time probably measured in hours. Contrast that with Lego, where I was regularly building and creating cars, and castles, and bridges, and towers, for well over a decade. From my parent's perspective the Lego was much better value for money - and I'm sure they knew that - but they were sometimes coerced into buying junk.
In this sense of "manipulation", it's an attack on my freedoms. Everywhere I go, whether I want it or not, I am assaulted by posters, videos, TV ads, Web ads, outdoors, sound speakers, and all other varieties of advertising. Whether I consent to it or not, I have people subtly implanting ideas on my brain. Ideas that I'm fat, ugly, that all the fun is happening somewhere else, that other families are all happy and wonderful, and that all of my yearnings and insecurities are solvable by having a Coke or whatever. It's insidious. They make people feel bad about their body, insecure about their families and love lives, all to make you drink sugary crap that will most likely harm your health. All of this bombardment of my vulnerable primitive mammal brain, I stress, happens without my consent.
EDIT: I don't know if I was eloquent enough to communicate well my feelings about this. It's early, forgive me. :p
Especially for those of us who pay for YouTube red.
But glad to hear there won't be "b r i l l i a n t . o r g" (made hard to copypaste on purpose since I've no interest in encouraging them due to spamming too many of videos I watch) interruptions in the videos anymore
I think 3blue1brown's formula is amazing for laying the fundamentals of advanced mathematics. But it's not needed for deep diving into specific topics. And there are more than enough advanced core topics remaining to cover instead.
In 10 years his 'Essence of Calculus' videos will probably earn more money per month than now.
In reality, you're going to make most of the money in the first few days after uploading and after that you'll get a trickle of people who find it via search, recommendation or rewatching it from a playlist.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZHQObOWTQDNU6R1_6700...
Granted, I'll still forget the material since I don't use it every day. But I do believe it gave me a deeper insight, and will help me remember it longer.
This move is not rational. Ads do not behave like this article says they do, and every draw or consequence of ads listed here are resistable or mitigatable on his part, since he is the content creator.
People do crazy things for love, and this content creator clearly loves his creation.