Hacker News Reader

Comment by netcan | Hacker News Reader

Private, centralized 3rd party marketplaces are responsible for some of the biggest commercial successes of the web boom(#1 and 2.0).

But, they haven't "done good" by vendors, by and large. A YouTuber with viewerships as high as mainstream TV shows can barely afford "2 guys and a mic." App store purchases is a fairly meager market, and not a place to build a serious business unless you have other "monetisation" plans.

Steam is somewhat of an exception but still, being beholden to a discovery algorithm like that is disheartening.

Recommendation engines are such an important part of any market these days. Besides recomending stuff, it's an incentive structure for the market.. a la google-> seo spammers, fb-> kgb spammers, etc.

View on HN

The discovery algorithm serves the consumer first and foremost. When users start complaining about not being shown interesting stuff, then Valve will jump into action.

In this case, how do we know that the algorithm change isn't correcting a problem? I'm sorry for the game developer in the article, but every time his game was being promoted, somebody else's wasn't. How do we know he wasn't being over-promoted with the old algorithm? Without seeing everything that Valve sees, can we really know?

The point here is not about this particular developer, but at about recommendation engines in general and the challenges they pose.

I'm not arguing against algorithms here, there are just too many games on Steam to show everyone a raw list of products and let them fend for themselves.. You need some kind of automated curation.

But as a seller of products, you have to put all your faith in the marketplace's ability to put your products in front of the right people as much as possible, and it can be frustrating when you suddenly start seeing data that shows this is happening less, and you don't know why.

Exactly what I meant. They're not meceydoing a bad job, but just having that central decider (human or botmaster) is disheartening.. when things don't go your way.

..it's a gatekeeper, and we have a complicated relationship with those guys.

For sure, I agree and I know exactly where you're coming from..

A decade ago or so I was tasked with writing a recommendation engine for a "creators community" company I worked at, and the feedback we got after launching that feature was pretty much constant for as long as I was still working there.

Everyone wanted to know exactly how it worked (so they could min/max for the logic) and no one was happy with the results.

> When users start complaining about not being shown interesting stuff, then Valve will jump into action.

I'm pretty sure there are a lot of complaints about it, but as much as Valve tries to better the situation there's a significant problem: It is hard to match people with games they'll like based solely on broad metadata about both.

From the article, we know there is a problem with the algorithm change because the "other product pages" graph stops matching the other graphs, see the orange line here after the start of October: http://greyaliengames.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/RegencyTra...

> every time his game was being promoted, somebody else's wasn't

This isn't necessarily true. Imagine a recommendation list of 4 items being shortened to a list of 3 items... Or 4 small promotional thumbnail links being redesigned into a single larger image link for a single game. That larger image isn't going get 4x the traffic + clicks just because it's 4x bigger.

> This isn't necessarily true. Imagine a recommendation list of 4 items being shortened to a list of 3 items... Or 4 small promotional thumbnail links being redesigned into a single larger image link for a single game. That larger image isn't going get 4x the traffic + clicks just because it's 4x bigger.

But that isn't the case here. "More like this" list was always 12 games. Both before and after the October change.

highly naive to consider only new-style algorithmic truths; traditional markets are heavily manipulated at every turn, even under scrutiny and threat, no?

no?

Steam's discovery and categorization are pretty awful. Despite never having purchased an anime visual novel, played one, or even looked at a store page for one, Steam advertised them to me nonstop on the front page. I blacklisted anime. Problem solved. But then I just get lots of trash tier roguelikes. A couple years later, I realized that blacklisting anime actually blacklisted all Japanese games entirely -- even those without an anime art style, which is too bad.

My guess is that because those games are so inexpensive, they probably sell a ton of units irrespective of price and category, and if the system is optimized to show stuff that is moving a lot of units in a short period of time, it will bubble to the top.

The other day, the only good recommendation I've seen in a long time came up: Battle Brothers has a new DLC, even long after the devs said they were not going to make any. But that's the only one I can really think of.

I think most personalization features on marketplaces are kind of overrated. I care way, way, way more about sales than I care about 'personalization.' I am just about never going to buy something at full retail apart from daily essentials.

I think his problem more realistically is that his category is extremely weird. Adventure solitaire RPG? How would you even begin to SEO that product page in a way that didn't cause a ton of confusion?

Even something like Thronebreaker, which is basically a solo player card game RPG, does not try to distinguish itself on search. It promotes itself based on the strength of the Witcher brand and on Gwent.

> Despite never having purchased an anime visual novel, played one, or even looked at a store page for one

I'm going to be honest, given this information I'm wondering how you know you hate them. Any individual recommendation is likely low-quality, but that's mostly thanks to Sturgeon's law - Steam certainly has a good enough grasp of what I'm looking for in a game to point me at the right genres.

Honestly man I don't need to play an anime visual novel to know I won't like it. I don't like visual novels and if it's anime it's probably about high schoolers.

...Right. Okay. Stereotypes and a failure to do basic research is not a reason to disregard an entire genre. Go play Umineko and Steins;Gate. Have fun.

You're missing the point here; If I wanted to block shooters, would you try to defend shooters - saying that they don't influence young kids to shoot up school etc.

You would be right of course, but thats not the point. It's not harming anybody, and nobody has to use such a feature.

If you'd told me you had a library of 3d action-adventure games and fighting games and hated shooters because they were plotless, mindless gorefests, I would recommend Portal, Half-Life 2, and Halo. They are dissimilar enough from genre's stereotypical dreck that I'd recommend them even assuming your statement was completely accurate, and good enough in absolute terms that I think you'd be likely to enjoy them. I agree that there are a ton of awful VNs out there, just like there are a ton of awful shooters, but I hate seeing people throwing the baby out with the bathwater based on sweeping generalizations that simply aren't correct.

If you want more specifics: You complained about VNs as being "anime" and then said that all anime was about high schoolers. I provided recommendations for high-quality VNs that were neither anime nor about high school.

I have 344 games in my library accumulated since the day Steam came out over 10 years ago. They fit pretty neatly into RPG, action/FPS, strategy, and the occasional odd indie that is hard to categorize. Nothing there in my purchase or play history indicates that I want to buy a $0.99 high school drama. Chances are I will never buy one until I die at this point. One issue might also just be that I own everything I'm likely to buy, so it just runs out of stuff to suggest.

Yeaaah, knowing you're into RPGs and random indies, I'd recommend JRPGs, and if you already have any JRPGs I'd add VNs. Certainly the options involving less high school relationship drama, which is why I say that the specifics are an issue and that 90% of everything is crap, but, well, there are some extraordinarily good non-teenage-relationship-drama stories out there in JRPG and VN land.

Some recs in that direction, based on what's presumably a collection of western RPGs and FPS games: Baten Kaitos (gamecube), Most Final Fantasy games in the single digits, Golden Sun I and II (gameboy advance), Umineko (PC), Steins;Gate (PC).

Steam discovery is and was useless for years. It is not really a place to find games you might like.

I followed a conversation he started on Twitter about it, and every dev that responded had similar graphs for that time period. Still could be some bias, but there's more than one data point.

> The discovery algorithm serves the consumer first and foremost. When users start complaining about not being shown interesting stuff, then Valve will jump into action.

Anecdotally, I've been seeing users complain about Steam's recommendation algorithm for a long time, on gaming forums like ResetERA.

I don't recall a time when I wasn't hearing people complain about their recommendations. Steam's recommendations are legendarily bad in the circles I hang out in and I don't remember the last time I bought a game off of one. I may never have.

Steams algorithm sucks, it has a bad habit of recommending games I already own.

But not DLC for those games that I haven't bought yet....

His point is, that he suspects AAA games get more favovered, because they make more money for Valve. So good for Valve, not necessarily the consumer who might have been happy with a less expensive indie game as well ...

It depends on how you define "done well by vendors". They aren't causing a few vendors to find success on the scale of a mainstream TV show, but they have allowed a great many vendors to "succeed" weakly.

2 guys and a mic, without Youtube, would just be a self-funded hobby to show your friends and family, maybe enter some indie film shows, maybe help get a job in advertising or local TV with your portfolio. With Youtube, they might get a million subscribers and make on the order of $10,000 per year from what would otherwise be just a hobby! And there are on the order of 10,000 such channels with 1 million subscribers.

Now, you can say what you like about how Youtube treats the other 97% of channels with far less viewership - but there's a lot fewer than 10,000 channels on mainstream TV.

It's the same in game development, mobile app stores, music, sports, and a lot of other fields. The marketplace is open to a lot of people who really want in to get their chance at the top. It's hard to earn a living wage from doing the work when you're competing with people who are willing to earn less than a living wage.

The issue here is that you make (just continuing your hypothetical here) $10k per year for 2 guys doing 7 days per week to maintain their viewership. Not enough to sustain their business, so their content starts moving toward least common denominator stuff.

I'm not seeing how this is not just reality. It's like trying to make a living as a rock band, a book author. There's too many games. The iOS app store claims 2 million apps. It's been around 10 years. Opened July, 10, 2008.

2 million apps / 10 years = 547 new apps every day for the last 10 years. And of course the number of apps coming out today is far greater than it was 10 years ago so it's actually more like 1000 apps a day right now.

Steam has the same issue. Steam was around 8k new games in 2017. That's 21 new games per day, 153 a week, 666 a month. No one has time for that many games.

What would Steam do to suddenly get all those games to make a salaries for every indie that put stuff up? There's really nothing they can do. There's just too many games. At most Steam could go back to restricting the market. That wouldn't raise anyone's odds, it would just make invisible all the people that tried and failed to get on the market.

It's not a zero sum game. By improving recommendations and visibility valve can increase the total amount of money (& time) people spend on games.

Not enough to sustain their business, so their content starts moving toward least common denominator stuff.

It's the same story with books. Apart from rare mega hits like Harry Potter, the bread and butter of the paperback world is least common denominator stuff like Danielle Steel and Nora Roberts.

I don't think we can blame Valve here. This has happened across all forms of media. There is too much content and not enough time.

> YouTuber with viewerships as high as mainstream TV shows can barely afford "2 guys and a mic."

This actually isn't a revenue thing, its a platform expectation thing. There's a really good video essay (on YouTube, naturally) explaining the 'Manufactured Authenticity' for popular YouTube channels: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FJEtCvb2Kw

> A YouTuber with viewerships as high as mainstream TV shows can barely afford "2 guys and a mic."

But this stands to reason. Mainstream TV show viewing figures refer to the number of adults 18-49 in the United States watching the show live(-ish now that L+SD and C+7 rates are used to sell ads) including at least putatively watching the various 3 minute blocks of commercials in the middle. YouTube viewing figures show the number of worldwide plays by all people in or out of the demo, most not in the United States and in less valuable markets, many adblocking, those who don't adblock often skip ads, and the ads are either inline or pre-roll. And the content is shorter, so it's sort of unclear how an 11 minute video should compare to a 42 minute television series.

Adblock works for most of the network tv websites too! Surprisingly...

One reason networks have been very ineffective at including online streaming views in their ad sales packages.

>A YouTuber with viewerships as high as mainstream TV shows can barely afford "2 guys and a mic."

Do you have a source for that? because it seems to me like there's a lot of youtubers out there making pretty good money.

Here's one example. [1] It claims 1.4 million monthly viewers translates to about $17K per year. Yes, a few people have made relatively big money ($millions) but that's for billions of views.

A popular TV show averages in the neighborhood of 15 million viewers these days.

ADDED: So the parent comment seems pretty close. Maybe $150K/year gross revenue for viewership in neighborhood of the most popular network programming. That's in the ballpark of barely supporting two guys and their gear.

[1] https://www.inc.com/minda-zetlin/even-youtube-stars-with-14-...

Aren’t TV ratings based on how many people watched each episode, during its initial airing? And the same episode is sold in multiple venues, like DVDs and paid streaming. To apples-to-apples compare traditional TV production budgets to the YouTube stat of revenue per views per month for a whole channel, you might need need to multiply by 10 or 100.

YouTube’s cut is reportedly 45% - I am skeptical that the traditional media industry gives such a revenue share to its creators.

With traditional network TV, the vast bulk of the money is in how many people watch the show when it first airs. Syndication revenue, DVDs, etc. are relatively trivial. Obviously the whole model is shifting to a more fragmented and on-demand market with fewer, but often more valuable, eyeballs per show. Seinfeld peaked at over 30 million average views for first-run episodes. Game of Thrones is about 10 million for a comparison on cable today.

I agree that apples-to-apples is hard but the bottom line is that very few people make a real living from YouTube views.

I think if a YouTube creator is getting four hours of attention per month from millions of viewers (like a popular weekly TV show), they are probably getting pretty good revenue. I don’t think creators who earn less are getting ripped off, their market is just divided between many more attention-seeking channels.

The recommendation engine are there for the buyers, not to replace sellers' marketing. That's as reliable as a source of viewers as scratch lottery cards.

Let's say, hypothetically, that I create a website that rivals YouTube where people do achieve fairly consistent success, and can live off of the income from their videos. What do we expect to happen?

Hundreds of thousands of people will try to get in on it, causing both the income of existing creators to drop, and the average income to plummet.

Any market where there is a huge supply of people who want to produce the good is going to have this problem.

have you seen how much youtubers earn?

Picking a random example: https://socialblade.com/youtube/channel/UCbx1TZgxfIauUZyPuBz...

100k daily views, £17 - £250 estimated daily earnings.

Game of thrones has an estimated 10 million viewers per episode. So, scaling up youtube earnings: £1,700 - £25,000 per episode. The actual per episode budget was around £4 million per episode.

See the gap here?

https://influencermarketinghub.com/how-much-does-pewdiepie-m...

You're using the example of the top earner to make your case about everyone?

Do all film actors make $60M/year just because Dwayne Johnson does?

Well to be fair the parent was using one of the most popular TV shows to make their case, so using the top YouTuber as a response seems reasonable.

There are multiple youtubers who have gone into depth about the details of how twitch people get paid. From top end to bottom, it's fairly consistent (except for a little subscription margin step at a certain point). Youtube/Google is even less involved in day-to-day, so there's no reason to believe that the scale isn't similarly linear.

My God, no. It's not anything like linear. It's more like exponential: the top earners are totally off the charts, and everybody else is largely jockeying for position.

I hesitate to even call it a scale. These things all follow viral dynamics: if you haven't blown up with billions of views, you're very possibly spending more than you get back.

Pareto explains the curve, but the monetary rewards are linear to where you are on that curve. Perhaps a small example will clarify.

Pareto Curve (more or less) of Y values on index X: [1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,2,2,2,2,3,10,50,500,7000,9000000]

Index 30 is "off the chart"

Now revenue: $$*index

The correlation is linear (basically). The top youtuber who is a kid who reviews toys, makes the majority of his 22mil from ads, same as you or I would with <100 views per video.

I don't think that is a fair comparison, because people pay money to watch Game of Thrones, while YouTube is completely free. If it cost $14.99 a month to watch a small set of YouTube channels, their viewership would be far lower (and revenue per viewer would be much higher).

> If it cost $14.99 a month to watch a small set of YouTube channels

Actually this exists, it's called Youtube premium and there are some channels that offer some content exclusive to the platform (as far as I'm aware)

I have no idea how it's doing but I also don't have any interest in trying it out, I'd much rather support specific content streams via patreon or other offerings.

I pay for YouTube Premium.

Are there ads?

No.

Not on YouTube (general) but I also pay for YouTube TV and there are loads of ads on their "on demand" content.

Vote with your wallet. I'm about to ditch Pandora b/c they keep advertising pandora super-premium, when I'm already paying for pandora premium.

What should that particular anti-pattern be called?

I already voted with my wallet when I dropped Comcast TV. What I found is that "cutting the cord" is not all unicorns and rainbows. I'm not more reliant on Comcast the ISP, and the speeds I pay for are not the speeds I get.

I also dropped Pandora, because I had/have too many streaming music options and couldn't justify it. I don't remember commercials for their ultra premium offering, maybe its because I've been a paid customer for so long?

Yeah a fair comparison would be high viewership but freely available stuff like SNL.

How did you generate the random example? If you do it again, I'd be shocked if you got a 100k/day example.

I would guess there's a very, very long tail of channels that have a very small number of videos and essentially no views.

That channel is ranked around 20,000... It's in the long tail.

I picked an example of someone who does it full time.

With hundreds of millions of channels, it's pretty darned close to the head.

Sure... but what's the value of a channel with no views in this example?

It won't be monetised, so you can't really compare it to TV?

Earnings is far from a linear function of viewer count.

well I always tought that most youtubers actually make money via "hidden" ads and not via views. most of these 100k daily views channels make way more than 17€ - 250€ juat because they have sponsors and what not. basically it's the same than on free tv. people with the most sponsors and ad network will basically make the most money. (i.e. on german television (sky paid tv) there are ads on the end of game of thrones which makes them probably more money than their subscriber count)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com