Hacker News Reader

Comment by yesco | Hacker News Reader

>The time is coming when YouTube will not be a viable place for creators.

Looks to me like it already is.

Creators go where the market is. If that wasn't the case, they'd be hosting on Dailymotion or Metacafe.

The question is whether it is viable for creators to earn a living through YouTube, or even to just host their content. With YouTube randomly shutting down channels and demonetizing at the drop of a hat, it's clear that it is no longer suitable for either of these cases.

As things are now, there is no other "market creators will go to" since I don't believe Dailymotion or Metacafe are viable either.

Vimeo?

Tell that to the thousands of creators who pay their bills with YouTube money...

"The future is already here. It's just not evenly distributed yet."

Before the first adpocalypse, more people could live off Youtube revenue than do now. Youtube is going through the third or fourth adpocalypse. Those who can still live off Youtube are lucky, and should be looking to diversify their income. For everyone else, there's places like Patreon.

I love this phrase

There are stages of adpocalypse?

Surely ad blocking would mimic the slow growth rates of browser adoption.

The YouTube adpocalypse wasn't just about ad blocking. YouTube has gone through multiple rounds of "you can't monetize", or "you can't be a partner anymore", or similar ways of cutting people off.

I don't know of any other video platform that pays Youtube money

I don't either and I assume there aren't any. The thing I would recommend to anyone living off of Youtube revenue is to diversify so you're not left with nothing if your channel gets taken down or demonitized.

Diversify to what, though? A portfolio of Treasury bonds and Monopoly money is not meaningfully diversified. If there is no other way to monetize video content than YouTube, there's no meaningful diversification you can do. You either have to eat the risk or leave the market.

I think he meant diversify "markets"... A.k.a work a part time job or something so in the event that your youtube revenue is nuked (as is happening more and more frequently), you'll still have a meaningful source of income (Many part time jobs have the ability to increase your hours as well if necessary).

That sort of "diversifying" is potentially not very practical - video production takes a lot of time and effort, so either you cut your output there to have time for a part-time job (is the part-time job giving you as much money per hour as the extra work you could have put into making more videos?) or you're now working a job and a half.

If you can make more from YouTube ads and per-video Patreon subscribers than you could by cutting your video production by half to fit in a part-time job, it might make more sense to stick to just videos but keep tabs on local part-timer opportunities. Less stable, but a higher net income until your channel goes down -> more able to last until you can get a part-time job? Not sure; I've been lucky enough not to have to worry about that sort of thing, so this is mostly speculation.

For video game streamers a lot of people diversify into a mix of twitch streaming, youtube videos, and patreon subscriptions, but it's not obvious that this is a viable path for the majority of youtube content creators.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com