Comment by fareesh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fareesh | Hacker News Reader

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Imagine you work hard editing for a day / days, and put out a video and go to bed. You wake up the next morning and find that after the first 3,000 views, the video was de-monetized and the remaining 500,000 views went generated no revenue. You complain to YouTube, they manually review it, and your video is re-monetized. Your views for that video barely increase for the rest of eternity. That bug just cost you X revenue. Multiply for the entire month.

At the very least, YouTube can offer a service your video can go into limbo before it's sent out to your subscribers, where all of these "mistakes" can be ironed out.

Perhaps the platform is de-monetizing video based on mass reporting - leaving the system open to be gamed by anyone who is okay with the ethics of brigading/report bombing. This is a VERY common thing these days.

The other possibility is that the AI is generating false positives and de-monetizing as a result of it.

Whichever the case may be, it ought to be possible for content creators to publish a video that is not mistakenly de-monetized for the vast majority of their viewers.

> video based on mass reporting - leaving the system open to be gamed by anyone who is okay with the ethics of brigading/report bombing. This is a VERY common thing these days.

I would say the “angry mob” is one of the biggest threats to free speech in our generation. If you can’t get the government to silence those you don’t like, try and get them deplatformed everywhere.

It’s the biggest threat to profiting off of speech, not of free speech. After all, doesn’t the angry mob amplify the message?

> Imagine you work hard editing for a day / days. That bug just cost you X revenue. Multiply for the entire month.

Counterpoint - it didn't cost you anything, it's just lost opportunity. Imagine you work hard editing for a day / days and literally no ones watches the videos you produce. You have no cost, but also no revenue.

I understand why people want to criticize YT, but if you are using a service that will gladly pay the costs for your distribution with no upfront obligation and no on-going payment, then what do you expect?

I mean this is why unions exist. Not suggesting that unions are the right answer here. In fact, I really don't know what the solution is, but I don't think either side of the table has a solution that will solve everyone's problems unilaterally.

> Counterpoint - it didn't cost you anything, it's just lost opportunity. Imagine you work hard editing for a day / days and literally no ones watches the videos you produce. You have no cost, but also no revenue.

Sorry I guess I should have provided the context - the context was you are a YouTube user with a subscriber base of regular viewers. I figured that came across when I quoted the viewership numbers. Monetization is only offered to users who meet some thresholds.

Why don't they pay for the 500,000 views after the video is re-monitized? This doesn't seem like a hard problem for Youtube to solve.

Those 500,000 views wouldn't have had ads shown on them. Some solutions might be: 1. Being able to automatically unpublish the video if it's de-monitized. 2. Have a monitoring service available that can fight copyright claims in real-time. 3. Don't upload at night and then go to sleep. :)

Or: 4. Google accepts the risk they have to pay you out of pocket the amount you lost while you appealed their demonetization if you win.

That risk should feed into how sensitive their automated system is at automatically demonitizing things.

The only way Google cares enough to change this is if their demonetization practices cost them money when they get it wrong.

It does cost them money when they get it wrong. It's not as if google makes money off the demonetized video, they only make money if the creator does. People act like YouTube wants to demonetize videos, of course they don't, they would monetize every single second of YouTube if the advertisers allowed them to do so.

>It does cost them money when they get it wrong.

Does it tho?

Google has the problem of too much advertising space vs too few advertising clients. Being able to significantly cut down the advertising space means they get better prices across the board.

Demonetizing any singular video (especially if suspect or borderline) is one time loss, long time profit.

Maybe they weigh the risk of creators leaving vs advertisers leaving. High profile creators haven't left yet. Advertisers have already bluffed a number of times and Google didn't call them on it.

1 is an insightful, outstanding market need. Build it folks

> At the very least, YouTube can offer a service your video can go into limbo before it's sent out to your subscribers, where all of these "mistakes" can be ironed out.

This has existed for some time. You can upload your video as "unlisted" and then later make it "public."

(N.B. "unlisted" != "private")

It won't be monetized or de-monetized if unlisted

I think de-monetizing is part of Google's profit plan. They provide content for no cost, but can still show ads and earn revenues. It's a giant scam.

This is a little too cynical for my taste. Google isn't exactly a monument of ethical business, but I seriously doubt that Google would intentionally demonetize videos for the purpose of stealing from content creators.

Often used to hear the same accusations when adsense was a bigger thing. Accounts with expected big payouts would always get banned a few days before payout. They would accept all traffic you send them for the month, then just before paying out, banned.

Perhaps a coincidence sure, but when accusations keep getting made about underhanded tactics, maybe there is somethig there

<takes_off_hat_made_of_tinfoil>

We're seeing a lot of sentiment similar to this on Quora as well, now that they pay question askers. This is the first time I've been on "the other side" and see what's actually going on, rather than just seeing blog posts about "I made $X and got banned a day before payout!"

At least in Quora's case, almost everyone making thousands and getting banned right before a payout are gaming/scamming the system to make those thousands, and just play the "right before I got paid!" card whenever they get caught because, well, there _was_ another payday coming... even though they should have been demonetized a long time prior.

Except demonetized channel videos don't show ads.

This whole conspiracy falls flat when Google doesn't generate revenue off of demonetized video ads.

The hypothesis is that the channel was only demonetized after a long period during which it generated ad revenue. Flipping the demonetization switch doesn't make that revenue disappear. Rather, that causes the revenue to stay in Google's pocket instead of being distributed to the channel owner.

The channel still gets the previous revenue leading up to the demonitization switch, so no, Google doesn't gain anything. In fact, they lose because they're now hosting videos that no longer generate revenue.

That happened to me too. Min payment was 120€ or so, and when I had amassed that amount (it took me like one year), bam, banned a few days before I could cash out. Obviously on purpose. That was ten years ago or so I think.

Google isn't exactly a monument of ethical business, but I seriously doubt that Google would intentionally demonetize videos for the purpose of stealing from content creators.

Whether it's intentional or accidental, it's readily apparent that their incentive structure doesn't motivate them a bit to correct the situation. Also, this mechanism makes it very easy for lower level employees with a political axe to grind, to punish viewpoints they don't like.

Why is it 'too cynical'? It's metric dysfunction. A division of the company is getting results with a cost that is way below what it should be. Nobody in management wants to know how the sausage is made. It would tank their revenue reports for the next quarter.

It takes leadership that most companies no longer possess to avoid situations like this, and Wall Street enforces this behavior (see also, B Corporations).

The AdSense settlement (http://www.adsensepublishersettlement.com/) was quite literally that exact pattern: Google would do a review once you cleared the $100 threshold for a payout and conveniently block you, but there was no evidence that the ad customers were being refunded

Are any of these business models transparent? I think a lot of it runs on pure faith.

If I spend $10,000 on an ad, is there a way to prove that I got $10,000 worth of advertising and not $8,000?

If I am a content creator and my content generated $500 in total revenue of which I have a share, is there a way to prove that it generated $500 and not $1,000?

> I seriously doubt that Google would intentionally demonetize videos

Upper Management will never say that directly but when they keep saying we need higher revenue and lowers costs, the people working under them find ways to achieve the targets and get their bonus.

Check Wells Fargo fake accounts story.

Yes, whats more likely is that one of the countless bean counters at Google saw the long-tail revenue pie chart/breakdown and thought to themselves "Hmm! Would you look at that!" and just decided to not upset the apple cart..

Decisions like these aren't mistakes.

Well, let's look at Google's ethics here - they still run ads on demonetized videos, right? So Google is okay making money off that, they just don't want the creator to make money off demonetized videos.

No, they don't. Fully demonetized videos don't run ads because that's the entire point of demonetization - that the video was deemed unsuitable for showing ads (because ad buyers don't want their ads showing next to certain content).

Partially demonetized videos may show ads, but from a reduced set of advertisers - those videos will make money but possibly not as much due to less desire for the ad space on that content.

I thought there were no ads shown against demonetized videos?

> but can still show ads and earn revenues

De-monetized videos do not show ads or earn revenue, so that actually hurts Google as well (of course it has indirect effects that are beneficial for Google overall).

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

Isn’t this just yet another internet service that is not viable if vetted properly? Same as Facebook.

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