Comment by bArray | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bArray | Hacker News Reader

The worst thing Youtube ever did in this respect was to give in to the original advertisers dropping out of their platform. As far as I know, they introduced a bunch of changes that crippled the income of their creators and their speech, without any monetary return for doing so.

In turn, creators have to be careful about what they say and viewers are slightly less interested in tamed content.

With creators further restricted and not being paid as much, they reached out for third party funding sources (bypassing Yotube) and started to seriously consider other platforms as alternatives.

Worse still, once one media company had seen success at trying to "cancel" Youtube, others strive to capitalize on the same opportunity.

Now Youtube is stuck trying to implement forever more complicated filtering models, employing larger and larger numbers of humans for manual verification and are trying to find an impossible balance of responsibility.

Dealing with news media is pretty much the same as dealing with bullies - simply ignore them and they'll go away. The advertisers will eventually come back when the heat is off and they see their competitors doing really well.

> As far as I know, they introduced a bunch of changes that crippled the income of their creators and their speech, without any monetary return for doing so.

Are you in a position to know about that, though? I mean, would you expect to be made aware of whether these changes were financially efficient to YouTube? Or are you just presuming they are not?

To explain a bit about your question to others:

YouTube directly lost money by introducing these changes, because content that is demonetized doesn't make YouTube any money either. However, the bigger picture is that if YouTube in its entirety becomes advertiser unfriendly, then much more money is lost by them.

So the question whether YouTube lost money with these demonetization rules is not so easy to answer.

> Are you in a position to know about that, though?

I did proceed my statement with "As far as I know", meaning I'm willing to be educated differently.

> I mean, would you expect to be made aware of whether these

> changes were financially efficient to YouTube? Or are you

> just presuming they are not?

Again, I'm willing to be told differently, but the big advertisers that I was aware of were Disney, Coke and Car Manufacturers, none of which ever seemed to return, despite Youtube bending the knee in trying to get them to return.

As another comment says, Youtube loses money delivering content without adverts. As the number of demonetized videos increases, so do the losses from those videos.

My point is essentially that they although they made these changes, it doesn't appear to have benefited them. The number of "controversies" increases regardless of what they do, but now all that happens is that they hurt the communities they want to protect (such as LGBT) and annoy others.

> Again, I'm willing to be told differently

I guess my point is that you're not going to be told differently, because that information is proprietary. It is not YouTube's habit to go around letting all the curious people know the details of its financials or the inner workings of its decision-making apparatus. You would not expect to be told all the factors that weigh into the feature's development, nor how it's turning out. So the fact that nobody has informed you or publicly announced that demonetization's goals are being achieved is the expected outcome, whether or it is performing as desired.

The only solid evidence you or I have access to is that they are still doing it. That at least strongly suggests that it has some significant benefits from YouTube's perspective, considering all the downsides you so rightly point out.

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