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Comment by CivBase | Hacker News Reader

I am baffled as to why YouTube is still primarily monetized by ads. Ad revenue is unreliable and inherently restricts the kind of content YouTube can even monetize.

The model used by Twitch seems far more reliable. I thought they were going that way with YouTube Red, but that ended up being a huge disappointment. After about a year I switched to just donating to my subs on external platforms.

Just let me make small, monthly donations to the creators I like. In exchange, spare me the ads. YouTube can even take 50% of the cut or whatever. It's more stable that way for both YouTube and its creators.

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I think this is because that idea isn't sustainable for the majority of youtube content, which isn't produced by professional YouTubers. Most video is hardly even edited. In the current system, all video can be monetized whether or not it's a music video, well-produced documentary, a sponsored gear review, some video of someone's baby crawling around, an explanation of taylor series, or a 24/7 webcam livestream of someone's backyard.

In a viewer-contributed system, only creators that have a good audience worth paying into would receive donations, but those lesser known videos would essentially have to be subsidized by those donations since those videos wouldn't bring donations in themselves. YouTube's cut, 50% as you suggest, would probably be better spent making the platform better for those creators than hosting videos that brings in no donations.

Also only a very very small subset of the audience will donate. Platforms that have been predicated on donating or subscribing to receive content are struggling to lift off (besides Patreon, which is effectively a marketplace for content, merchandise, behind the scenes stuff, etc rather than just a video hosting platform).

Most of the views land on professional channels. You basically have to be at least semi-pro to reach the numbers you need for "monetization" by Youtube anyway.

There are 2 Youtubes, one for embedded viral clips you discover around the web and one for professional content that viewers subscribe to.

I think Youtube has issues shoe-horning both systems into one monetization scheme. I think this is mostly a problem of inertia but either they need to make things more stable for their professional creators or someone else needs to build a better platform for these pros.

> 2 youtubes

There’s a whole ecosystem of niche review channels that have decent but transient viewership.

For instance some chromebook reviewing channel posts reviews of almost every chromebook coming out to market. There might be some people subscribing to that, but the bulk of the views will be from search results, and only for 3 or 4 videos per viewer (once they make their buying decision they’re done).

That’s an example I could think of on the spot, but there are many many facets of youtube that have a decent traffic with no allegiance from the viewer. They also survive by managing in-content ads themselves, having affiliates or any other system external to youtube, but youtube ads must still represent something to them.

Not really. The requirements for monetisation are 1000 subscribers and 4000 hours of watch time in the last year. They're not the easiest numbers in the world to reach for new YouTubers, but they're also not beyond many amateur creators either. I know many people on the platform who reached/far surpassed that without much in the way of video production/editing knowledge and no budget whatsoever.

That situation seems to be the case already - Professional YouTubers are the ones pulling in big view counts and so receiving the lion's share of the revenue. Yet there are millions of tiny contributors doing it for non-monetary reasons.

This situation is also true on Twitch. For every big streamer pulling >1k viewers per stream, there's thousands of small streamers with <10.

Youtube has already made a token effort to mimicing this with the 'join' button, but right now that more patron-centric revenue model looks to be a short- and medium-term winning formula. Youtube would likely benefit from pursuing it.

> In the current system, all video can be monetized

To monetize your video you need to have 1000 subscribers and 4000 hours of watch time in the past 12 months.

Unfortunately, this isn't how Twitch operates, either.

Twitch is primarily an ad platform. That's where they make most of their money, and why they're making changes to increase ad impressions. Subscriptions used to give you site-wide ad-free. Now it's only for that channel.

See Devin Nash streams for insight into the business of Twitch. It's not public info, so it's a lot of reading between the lines and anonymous first-hand accounts, but I imagine it's accurate.

The direct-pay model is vastly preferable because it keeps advertisers from controlling content, and Twitch certainly has shown greater success here than I've seen before. But it's not happening on Twitch. At least not like it should.

90% of the adverts I see on Twitch are for Amazon Prime which suggests that Twitch advertising isn't naturally selling out.

Twitch since acquisition has made some changes (e.g. no longer hiding ads for prime members, forcing pre-roll ads on channels) to increase the amount of adverts seen but content creators hate adverts.

Twitch is live and not episodic which means that it relies on people watching and staying to watch. Pre-roll ads cause a noticable bounce rate, where someone clicks on a channel and because an advert starts playing thinks "nevermind" and clicks a different channel. Adverts during streams are suitable for some games with natural pauses but for others just interrupt things and any time creators have a break (which they should have more often for their health), they will lose a significant part of their audience.

Most games don't have a natural cliffhanger or other hook to get people to wait for "after the break", so the audience will just think, "I wonder what x is doing" and click through to their channel instead. In fact they don't need to wonder, it's present on their sidebar as a constant reminder of what other channels are showing.

So there's this weird situation where Twitch is reliant on both content creators and want advertising revenue but adverts actively harm content creators so resent being forced to play adverts.

I think Google/YouTube made a huge strategic mistake by not introducing a serious competitor to patreon. Pretty much all youtubers these days make a significant chunk of their income through patreon, and its main features wouldn't have been that difficult to integrate into yt. They started to do a small rollout with yt red with "red only" and subscription options ("join"), but it's far from widespread and they did it after patreon had captured a sizeable chunk of its userbase.

Youtube has about three orders of magnitude greater revenue than Patreon. Do you think Patreon could grow 1000 times by scaling to the size of Youtube?

I love the direct-support model as a consumer/viewer, but I have significant doubts that it competes with ad dollars nearly as well as people would like it to.

In terms of creator income it absolutely competes. In terms of raw spending, adtech is king by a mile. I doubt patreon would ever grow to compete with youtubes ad sales volume, but creators get a very tiny cut of the yt ad revenue. Typically single digit dollars per 10k views. Or far more views, depending on the audience (cpm varies wildly among different target groups). As someone who ran a slightly successful yt channel (20k subs), I was making a pittance from ads ($100/mo). That was back before things like patreon existed, but I'm sure I could have gotten more from donations.

Doesn't much of youtube's revenue come from music these days? Whether a patreon-style model competes or not depends on the kind of content. Individual channels making videos on youtube act like patreon is a much larger income stream for them than ad revenue.

Just 'donating to creators' works in cultures where asking for donations and giving donations is alright. There are cultures (most developing nations in Asia) where openly asking for donations is frowned upon, and donating to non-charitable organizations isn't considered normal either because most people don't have the disposable income to just give away.

Buying things for daily needs, and advertising for them is still normal.

Unless you're willing to turn Youtube into a 'Developed western countries only thing'(which already exists - it's called Youtube premium), advertising is a better option.

YouTube already has that as a feature. A ton of channels have big "Subscribe" buttons on all their videos. The number of people actually paying though is, I imagine, negligible.

JSYK It's a "join" button, separate from subscribing.

Right. I mixed them up because it really should be the opposite.

Note that there may be fewer ads on Twitch, but there is still a machinery working on you to make you select various levels of subscriptions or buy vanity/chat mechanics. It all hinges on streamers creating "1 to n" relationships, and such a dynamic changes the content.

If only it was possible to pay for the true hosting and bandwidth cost, with discovery/search mechanisms either open source or on a separate service (decentralized and smaller in scope), and again a separate platform to support individual creators.

Not disagreeing with you, just pointing out that the Twitch model might still suck on some level.

I'm not sure what Twitch does with live streaming works with static videos. Could you imagine a sub train and cheers on a Twitch VOD providing nearly as much income as it does live? YouTube seems to have monetized live streaming in a similar way but when it comes to normal videos they have to either compete with existing 3rd party services like Patreon (which is already down to something around 10% not 50% and covers more than just videos) or come up with perks for subscribing you can't get anywhere else (which is hard to do with recorded video with a bad comments section attached).

> I thought they were going that way with YouTube Red, but that ended up being a huge disappointment.

> [...]

> Just let me make small, monthly donations to the creators I like. In exchange, spare me the ads. YouTube can even take 50% of the cut or whatever.

I'm confused. Isn't that exactly what YouTube Red (now called YouTube Premium) is? $12/month, no ads, creators you watch get paid out of the monthly subscription instead. (A payment which was, last I checked, significantly more money per-user than ad revenue is.)

In reality, I don't pay creators to avoid ads. I can just use an ad blocker for that. I pay creators because I want them to keep making content and I know they can only justify doing that if they make enough money off it.

I've used the word "donation" a few times, but I don't really see it as a charity. They're providing me a service and I'm simply allowed to pay whatever I want for it.

To that end, YouTube Premium is a disappointment to me. It's fixed at $12/mo for everything. I can't donate more and I can't pay less in exchange for removing ads on only a few specific channels. On top of that, there is no transparency over how much money is taken by Google and how the remainder is split across the channels I watch.

YouTube Premium is a service for people who can't or wont setup ad blockers, are already paying for Google Play Music, care about the exclusive content, or want to download videos with the YouTube mobile app.

I use a PiHole and have no problem using a VPN to connect to my home network if I want to block ads on my phone. I still buy my music, so I don't care about the Google Play Music subscription. I don't care about the exclusive content and I can just use youtube-dl if I really want to download a video.

The only reason I would get YouTube Premium is to support YouTube itself. But the questionable actions YouTube has taken to stabilize its ad revenue (coupled with the many problems of its parent company, Google) alleviate any guilt I might have otherwise felt. At this point, I only use YouTube because of their content monopoly.

Interesting perspective. I have a similar attitude towards subscriptions; except I don't really want the mental overhead of having to manage payments to the dozens (or hundreds, if you count one-off views) of different creators whose content I watch. A single subscription service which distributes payments automatically based on which videos I watch seems much more convenient from my perspective. (And all the other features which come with it are a nice bonus.)

This is already how it works for a lot of channels except the funding comes through Patreon. This is strong evidence that viewer sponsorship works yet YouTube is just missing out on their cut.

I got YouTube premium just to get rid the annoying ads (they started showing way too many ads).

Maybe they should just let creators monetize their own channels by having, as you said, a subscription service similar to Twitch as the main monetization.

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