YouTube adds ads but won't pay all content-makers | Hacker News Reader

YouTube adds ads but won't pay all content-makers

bbc.com

45 pointskhaledh41 comments

Big discussion already in the past 24-36 hours:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25149206 (926 points/721 comments)

This is very painful for the people who make video's that don't attract enough subscribers to reach the 1k threshold (like makers of incidental How To video's). You can have millions of views, but if you don't have enough subscribers, you won't be able to monetise and Google will profit from your work.

This will push more and more people towards adblockers.

Or an increase in premium YT accounts. I wouldn't be surprised if there is a holiday promotion in the near future.

Could this be something we solve with community actions. find videos that are well made, do get views and ask a community to subscribe so they cross the threshold?

Its late and I'm about 5 whiskeys in so maybe a silly idea but right now I feel I'd be more than happy to hit a few channels and subscribe to help out.

Yes, it can be solved with community actions: the community can start using something like PeerTube to distribute their content instead of relying on centralised behemoths like Youtube. The value of Youtube lies in the content which its users upload, if you have something worth sharing on there you can also share it elsewhere. Begin by having content both on Youtube as well as PeerTube and point those who are annoyed by Youtube-ads to the ad-free PeerTube instance. Youtube will eventually change its terms and conditions so as to forbid pointing users to alternative distribution channels so the sooner you set up those alternatives and start pointing your viewers there the bigger chance you have of spreading the word. Replace the lost income from Youtube with one of the many sponsoring services, this will aid in becoming less dependent on Youtube. Once the PeerTube channel has gained traction you can put a moratorium on your Youtube presence. Keep to this and, once you are close to the end, replace old content with short trailers which point viewers to the new site. Continue publishing on the new site, if you want you can put trailers on Youtube but it is probably better to refrain from doing so as this might end up annoying viewers. Just leave a message on your channel about the move and keep it at that. Assuming that your content is worthwhile to viewers they will follow you.

Don't criticise the media, become the media

Whether yt pays it's creators or not have no impact on ad blocker usage.

Also the general population do not care about ads. I've asked my SO countless times to install an ad blocker, but she refuses. She just doesn't seem to be annoyed by the frequent irrelevant interruptions.

> Whether yt pays it's creators or not have no impact on ad blocker usage.

It will because now YT will play ads on a lot of previously unmonetized videos. So people will watch a lot more ads.

Don‘t know why this got downvoted, it’s a solid point.

Also if you seem to be gaining traction, wouldn't you simply be able to buy 1000 subscribers for a very low price? (I'm not saying yt's rules are right, I'm just saying this might be a simple workaround)

I believe there is also a certain amount of hours that your video's need to be watched by subscribers that counts. That is probably a little more expensive to buy. Probably not worth the ROI considering the low amount of subscribers on your channel bringing in ad revenue.

I guess they will always be in favor to the channels that bring the most views/watch ratio. I think this will also do that, it wont hurt the largest creators, but it will definitely hurt the small ones. Sucks very much as it will deprive of the variety of content on YouTube

just before I saw the first headlines, I was jokingly complaining to a friend that it seemed Youtube was showing more ads then regular commercial TV channels do. Apparently something did change...

Google's corporate code of conduct used to be "Don't Be Evil". After their restructuring under Alphabet that was changed to "Do the Right Thing." You may think these statements are equivalent but we can see it's driving different behavior, i.e. people respond to them differently.

On another note, I used to think YT was great. I was a regular viewer, lots of subscriptions, etc. It was typical that I'd watch YT in lieu of other content. That has changed in the past month or so because the ad frequency has gotten to the point of making the content unwatchable.

Maybe that should be our 2020 Holiday Challenge - take a break from YT for the holidays. If their viewership drops significantly then maybe that'll drive better behavior.

I know it's unpopular to suggest paying for things on the Internet, but YouTube Premium is worth the investment if you're allergic to ads. It removes ads on mobile and Chromecast too (where ad blocking is harder to set up otherwise) and allows you to play videos in the background on mobile (a feature that I use constantly). If you're a heavy YT user like me it's really not that hard to justify the expense.

I'm allergic to signing into any Google property in a web browser. The only thing I use my Google accounts for is email and I don't want everything I do to be associated with one of my Google accounts because then they shove other annoyances in my face.

Even non-Google websites like Medium.com annoy me with pressure to sign in to their site if I'm signed into a Google account. [0]

[0] https://imgur.com/a/06M9riv

Just like Twitch started forcing random ad interruptions, I guess this is a trend now.

It's almost as if hosting and serving videos cost a lot of money and the companies eventually want to make a profit.

Then relax the rules to monetize, or dump them altogether

How many serious alternatives are out there for content makers now adays?

They’ll have to pitch their ideas to Netflix/ATT/Disney/Comcast/Apple/etc. Or setup their own website and make deals with advertisers.

Nginx can still serve videos with a plugin. There's plenty of ways to self host it.

The problem? You don't have YouTube to cover your hosting costs.

Split the video into chunks and serve it with the wrong mime type, and cloudflare will host it for you...

S3/CloudFront supports video with scrubbing, and it's not expensive.

The bigger problem with leaving YouTube is losing the enormous audience and recommendation algorithms that bring in viewers.

> The problem? You don't have YouTube to cover your hosting costs.

Even bigger problem, when you self host nobody knows you exist.

A lot of creators are trying to advert nebula as a way to watch their videos, but I haven't tried it.

There's Twitch and then I see a lot of people doing talk shows on Instagram. Definitely more than there used to be.

I've seen Nebula been promoted by some content makers on Youtube. Otherwise alternatives like PeerTube.

Vimeo?

I've seen people moving or at least having a duplicate channel on Bitchute, DailyMotion, Rumble etc.

Serious in sense that it's a place to make money? Probably Zero. If you count Live-Streaming, then 1 or 2 more. If we talk about alternatives to host videos? Probably dozens or more. If we talk about places for "high business" (proper company, not some lone creator in his ikea-flatroom) to make money, even more, but most of them are also specialized. Social Services like Instagram, Twitter, TikTok and even reddit are somewhat of a competition for short clips (<2 min), but making money there is a bit strange I guess.

Youtube at the moment is the single place (for videos) where you get everything, from the high number of potential customers, to proper and easy tooling for managing stuff coupled with a good level of potential income. And as long as Youtube is to big to fail, this will not change.

Funny, today I woke up and first thing install ABP for the first time in my life, because google will not let me fall asleep to soothing documentaries without obnoxious ads rolling every two minutes because their algos figured out im not there to skip them.

Then I see this and im just even more confident in that decision.

Newpipe is pretty good.

https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipe

I've been using YouTube Vanced on my Android. I tried NewPipe, but was not impressed with it. Then I went to Vanced not because of the ads, but the looping functionality (which is disabled now for some time) and it's been a great experience so far.

Have you considered trying uBlock Origin?

I second this recommendation. uBO is much better.

In my view uBlock Origin is the gold standard in ad blockers.

I didnt consider anything, I just searched for ad blocker first thing this morning and took what seemed like the popular choice. I'll try uBlock now, what is the difference in regards to user experience?

Ublock origin is nice that it prevents you from page redirects to known tracking websites. I first found out about that with slickdeals.

The one thing I still haven't figured out how to use with it is the zapper. Adblock plus' "zapper" just worked and always prevented that pop up or whatever from showing. Ublock just stops it from showing again after you do it after the page load. Then it'll pop up again.

uBlock's zapper is just for deleting elements once. If you want to remove something permanently, use the picker.

Thank you! Imo they should really change the icons for that cause when I see that, it looks like I want to take the color of the thing, not remove something completely.

have you considered paying for YT premium? Its great for watching with no ads. I started paying once I discovered Event Horizon, What The Math? and Space Time Channels. I then discovered Mixtape Magic for old school mixtapes to listen to while working. All in all, one of the subscriptions that bring the most value.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com