YouTube Will Monetize Videos Without Paying Content Creators
youtube.com
youtube.com
But it's not clear if this new TOS change affects everyone or only folks not eligible for their partnership program.
For example if you're a channel creator who could monetize but chooses to hit no, will YouTube be able to run ads on your videos now? It sounds like a yes based on the TOS wording since it doesn't explicitly mention a type of creator and includes "your" (which is a blanket statement to include everyone).
This sounds like it'll affect me directly. I have 12k subs and I've chosen not to run ads on any of my videos because I'd rather someone watch my videos without interrupt even if that means losing out on ad revenue. But moving forward it sounds like I'll enable ads on my videos because if YouTube is going to potentially run ads on them them I might as well benefit from it too.
As someone most likely affected by this I'm not really upset at YouTube over it. Hosting and streaming video isn't cheap. Sure I'd prefer not to have ads forced upon watchers of my content but at the same time I can't blame Google for wanting to make money off a platform we're all benefiting from. I've learned so much over the years from various YouTube videos and that mostly comes down to having easy access to find high quality videos.
How upset would you be if ads started to appear on a channel that never ran ads? Would you stop watching videos on that channel or do you just run ad blocker anyways?
(Even though the recommendation system is overall awful and I can't believe an army of engineers have actually been working on it for a decade, but I digress)
I'd say that's passion and i see nothing wrong with getting rewarded for doing something you like and other people enjoy watching.
However, this often results in videos that are unnecessary bloated to fulfil the requirements to place more ads, deceptive/misleading titles, or 10-minute-videos about something that could be explained in 30 seconds.
But ads on content where all the revenue goes to google without a penny being sent to the creator? That's not tolerable.
Now its 600KB (100KB compressed) JSON + additional 8MB desktop_polymer.js (1MB compressed) that needs to be compiled/interpreted before anything starts showing on the page - its all dynamically generated Client side. 1MB js player is on top of that.
How does that work when you’re out on your iPhone and just want to check a video-link someone sent you?
Oh wait. It doesn’t.
First, choose to go out with a more open platform (if only by a bit) that at least allows you the freedom to install apps which don't necessarily come with a corporate overseer's approval.
Then, install the Youtube Vanced app.
That said, either youtube-dl or Invidious [1] will do the trick. The latter can be self-hosted and emulates a more familiar YouTube experience (minus the tracking/recommendations).
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Shut up and take my money
Technically, I signed up for Google Play Music way back when it was initially launched, and have since been upgraded to YouTube Red/Premium and have kept it.
Unfortunately, in recent several weeks I started to see an occasional ad even in Brave. As for now, these ads are really rare, don't think I get more than a couple a week. But boy are they annoying.
Even in such a mobile browser where all the videos are muted by default, these ads find a way to conveniently unmute themselves and delight your surroundings with loudest and cringiest lines/tunes.
YouTube must be actively making changes to their ads in attempt to bypass ad blockers. However, I still think that Brave is a great option as (based on their forum) ad filters are constantly being worked upon.
PS: I've also tried Firefox Mobile with uBlock Origin addon. As expected, ad blocking works just fine, but page loading times are way slower compared to Brave which is based on Chrome.
I would never be upset, but I may stop watching the channel. One thing I've noticed, at least in a few anecdotal cases, is that the format of a channel often changes when they begin seriously to monetize. This is often not necessarily bad, in any objective sense, but nonetheless changes the character of the channel. If you were in love with the channel before, you might say that the channel has become worse. Others might say that the channel has been improved. Regardless how it lands for you, it seems clear that channels without any pressure to monetize do produce somewhat different content than channels with pressure to monetize.
While it would likely be a great boon (think Stripe + legal service + getting paid on time), it would likely end up like PayPal; creators constantly getting their accounts shut down for "suspicious activity" and their money pocketed.
meanwhile, adverts probably have a much better ROI from working on a person by person basis than making a deal with google to cycle in x times per day. It's a win for everyone except the consumers (and it can be argued as an indirect win, since that 2nd source pushes many YTbers to go full time. So, more and more consistent content).
If they actually use the product too then you are sold. Particularly if they remind you next time you see them.
Some people see their favourite YouTubers more than their friends. They see them as hero-friends.
This is very much the future of advertising, linear TV style adverts are not for every product.
It's like your Cable TV or favorite newspaper charging you for subscription and then filling up the content with ads because they can earn FROM BOTH.
I keep being told this is modern economy working as intended -_-
The advertising cut is not much at all and it's really hard to sustain anything on it.
> It's like your Cable TV or favorite newspaper charging you for subscription and then filling up the content with ads because they can earn FROM BOTH.
It's more like the flip of that, content having ads but you can subscribe too. If video makers had an easy way to disable ads for direct subscribers, I bet almost all of them would do it right away.
Content creators earn much more money from product placements and ads within their videos than they do from the ad share that YouTube pays out. With a medium-sized German YouTuber, you easily pay 50,000 euros for a 30-second review of the product. And in the video, he talks about several products. To earn 100,000 euros just from views, the video must be clicked millions of times.
Content creators would immediately look for or build another platform if their most important source of revenue was blocked.
Content creators could move to a different platform, but that's also incredibly risky. Unless you're already hugely successful, abandoning YouTube probably isn't a great way to build a following. The same goes for building their own platform, with the added complication of it being prohibitively expensive to make a scalable, relatively ad-free video platform if you aren't a megacorp who generates billions of dollars from other revenue streams.
So I suppose there is a risk, but it wouldn't surprise me if it's a risk that Google would live with if sponsored content was undermining their entire monetization plan for YouTube. I have no idea if they'd care enough to do this or not, but I don't think a scattered collection of content creators have enough leverage to scare Google here.
But if you follow anything DIY, maker, automotive or work related it's difficult to tell the sponsored posts from the non sponsored. Is this guy recommending Metallex because it's a good product, or because he was paid? Did the Mikita drill win this shootout because it's the better drill, or because they are the only manufacturer who supplied a tool free of charge? Are they putting a Garrett turbocharger into the car because that was the vision for the project, or because Garrett sent it to them?
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sponsorblock-for-y...
Sponsorblock works incredibly well at blocking in video sponsored ads.
Presumably the content creators would also be able to designate spaces in their videos for ads to insert for their older videos so YouTube can still make money off them without a retired content producer needing to take them down to avoid being charged for views.
(Plus they can be skipped if you have an adblocker. The only time I see YouTube ads is on my Roku in bed.)
YouTube videos containing ads even if you pay for the service just makes it the same as everydamnthing else.
To me it seems that monetization of content has led our culture to become deeply sensationalist and destructive, and I'd like to support non-monetized content platforms if I can
Vimeo
But tbh nothing has the scope of YouTube.
And that leads to a chicken and egg problem. You can take your content there, but there won’t be a big audience, because the content which casual users will find there is quite literally content which serves more to repel a general audience rather than attract. And that won’t change until enough “normal” publishers start putting their stuff there. Which they won’t.
I’m honestly not sure what a good solution is, because the technical platform itself seems decent.
> PeerTube is developed by Framasoft, a French non-profit popular educational organization on digital issues
In any case the main gripe i've heard content creators have with Youtube is demonetisation and derecommendation of "sensitive" topics ( e.g. history) more so than money directly
https://lbry.com/ https://odysee.com/
Supposed to be decentralized and can even "synchronize" your YouTube channel's content.
My guess is no. We have this amazing resource with an amazing amount of content, yet it is probably subsidized by one of the largest companies in the world. It’s a big question whether YouTube can even exist without that subsidy.
My hunch is they need to do this kind of thing to somehow reach break even.
Edit: to the people downvoting and quoting numbers, alphabet has never broken out actual profitability numbers. Just because YouTube made $15bn last year doesn’t mean anything. Hosting costs, moderation costs, music license fees!!!, you have no idea how much YouTube costs to operate. It could be more than $15bn.
I think the answer is yes, and hugely so.
> On an annual basis, Google says YouTube generated $15 billion last year and contributed roughly 10 percent to all Google revenue.
> Overall, Alphabet made $46 billion in revenue in the quarter that ended December 31st, 2019, a 17 percent jump over 2018. Nearly $10.7 billion of that was profit, the company says. Google’s search business remains the big moneymaker of Alphabet’s sprawling empire, earning $27.2 billion for the quarter.
Source: https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/3/21121207/youtube-google-al...
https://www.fool.com/investing/2021/02/03/google-revenue-pro...
YT comes up with a premium offering.
Also, HN: I won't pay for YouTube Premium. Here is how I use adblock to block ads.
I really don't get this rationale. We pay for other services. YT is effectively a pipe which hosts and streams content for you, that does cost something.
I consider YouTube to be a repository of knowledge rather than just a specialised video hosting service like Netflix. As it has everything from how do I bake cookies, to something as niche as how do I fix the specific model of bike I have. It makes sense to just pay for it.
Content creators can earn money from Patreon or sponsorships but for it to be profitable to host these videos, YT will have to charge for them either via subscription or ads.
I would say that the problem is in the order: It is not OK for YT to be a healthy company, it needs to grow. It is like a car that is not allowed to max out at a speed.
Until YT improve their algorithm and stop with the arbitrary 10m time marks for monetization, I think YT is going to have a problem with people seeing a premium variant as a good option opposed to just adblocking.
I get that the counterpoint to my point is that YT isn't paying that much and that people are free to do whatever in their videos, but that doesn't make it less annoying. Spotify doesn't pay great, but I don't have to hear a band saying 'buy our tshirts!' after listening to a song/album.
I think that the many community scandals, coupled with the, what I view as, changes in monetization strategies has put YT in this position.
The ideal scenario is, YT takes a fee like they do with Premium for hosting and discovery. The content creator can choose to take a cut if he wishes or can just do his own monetisation. It is upto him, whether he does no monetisation, puts merchandise links in description or outright shows the product in between a video. YouTube can make other integrations for content creators to monetise but they should have freedom of their own as well.
The good thing about competition is, if some content creator is being obnoxious with promotions or product placement, users can find someone who is doing a better job.
In the past some YouTubers have noted that they get more dollar return from a premium viewer watching their video than an ad one, so content creators can choose to forego on promotional placements and compete on a better experience.
This would be a step closer to like someone else here mentioned YT being the intermediary between the companies and the creators and taking a cut from that as well.
To expand on what you said, a large proportion of YouTube's content is just clickbaity garbage as well. The whole platform is designed, from the ground-up, as a mechanism to shove intrusive ads in your face. Simply removing the ads and putting in a subscription fee doesn't address a lot of the other noxious effects the ad-centric focus has had on the content environment, the UI, the recommendations, etc.
I would much rather subscribe to the YouTuber offshoot services, like CuriosityStream or Dropout or Nebula. They have a clear offering and the services are designed around a clear subscription model.
Ideally they could also offer paid content hosting so organizations like Blender or hospitals could host ad-free content and pay for the hosting/bandwidth costs directly.
It is suffering from the problem of social media at large: to be a platform or a curator of content? Moderation is tough and largely unsolved, I get that, but it started as a platform and then it flipped over to heavily curating, effectively abusing their influence they built with the help of little channels.
Independent creators are the future of media (not just social) in my opinion, and I feel YT has betrayed them by constantly siding with mainstream legacy media, and doing so in a sneaky way... they pretended to be fair and after huge global success they flipped and have no problem manipulating the attention of the masses.
If you’re producing videos as a business, depending on a third party to provide a free service, you’re going to have issues sooner or later.
The problem is that nobody wants to pay for it. They want to own their own web presence but on free servers.
And I’m happy to share in the hosting that way. Bandwidth and spectrum aren’t like oil. If we don’t use it, it’s lost forever.
Worked for how we consumed internet video before Netflix/youtube: Torrents.
Absolutely worth it, given how much entertainment it provides.
I pay for YT premium, because I got sick of all the preroll and mid-video ads.
What am I greeted with now? A bunch of "Sponsored Content" during videos - the kind of thing I specifically paid to get away from.
...or could it work for those by using iOS/Android’s accessibility+automation services?
(make sure you install Vanced from the right website, go on the subreddit for the always updated link)
Television and radio ads I find more obnoxious. Some random celebrity pushing some credit card or the same repeat radio read for the 1,000th time that only ensures I will under no circumstances use their product.
However, I find myself more sympathetic to the issue you’ve described. Perhaps if people felt that the “content creators” would revive a fair shake of those premium monthly charges I pay they would be more likely to enter into such an agreement. As it stands this is simply not the case and the same holds true for most all content streaming services. The provider and about 1% of contributors get the real lions share, the rest are fighting for scraps (often at the mercy of YouTube’s moderation algos, e.g. getting banned, having videos removed or demonetized because a computer doesn’t really know what it’s looking at.)
On top of that YouTube uses my demographic and video watching data to serve me ads everywhere else, my email, my browser, etc. not exactly a fair trade off in simply removing ads from the videos themselves.
It truly is not an egalitarian system, therefore the erosion of trust, and as a consequence the unwillingness of its consumers to “play ball”, is simply a product of their own making.
This is a good point and a much bigger issue than I was initially thinking. Even if 100% of my YouTube ad money and premium subscription went directly to the creators I watch, proportioned by how much time I spent on each channel, I wouldn't do it. That's because there's a weird inequality created by virality. If you're really successful, you can make millions of dollars a year solo. If you don't get past the algorithm or your content is niche, you might have a team of 5 people and make less than 100k a year in total (and obviously there's a very long tail of people trying to make a career of YouTube who are currently failing to do even that).
At the end of the day, I think this is ... bad. It may seem "fair" for people to be paid linearly with how much their creations are consumed, but the nature of digital media is such that if something is mainstream enough, boring enough, safe enough, it can scale basically forever with no added costs. (It's why Disney movies can make a billion dollars.) If someone whose work I follow is already making six figures a year, I'd much rather continue watching their content for free (which comes at no cost to them because digital media can be copied), while supporting niche creators who are trying to make rent at the end of the month instead. It may not be "fair" (ad blocking is only a step removed from piracy, they're both effectively copyright subversion), but copyright and endless remuneration based on popularity is creating a bad media landscape. I want to see a better one.
But with youtube you pay twice, once with your money, and the second time with your private life. And Google's track record clearly shows it's not a good idea to trust them with it.
Google is the only one responsible for my total defiance toward them. They catered to it year after year. Now they are just harvesting the result. They can't have their cake and eat it.
Try it, and you will for a brief moment feel like when you installed a regular adblocker the first time 15 years ago: "WOW". With this + ublock origin + youtube enhancer, the site is a completely different experience.
It's the experience I would happily pay for, if it wouldn't mean giving away my whole life to Google's monster AI.
I just wish we could choose which series to fund for youtube originals, like a big contest or something.
https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipe
And libgen. And private trackers.
YouTube is largely shit tier mental junk food anyway.
Maybe the stuff you watch. There's heaps and heaps of longform content about every subject under the sun.
And the worst experience is when I am on my phone, where logging in my Google account in one Google app means I am logged in on all other Google apps. I am sure they put a lot of effort to make it difficult to logout. I remember last time I accidentally logged in to Google Maps app a few month ago, I had to revoke the app's auth token from web management dashboard because I couldn't figure out how to logout within the app.
Paying customers are the best people to show ads to.
Besides, my current experience is to watch an ad in order to watch an ad in order to watch a video. Getting rid of one layer of ad doesnt mean I'm not watching ads anymore, and I'm not going to pay money to watch ads.
https://sepiasearch.org can search most of peertube
https://tilvids.com/ is a great peertube instance for education stuff
Decentralized : Peertube
> YouTube’s right to monetize: YouTube has the right to monetize all content on the platform and ads may appear on videos from channels not in the YouTube Partner Program.
So... "you can't just upload unlimited videos for free and expect us to host them for free and show them for free and not have ads". Seems pretty reasonable to me.
This isn't really surprising. Google is finally trying to get their storage usage under control. And they've been giving away unlimited storage in so many products for so long that people are like "whoa, you're not allowed to do that!"
Last year the owner set an email that read (from memory): "Fifteen years ago we promised that we would stay free forever and never require a subscription. Now we break that promise. From now on, membership will cost XX kr/month."
And that was that. Not like anyone could do anything about it.
I feel that the only way to combat it is to raise prices, offer a legitimate good or service and be unwavering in that stance.
nobody on youtube does or would ever do this.
perhaps one can make a service that does this for them.
You mean like PeerTube?
Why the heck would they switch to Torrents which will earn them a small fraction of revenue... if any?
I think they have to upload to YouTube because that’s where their audience is (IIRC it’s the world’s second largest search engine). There are lots of channels that I’ve only discovered as related videos to other videos I’ve watched.
I presume this is not desirable for other reasons? Companies paying for their ads to display would strongly prefer ads display and not allow users to hid them in exchange for payments? (Gaining a new customer after displaying an ad perhaps is worth more than the cost of an ad?)
- Google will monetize Apps without paying to the developers
- Apple will monetize Apps without paying to the developers
- Spottily will monetize songs without paying to authors
Brave New World ... :)
YouTube is planning to monetize videos that are not monetized by the creators (and thus currently don't have ads).
A summary of the changes:
- Facial recognition restrictions: The Terms of Service already state that you cannot collect any information that might identify a person without their permission. While this has always included facial recognition information, the new Terms make that explicitly clear.
- YouTube’s right to monetize: YouTube has the right to monetize all content on the platform and ads may appear on videos from channels not in the YouTube Partner Program.
- Royalty payments and tax withholding: For creators entitled to revenue payments, such payments will be treated as royalties from a U.S. tax perspective and Google will withhold taxes where required by law.