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Comment by ajhurliman | Hacker News Reader

Sponsored content is the main income for creators, so if a platform banned it there would be a mass exodus and they'd lose their dominance.

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But they would earn more money from regular ad revenue, presumably.

You're painting a rather bleak picture -- that the majority of creators/influencers' content is advertising. If that's the case, I'm not sure why Youtube/Instagram should also tolerate that -- it's basically spam on their platform they haven't curated through their ad network.

I don't think most influencers can make a living with just ad content. Many are using sponsorships and ada and barely getting by.

> But they would earn more money from regular ad revenue, presumably.

I’m not sure why you would presume that. Also, product placement has been a standard feature of entertainment for a long time. I don’t see why you’d expect Google and Facebook to be the ones to take a stand on this, after all this time.

The platform is essentially getting a cut -- their own ad revenue -- from content producers who are financially supported via sponsorship/paid content. Right now it's just economically not feasible for the platforms to force themselves into that sponsorship relationship without risking an exodus of their most profitable users. And Google doesn't really want to be in the business of individually managing influencers' relationships with brands, anyway.

Spam is something nobody wants. The influencers videos quite some people want to see despite their sneaky ads. So youtube gets views, too.

Not all sponsored ads are sneaky, a number of YouTube channels I watch do hilarious skits for each one at the end of their videos which I think is a win for everyone involved.

At this point I don't think there's a single channel I watch that produces original content for YouTube (as opposed to, say, speedruns of video games or stream recordings) that is not sponsored. The last few holdouts gave in just a year or two ago. Just like podcasts, they'll do an ad read before, in the middle of, or after the video. I've gotten very used to skipping them.

> Spam is something nobody wants.

Spam is something the recipient doesn't want. What is or isn't spam is subjectively determined by each individual recipient. If spam were strictly determined by what nobody wants, requiring complete consensus, then nothing would be spam because in a world of 7 billion people there will always be one nut who welcomes the unrequested solicitation.

Brand deals are the majority of their income, but not the majority of their content. This just means the platforms aren't paying very much, since the platforms are advertising on _all_ their content and yet creators are managing to earn ~80% of their income through brand deals on a tiny fraction of their content. 58% of creators post 16 or less sponsored posts a year, and those with more followers post even less[0], while the majority of creators post significantly more content than that.

Creators are very careful not to overwhelm their audience with ads; their audience (and their portability to new platforms/ channels) is their number one asset since they may need to jump to new platforms in the future as their channels can get demonetized/ banned for frivolous reasons.

[0] https://influencermarketinghub.com/creator-earnings-benchmar...

> _all_ their content

Except if they believe you are not advertisement friendly content.

Like any discussion or educational material about any touchy topic gets not ads (and there are a lot of such thinks).

YT accidentally mistaking a think you sayd as a black listed swear word (even if you didn't say it and are not even speaking in the language its from and it just sound similar) => No Ad Money.

Politics => No Ad Money.

Covering Covid related thinks => No Ad Money.

Covering local news including violence => No Ad Money.

etc...

Youtube et al tolerate it because these influencers posts ultimately mean more eyes are fixed on the platform to watch the actual first party advertisements. Having these influencers rely on third party sponsored posts for their funding means that youtube doesn't have to pay them very much at all.

And they can eventually change terms to charge a percentage, maybe only on the biggest channels for ease of enforcement, like record labels eventually started doing with concert tickets and merch.

How would they even do that? Music artists are free to make their own endorsements without having to pay their label.

Surely just by contract when they get a 'record deal', and practically by hiring the accountant who does the artists books to make sure they don't try and earn without paying the masters?

> that the majority of creators/influencers' content is advertising.

Advertising embedded in the content as sponsor callouts and similar (often paying way better then YT ad sense), this includes showcases of sponsored content and similar.

Which if it's properly labeled is not a problem.

But as far as I know many big YT channels can NOT live from YT ad sense/network money. Some won't even get any at all due to YouTubes (IMHO overreaching) classification of content into advertisement friendly or not.

A lot of content contains or is funded by a product placement but is otherwise not advertising.

For example, a guy is teaching me to fix a generic, unbranded toilet issue but stops to mention a particular widget or toolbelt he is being paid to use.

Next video he is teaching me to fix a sump pump and there again he mentions his sponsored plumbing gear.

This is fine by me. I learn how to fix things and some plumbing widget company pays the bill.

And make money how? Creators are dependent on platforms to get and monetize attention. People aren't going to stop using Instagram and YouTube because a few superstars only post content on TikTok.

Even moderately successful YouTubers rely on sponsorship and because there's competition for creators between platforms it would take illegal coordination to present a united front and ban it

Right... Like how Google and Apple and Steam and Microsoft and Playstation compete on transaction fees for their stores?

If the platforms wanted to come after the money, they could. I suspect they're still in the growing phase. But I imagine in the near future, they'll start demanding all ads go through their platforms.

Only if they aren't worried about antitrust enforcement against their advertising monopolies. Probably safer for them to let it go.

Ignoring the ongoing court cases around that it's very different when you have huge barriers to entry and thus only a few companies especially when they just have to follow the existing norms vs imposing a new norm. Like starting up a video sharing site is hard, but we've seen a number of examples over the past 5 years who have gained traction where we've seen no examples of new successful app stores in that time

> Even moderately successful YouTubers rely on sponsorship and because there's competition for creators between platforms

The fact that you call them "Youtubers", identifying them using the trademark of one particular platform rather than a generic descriptor like "video content creator", suggests that there is not quite as much healthy competition as you claim. Most video companies other than youtube only compete with youtube in a narrow sense; a great deal of the content on youtube does not fit on tiktok's platform, which is only good for short-form content. Netflix only hosts movies or TV shows. Twitch is for livestreaming; other kinds of content don't fit into the paradigm of twitch. Vimeo has never been a good place for off-the-cuff home movies, they too try to compete with youtube only in a narrow domain, not across the board. The few generalist video hosting companies other than youtube are all jokes that are faaar behind youtube in viewer counts.

I guess the point is that Youtube has a powerful market position but not an unassailable one. They can lose market share and pissing off a large percent of there content creators seems like a good way of doing that

Content is King.

TikTok has a fund to pay people to make content to get them up off the ground.

Insta, despite it's growth, has a decay problem in that it's out of the zeitgeist of the key demos. it's growing in developing markets and maybe might have some incidental sign ups, but people are not flocking to it.

And TikTok - depsite it's popularity, has a very 'fad' feel to it. While FB has a bit of the 'e-mail' incumbency in that it's how people communicate with family and user groups, TikTok is a bit more fleeting.

These platforms would get hurt badly without a lot of those middle and upper tier content makers.

The current situation is a rational entente actually: Insta makes ads, influencers can make a buck however. The more popular YouTubers will monetize with ads anyhow.

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