The Next Chapter for Learning on YouTube
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blog.youtube
The issue I have with it is that I refuse to produce attention-grabbing clickbaity titles or thumbnails. I don't like the whole algorithmically-driven race to the bottom of the brain stem, and have zero interest in producing the same. I've had plenty of comments from viewers who say the videos are great and informative, but if I'd just jazz things up a bit then I'd get more views.
I'm just wondering how this will change (if at all) with this new program. It takes a LOT of time to produce decent content, and even more if you're going to provide a course and backup materials etc.. Writing curricula is HARD work, and writing tests, etc., that are actually valid is reasonably challenging and time consuming.
I currently get about £100 a month from YT, which definitely doesn't reflect the time I put into it (but I know it has other benefits as I sell a fair number of books partly as a result of the viewership). I know that the beasts of the platform (3b1b spring to mind) would do really well from this (and deservedly so), but I do wonder if things really need to change to make YT work well for genuinely-produced non-clickbait educational content.
what are you talking about?
a student gets stuck going to class regardless of how goofy the teacher dresses, whereas I feel an extreme sense of revulsion when I click on a YT link with a meme-thumbnail or a clickbait title.
your analogy fails since in this instance the 'student' gets to decide whether or not they participate in the course.
If I had had the chance to walk out on goofy teachers through high school then -- just as one anecdote -- I wouldn't have graduated.
so, in other words, clickbait 'engagement' style marketing will get your volume numbers up, but the hidden aspect is that there will be a market that pulls entirely away from you -- 'teachers' on YT will need to understand these market dynamics if they're really interested in teaching the masses rather than making money on viewership.
If teachers K-12 were paid according to their student throughput that'd turn into a major humanitarian crisis, imo.
And honestly? I don’t care. The content is good, and if the hat gets them more viewers then all the better.
In the UK we see this with nonsense talk of 'the [energy] price cap' being some £ figure per year - when it's not, it's a £/kWh cap, but the media can't cope with that, we're stuck with what it means for 'the average household'. Even comparison sites refuse to compare what you actually pay, £/day and £/kWh, and instead insist on asking you about number of bedrooms etc.
I'm sick of everything being dumbed down.
I’m just saying there’s a decent reason for some of it. A huge audience on YouTube are children, teens.
I'm not sure you can call his series a curriculum, yet I think I learned a lot more from there than from my university classes, despite watching it primarily for the fun and not for learning.
Parents would probably be interested in alternatives.
A click bait, is a bait, a lure in all instances to get something different what is expected.
A fish wanting the worm gets the hook, a fox wanting the meat, gets the snap trap. The clicker wanting the content promised in the title, gets something different, not what is expected.
> ... wearing a funny hat ...
An instructor still delivers all the details and content as expected with or without the funny hat. Not so for click bait videos.
The thumbnails are doing the funny hat thing.
I agree, race to the bottom of the brain stem. I sympathize with GP
The race is about making the best possible thumbnail based of empirical data and not aesthetics.
Andrew Huberman has tame thumbnail images that are professional and informative. Like others have said, there has to be a middle ground to explore.
[1] https://i.ytimg.com/vi/nZQgszA0_80/hqdefault.jpg?sqp=-oaymwE...
are you seriously going to pretend that optimizing for the most cringy thumbnails , because its a race to the bottom on Youtube, is marketing?
this is a ridiculous take.
I don't see how it's not marketing? YouTube is willing to promote your video for free and asks you to upload some promotional material for them to use.
Do you want to build a community that is a reflection of your ideas?
Do you want to build revenue by growing your channel regardless of the type of consumer you attract?
While obviously in a minority, GP should take heart in the fact there are viewers out there, myself included, that will actively avoid videos with click bait title cards.
Silly facial expressions and “you won’t believe…” type text are an instant turn-off for me. However, they are obviously effective in engaging a younger audience.
Whenever people say that I think "of course I don't believe ..." (ie that the topic is stupid, or that the decision of the day by xyz company is weird/bad/good, etc)
why should I believe or not believe in someone who I don't know?
If my mom says "you won't believe me if I told you you are not my son, but adopted" I'd be shocked.
Random youtuber "you won't believe?" - heck I don't believe a word coming out of your mouth! Of Course I DON'T believe you.
What does that even mean?
I'd be careful about using the language of silicon value ad companies. It changes how you think. One minute you're talking about content and community and the next thing you know you have metrics and are trying to measure engagement and are now making decisions based off something you could actually measure and not relying on your instincts, experience, and good taste.
Instead, create videos (not content) for your fans / audience based on what you know works. Make it so good, your audience will want to support you.
I think Justin Sandercoe does a good job of this. There is a community on his web site and a community on his YouTube channel, but more importantly he has fans on every guitar forum on the internet. He sells books for people who want them and he has courses you can pay for, but they are mostly guides through his lessons which are all available for free on YouTube or reproductions of copyrighted work which he can't give away for free.
The most important thing for his success (IMHO) is that he has created a lot of very high quality videos. He doesn't do clickbait titles or images. Just video after video of great stuff.
You used the same type of voice you criticized, I'm confused why you're projecting this narrative onto my comment.
I'm obviously pointing out that clickbait content will get more engagement. I'm trying to make the OP ask themselves what they want... which I believe is very clear.
I do bristle at the use of words like content and engagement. If you are thinking about those things, you’ve already surrendered. I believe thinking in those terms will lead you to make more of the same stuff that’s already out there.
Mostly though, nobody should make content. That’s a word used by platform operators because it’s all they see your work as. To them, the thing you’ve created is just another file they can store in their CMS, to be monetized later. Be a video producer or podcaster or digital artist or writer or whatever it is (more specific is better IMHO), but don’t call yourself a content creator.
I do, and I think I've done that - I have regular viewers who I interact with, and some of them also get private tuition from me. Many more, though, have bought my book on Cubase and Music Technology, and have found it useful, which is wonderful for me. It's precisely why I don't engage in OTT titles or "shock face" thumbnails - although they are a lot better produced than when I first started the channel (which look more like 1940s UK Government infomercial titles!)
>Do you want to build revenue by growing your channel regardless of the type of consumer you attract?
No, I don't. I'm fortunate that I don't need to earn a lot of money to get by, and I'm not very materially driven. I have a decent house with no mortgage, and no expensive hobbies (any more!) or vices, and I'm generally pretty happy where I am. I'd love to make 10x what I'm making at the moment, and be able to devote a day or two a week to making videos, but I think it'd be difficult to get 10x the subscribers to allow me to do that.
"Sell them what they want, give them what they need".
I also dislike this whole game where you have to essentially mould yourself into this "mainstream click-baity character", but part of me recognises that if your goal is to sell, then you'd be wise to spend time on presenting your content in a way that is at least initially attention grabbing.
One way to think of it is - you owe it to your audience to save them from worse educational experiences, and the only way to save them is to try to rank higher than these other more click-baity low-value videos.
The issue is, I think, exactly that everyone must be at least partially a salesman to get ahead. Is this what we want? Is there a way for YouTube to compensate for clickbaity titles and thumbnails? Are they incentivized to do so?
Thinking back at teachers and teaching that I really liked, they aren't always the best salesmen, but they're always very good communicators, and good at speaking. I don't think that the content promoted by today's engagement machines are optimizing for that.
I’d be curious to learn if there’s any pain points or things you wish you could do faster in your process. Happy to chat offline :)
Students' attention is low (not an insult, just what my analytics show). They are mostly searching for a fix to their immediate problem when coding. So my videos are split into 3-10 minute chunks covering that single thing. Recordings for a single concept take roughly 1ish hour, mostly a combination of setup, being human and flubbing words, and something in my examples going awry and taking too much time on it rather than demonstrating the example. I mostly record on Sundays (again, free day) or at night if I know I'm going to be away. As faculty, you're not paid extra to do this, so its very much intrinsic altruistic volunteering your time to do it.
And like I said, the second part is being comfortable enough with the material to record it. I'm teaching Intro to AI for the 3rd time this semester and while I'm confident in my ability to teach it, I still have some kinks in my examples. Typos, what gets covered when, etc. type things. I feel ready to record it during my next iteration, but then we fall back to making time to do it.
Regardless of what we as a society want, and even if YouTube never existed, it's the reality that salesmanship is always important to some extent.
Persuasive communication is important even outside of business: it's key for academia to get grants, it's important for non-profits to get funding and volunteers, and it's important for individuals who want to improve their lives (even in relationships). I know several people who are technically brilliant, but have abrasive personalities and/or fail to get their point across to key stakeholders, so they don't achieve what they want.
There is a difference between honest salesmanship and sales pitches that include lies or fraud. It's necessary to sell, but you can play the game with some ethics instead of not playing at all and losing out.
What I'm trying to say is, while the medium doesn't change core mechanics of human behavior, it distorts and accentuates – there is, for instance, a difference between tiktok and a novel. And we do have power of mediums, we can choose to engage in different types, and we can lobby for digital mediums to change. So pitting youtubers against the algorithm (just pimp your quantum physics lecture with an O-face thumbnail) isn't the only way forward. There's also "here's how YouTube could be better" or "we need a better alternative for this type of content". Unfortunately, we have almost 0 visibility and control over the algorithm so there's very little behavioral analysis that can be done.
You've made a good insight with an interesting solution. You might already be aware of this, but for an academic perspective, Canadian academic Marshall McLuhan framed this with the famous assertion "the medium is the message," [0] in other words the method of delivering a message strongly influences how that message is drafted. The reasons align with what you've written: the incentives caused by YouTube algorithms do pressure creators to create more clickbait content.
Perhaps human curation can be an initial way to get more viewership for quality channels that don't try as much to game the algorithms. Recommendations on HN and other forums have led to the discoveries of such interesting channels, though this would have limited impact versus change on YouTube's end.
Scientists spend something like 20-30% of their time begging for grant money.
Worse still, in order to get the grant money, scientists have to abandon the genuine pursuit of knowledge and do some random busywork bullshit that they deep down know will produce nothing of value.
Once they have produced the bullshit research, they then spend another disproportionately large chunk of time convincing their colleagues that their research is actually valuable.
The remainder of their work time is spent pretending that they don't realise that their peers' and colleagues' work is complete bullshit.
Don't get into academia.
You said "outside of business," and then gave three examples of _asking for money_. You could have said "in dating," or "in electoral politics," but even in those examples, "persuasive" speech verges on "coercive" speech.
> you can play the game with some ethics instead of not playing at all and losing out.
In a darwinian competition, eg "the marketplace of ideas," ethics will always lose out to money. To play is to lose.
No, I didn't: the third item I listed was "it's important for individuals who want to improve their lives (even in relationships)." Relationships include both romantic and friendship. The second item with non-profits also mentioned recruiting volunteers, not just fundraising.
>"but even in those examples, "persuasive" speech verges on "coercive" speech.
Persuasive speech includes: if I ask a friend to hang out with me and go to a conference, it's great for the both of us because we'll both enjoy it together and learn. There's no threat or coercion here, it's a win-win that is communicated well. The non-persuasive alternative would be: "There's a professional event this Thursday, we should go" with no further explanation.
> "In a darwinian competition, eg "the marketplace of ideas," ethics will always lose out to money. To play is to lose."
Ethics has value in many contexts. Certain non-profits can struggle to raise money due to having a bad reputation. Significant ethical misconduct can lead to scandals and arrests of executives. Highly unethical companies end up paying premiums to applicants due to struggles with recruiting.
I might be confused about the context or definitions, but I didn't read on any darwinian model that included notion of "losing out to". Did oaks lose out to orcas? Or was it the other way around?
Sales were around before the industrial revolution and likely before the agrarian revolution. I'd conjecture that whether one employs ethics or not, a moderate amount of salesmanship can spice up ones daily hunting-gathering.
Darwinian selection is the species versus the environment and this environment can include other species, as well as other individuals in the same species with slightly different traits, that will compete for similar resources as well as the climate.
It's very difficult to even think of who is actually a competitor of who, was Facebook a competitor to myspace? Youtube to myspace? Tumblr? Livejournal? These were all platforms competing for creators and attentions so I think they are all in a certain degree of competition.
I think a sale in this space is the gathering of attention (i.e. time and/or money). But thinking of what's required to actually learn might offer some insight on why it is hard to compete in this space. To learn people need to spend effort and although it can be made fun it is extremely difficult to be made effortless. On the other hand, entertainment is effortless but it offers little learning. So these are two parameters that need to be tuned. But I think the problem here is that the algorithm benefits entertainment much more than it does learning, entertainment is more valuable for youtube's ultimate purpose (to grab the viewers attention) and so to thrive on youtube people that want to offer learning have an uphill battle to fight.
So I think this move is Youtube acknowledging that learning is also desirable in society and can be pulled apart from the loop and monetise in its own way. In other words, it's an evolutionary split, cells all have a common ancestor but some cells evolved to harvest the sun energy while others evolved to harvest the energy of other cells. Learning being desirable has given rise to platforms such as coursera which are also multi-million businesses and Youtube probably sees them uploading most of their content to youtube anyway (usually as private videos), so why not adapt the platform a little bit to give existing creators a chance to stay on youtube instead of moving to other services?
This move won't really solve the problem of entertainment predating on people's time over learning (if we consider that a problem) but it's not really intending to do that. So I believe if we want to look at things from a darwinian perspective we have different angles to look at. Creators that produce entertainment content will probably still benefit more than the ones that produce hard to approach but very good learning material, why? because attention is the most valuable resource out there. This move offers little solution to that, but, on the other hand creators will have more tools inside the platform to manage learning which will completely change the current online learning business and we'll see platforms like edx and coursera in need of offering more value to pull themselves apart from youtube. Because users from these platforms (including youtube education) are already searching for valuable learning experiences we might see evolutionary jumps in this particular area. Though this might also be a race to the bottom where youtube captures the segment and then changes to optimise attention-seeking. We'll see.
I stand by this term for various reasons. I think it's accurate and summarizes the current day social media status quo.
> but the problem begins with the audience
Yes, but humans are non-linear. Porn, for instance, is extremely powerful for attracting clicks, and we've figured out that we need to keep it separate. Even if people want some amount of porn, they want other things too and the best way is to not mix. Now say hate, or cheap entertainment, is not porn but not super far off. Similarly, that type of content tends to win the attention-game against math lectures, if presented side-by-side to the average amygdala. If we mix it all together, it's hard to focus. So.. I'm pretty skeptical to leave education to Youtube. Not only do they have all the cheap content, they're incentived to bombard you with it.
That's what the world's biggest marketing company wants.
Otherwise, I think it's pretty obvious that the idea of rating artists, journalists, engineers and educators primarily on their salesmanship skills is a disaster in the making.
In the long run, online learning will probably become dominated by the equivalent of private schools: companies that hire great teachers and, separately, great marketers to build audiences.
Or look it at this way: Nonprofit authors don’t generally design their own book covers. They work with a publisher who does that. Why should teachers try to design their own YouTube thumbnails?
(On the flip side, if you highly value your independence as a sole proprietor, then yeah, expect that you’ll have to put on the marketing hat sometimes).
Call it misplaced pride or whatever, but they usually feel doing/saying something purely because it helps selling comes across "not pure" or "not in good faith" or not "why I do this".
Eventually they end up justifying with something along the lines of "good product (or person) just sells itself" or end up bitter comparing themselves with someone who sold worse stuff, but sold more to stay long enough in business.
good advertising/sales/marketing (i know they are not the same) strategies have a large upfront cost, which most if not all good-but-failed products/services cannot sustainably pay for.
My hope for the internet was to lower the bar by being accessible to everyone and allowing more indie sellers to prosper. And it did deliver. what i did not see coming was this industry for gaming the system which in turn drowns the true indie voice.
Click bait is ok sometimes?
Or you bet against fads and hope that your consistent brand will develop an increasingly loyal and appreciative following over the long term.
You could lose that bet, but sometimes cashing in on today’s hot trends means washing out and being forgotten when they change. You’re making bets every where you look.
To me it the race to the bottom of clickbait video titles/thumbnails feels dishonest and harmful but it’s hard to see what to do about it other than manual curation and/or alternative platforms which don’t use recommendations to exponentially amplify click rates.
The part I think LTT and many other folks with a similar philosophy ignore is that even engaging with their title/thumbnail isn't free. Clickbait forcefully grabs attention which requires every potential viewer to spend time and energy evaluating that option. A less forceful title/thumbnail makes it much easier to quickly and easily find the things you actually want to spend your time and energy on.
To make matters worse, most/all clickbait does it's damnedest to make it as hard as possible to decide a video isn't worth the time. Even when you know it's not worth it, the clickbait can make it extremely hard to actually skip.
So yeah, it has a real cost, even when the video itself is good. It's not equally good for everybody, and figuring that out has a cost too.
(And LTT in particular really pushes the boundaries, far more than most that actually try to not be dicks. LTT will sometimes draw the line at 'merely' technically not saying a lie, and blame you for hearing one anyway.)
This is clear self-deception and a way for a person to start the slide down the slippery slope to abandoning their standards. You don't owe it to your audience to 'save them' (a weird, evangelical way of putting it). You might like to put better content out there and hope that people find it and value it (and take reasonable steps to promote it, in a non-scammy way) but no, you don't need to rank higher than lower quality content. Because 9 times out of 10 the highest ranking content is junk and trying to rank higher will cause your own content to descend into being junk as well.
The courses that sell seem to be made by great sales men and women. But then the actual course itself is bad.
A lot of courses/content is created by a single person. The chances of them being great sales people and educators at the same time is pretty rare I would imagine.
This goes back to what the original commenter is feeling, the algo is going to work to the benefit of the great sales people. Which in turn leaves the good educators and the learner at a disadvantage.
We need a better way to find great courses/learning content. Social media(including Youtube in this) is not a great way to discover good content.
An example of an overcorrection would be posting short one-off videos that address specific problems and solutions with titles such as "When Should I Apply Reverb?" or "My Top 5 VST Plugins". If producing lectures is your strong suit, well, we need more of that...
And I'm the same. I won't do the over-the-top, hyped up character who uses the latest trends to grab your attention, like some sort of hollowed out clown that has no real joy in the middle.
Instead, I just focus on writing my online courses, mentoring people, and building a community. If you're interested in the same thing, and I can help, reach out :-)
I wouldn’t have built what became a $2000/month revenue website if I didn’t start making $2/month, then more work to get to $20/month, then 200, then 2000 over ~5 years.
YouTube is shooting itself in the foot with its monetization cutoffs.
I developed the Discord community via the channel plus other ways.
If your videos are genuinely interesting and / or useful, you need to be able to convey that fact to users, before they watch it. It isn't too much to ask.
Just imagine a viewer asking you the question, "ok so why should I watch your videos over someone else's?". It is a fair question. And replying back, "you don't get to know that until you watch it" isn't a reasonable response.
I would expand on it slightly by adding that "Good Thumbnails" are complicated and are not necessarily "Clickbait".
They have to discover you somehow. The YouTube Algorithm is at least partially concerned with enabling people who would like your channel to discover it.
Regardless of how well you think YouTube does that, you have to admit it's not exactly a simple thing to do. YouTube is trying to maximize ad revenue by maximizing watch time. They are not trying to evenly distribute viewer attention among "worthy" channels.
I am hopeful that somehow…somehow!!! we can have the quality content like yours more discoverable without having to game the system.
It reminds me how “SEO” has turned into an entire, absolutely ridiculous meta game industry that rarely has to do with how good a website actually is.
Been watching him from basically when his channel started many, many years ago. Was really disappointed to see him give in to this.
But around the time they implemented their "clickbait" titles and thumbnails, it had the opposite effect on me. They all just *seemed* like so many other videos: bland and tasteless. The content itself hasn't much changed, but the allure certain has diminished for me. I've stopped watching their videos.
Compare that to Curious Droid, or Practical Engineering, which still use descriptive titles, sometimes questions, but always exactly about the subject.
There are many channels that do have great content and accurate captions/thumbnails. From what I’ve seen, having high quality, consistent content over a prolonged period of time is a pretty sure way to grow.
same.
i watch a lot of youtube. i pay monthly for it, so i don't have to see ads. i've seen linus tech tips videos come up in my recommendations a time or two, and i am never going to watch them, just on principle. boy do i ever hate the mugging and pimping people like him indulge in, in an effort to bait me into watching.
To me it's like spending your lifetime writing an amazing book, only to spend a few minutes on designing the cover. It could be an amazing video/book. But how would I as the customer know?
I (and probably many other people) are constantly searching for good videos to watch. And unlike books, it's so easy to take a peek on a video and decide to close it within seconds if it's not something that is interesting to me.
not just that but the ones shown in this post are absolutely cringe. makes for zero credibility when it comes to education.
From Wikipedia:
> Clickbait is ... designed to attract attention and to entice users to follow that link ..., being typically deceptive, sensationalized, or otherwise misleading.
Think about it the other way, for all the time you spend producing content in an effort to help others, wouldn't it be more rewarding to you to help as many people as possible? As a user of YouTube, when I search for help with something, I typically start with result that visually looks like it's going to provide me the best answer, as that's the only thing to go on. If the title and thumbnail looked low-effort, I assume the content would look low-effort as well. Maybe that's an intentional aesthetic choice, it can definitely work for some content.
HOWEVER, if the video were to actually deceive me, I would just stop going to that creator entirely. This should be true for most viewers and YouTube is encouraged not to provide misleading results. Otherwise, trust in the results would diminish searching directly through YouTube.
I tried to find your channel, but I don't think I found it. Would you say it's name or link to it, if you don't mind me asking?
But even if you feel like that's a betrayal of your integrity and you just want to produce something like MIT OCW, well, there are other examples from fitness content, say Stronger by Science, Sigma Nutrition, Iron Culture, where they either make enough to get by but not a ton, or even in Iron Culture's case lose money from the social media ventures but do it anyway. If you want to use MIT itself as an example of something that can be legitimate, high-quality education, but still make money, you can consider that universities operate as non-profits and rely on charitable donations to amass the wealth they have.
I don't think the phenomenon you're getting at here is limited to YouTube or even to educational content on any platform. Sellers of junk food make more money than sellers of high-nutritional, better quality food, and the most profitable sellers of high-nutrition content, high-quality food are even still using clickbait-like tactics of misleading marketing and overselling what their products can really do. The most boring fruit and vegetable stands in the world selling basic nutrient-dense, really good products but not lying about what it can do for you, are just getting by and not getting rich.
Sometimes, that has to be enough. If you believe in what you're doing, do it, even if you're not going to get rich.
From my perspective, there are viable 'solutions' to this problem; Patreon, Curiosity stream, Coursera, etc.
I suppose those solutions, Direct Pay or Subscription, require more from individuals compared to youtube, 'free but with ads'. So the problem here is , "Is there a solution to the ad-revenue-based-on-views approach that keeps the content free for viewers"? When you identify it like that, I don't think there can be. I think the model demanding as many views as possible is a feature not a bug even if the outcomes are less than desirable. And now, in my view, we're talking about failures of Capitalism and this is just one example, Teachers being another.
So maybe the solution is community willpower.
Yup.
The consumer's challenge is finding what they want (or need).
Is it ironic that a search company mostly uses recommenders?
Why not better search? Why not better foraging and browsing?
--
Sole reliance on algorithmic recommenders, automated hate machines, has resulted in multiple negative outcomes. Existential threat to democracy, spike in teen suicides, accelerant for self radicalization, death of independent journalism, dominance of conspiratorial thinking, loss of public discourse, and probably a few more.
I'm sure search, foraging, and browsing strategies also have downsides. But I can't imagine how the outcomes could be worse.
True.
> shows content on commonly used education apps without distractions like ads, external links or recommendations
External links seem important on educational files, and I kind of like recommendations when I'm browsing educational stuff, but whoo, no ads on educational stuff? That's great!
> Next year, qualified creators can begin offering free or paid
There it is.
That’s not an answer as much as it’s moving the question.
Solution proposed by Google: Lets charge customers who view this content so that we can pay creators more without losing revenue.
Solution proposed by Consumers: Lets give creators a larger share of youtube's profits. We're already paying for the service by offering our data, our youtube premium subscriptions, and other forms of MTX monetization.
TLDR; Youtube is double dipping in the guacamole bowl, despite having billions of pounds of guacamole.
I think that two things can both be true: creators should be paid for their work, commensurate with the value they provide, and learning should be free (or of negligible cost) to the person doing the learning. There are exceptions to the latter when there isn't a platform involved, like personalized tutoring or coaching, but in general.
YouTube can achieve both of those goals, and advertising is not the only solution. What bothers me most about this announcement is that they aren't doing anything _new_. This is basically a carbon copy of Udemy's value prop, leveraged by YT's existing massive scale. Other than the videos being hosted on YouTube, it doesn't do anything that other platforms haven't already been doing for years.
It isn't a big assumption at all because this is an external embedded player (so the user is not 1 click away from the youtube homepage, they will be in a completely separate app), with no watch-next recommendations or external links.
This is designed explicitly to not compel the viewer into continuing on to watch unrelated youtube videos.
> a new YouTube embedded player that shows content on commonly used education apps without distractions like ads, external links or recommendations.
We've determined by our standards that you have too much guacamole. But, we refuse to see the hypocrisy of this hand-wavy standard that we've got way too much guacamole ourselves compared to another arbitrary entity. We also think, based on our own subjective assessment that guacomole is bad for you and you must reduce consumption. Correct strategy according to our experts is that we need to coerce those who have too much guacomole (again based on our subjective assessment) must give it to those who we think do not have enough. It is morally approved by insert-current-virtue-thing.
Subjectivism has taken over objectivism.
If you're going to make a pitch that Google should pay more money to creators, there's got to be at least some justification for it. other than "i want more money". If google is underpaying creators, then creators should switch to other platforms. If platforms like nebula become a threat, they'll start paying more. as long as most youtubers can make more money on youtube than any other platform, there's no reason for youtube to pay more. that's how capitalism works.
Some community measure of the content quality perhaps? Something opposite of a Like button?
So pretty much, with launching a model where viewers might pay, Youtube is launching a Udemy competitor, no?
But otherwise isn't being able to charge directly a good thing assuming creators remove ads and any product placement?
Google just wants that Nebula money.
The classes are advertised on the Nebula homepage to subscribers, but require additional payment.
By contrast, you now can chose between ads and no ads, both on youtube (and the former likely with algorithmic support).
That's a different calculus that - as it seems to me - should imply more paid content than before, contradicting your statement.
Media entrepreneurs set out to run a certain kind of business, revenue-engine-wise; and they choose their distribution channels by what will allow them to do the revenue model they have in mind. They don't compromise on their plans by choosing a channel with a larger reach but an entirely different revenue model. If they can't start a business with the revenue model they had in mind, then they just don't start that business. (They might start some entirely different business that does fit the revenue model of the channel; but that'd be a ground-up re-think, and probably have nothing in common with the original business.)
A TV-series creative planner doesn't "compromise" when they can't get their TV pitch greenlit, by turning around and making a Hollywood movie or "direct-to-VHS" miniseries instead. Those are entirely different revenue models, and so require entirely different development strategies — different budgets, different teams, even different content!
Same with educational content. You don't put the sorts of courseware videos you'd publish on Coursera, on YouTube as ad-supported recommendation-discovered videos. They don't belong there. People won't watch them, and you won't (currently) make any money. (For one thing — as another comment thread here attests — they aren't designed to be clickbait in the way that YouTube videos are, so they'll be ignored by the recommendation engine.)
If you're already creating that type of content, you're currently creating it for some other platform where it works, and ignoring YouTube. Now YouTube will be one more "platform where it works." That doesn't change anything about whether you will have made this type of content. It only (maybe) changes how much money you'll make doing it, and so moves a few people over from "not creating educational content at all" to "creating courseware on YouTube." Just like happens incrementally every time one of the other dozens of such courseware sites pop up.
Now, most (or even all) of those related videos will be replaced by "pay to watch" videos, and i'm 99.9% sure, that the algorithms will prioritize paid video over free content, so all the free stuff will get buried, and you're left with shitty paid content of worse quality than those old, free videos.
There are numerous channels with click bait titles that are little more than upsells to their paid courses. Quality courses (not referring to pre-recorded uni lectures) are not given away for free.
Have to open a laptop to replace the hard drive? No service manual? Just google "XY-123 laptop disassembly", and you'll get a video. Now, a "XY-123 disassembly course", only $1.99.
Good revenue stream, especially if they can get partnership deals with schools or other educational institutions. Imagine YouTube getting this sort of "guaranteed" revenue, like publishers do from textbooks, but getting schools to foot the bill instead of students; great business model.
The beauty of YouTube is finding like a retired professor who puts up their lectures on an account with a couple thousand subscribers.
It is not having a click-bait worthy thumbnail, over-produced video, and barely learning anything while being mindlessly entertained.
YouTube will kill many services in the process like skillshare, udemy, etc. They will continue to get bigger and bigger or this will fail miraculously.
This was such a fresh breath from Linus Tech Tips style "we upgraded to 100 Gbps network" kind of content, because most of us are just tinkering around with consumer hardware, and geek out on minor details.
That, and they don't shove merchandise and minute long sponsored contents to you.
I find YouTube unbearable without ublock origin and sponsorblock.
Honestly I can't get over a cynical impression that the announcement is basically: "brilliant and skillshare are getting a bit too popular, we need to do something about it".
So you're cloning Udemy? Meh. Not much to be excited about so far.
Finally, to help learners apply what they’ve learned, we’re introducing Quizzes — a new way for creators to help viewers test their knowledge.
That could be somewhat useful, but..
For example, a math creator who recently posted a series on algebra can create a Quiz on the Community tab to ask their viewers a question related to a concept taught in their latest video.
Does anybody ever actually visit the "Community" tab of a channel? Why add this extra friction? Hasn't the technology progressed to the point that quizzes could be integrated right into the video player? For that matter, why not have "adaptive" videos where your quiz results can affect the video that you see (like triggering an extra in-depth explanation for notoriously tricky topic if the quiz taker scores below a certain level, etc.).
I hope this works out and provides some value, but I have my doubts as it stands.
They don't want creators funneling users to external sites like Patreon. They want 100% of their income going through Youtube.
Same reason they roll out the "most replayed" feature, to make it easier to skip in-video sponsor segments.
Yes.
Channels have community tabs?
Coursera does this right now. It's very useful.
But again, I don't know why they removed it? /shrug
They had a setting to disable votes per video but that just means the company admits the video is unpopular.
Ah, so they did it to counter vote-brigading? Makes sense now.
Most users dont care. So Google removes it because its good for business, not for the user.
Massively downvoted videos are bad press.
TLDs used to carry a lot of weight, and used to signify something besides individual entities/companies... but it feels to me like that designation is becoming rather diluted.
One can arrange their own TLD for under $200,000 initial fee, plus around $25,000 a year (IIRC).
I imagine there will be a whole TLD auction game, but among those with deep pockets and governed by an organization that doesn't seem to take their job seriously. ICANN looks like a cash grab nowadays to me. I don't mean any offense to the engineers behind it, just that the administration seems quite greedy.
It’s mostly the tiny islands that decide to cash in on fancy tlds who don’t care so much about providing them as a service to the small population.
Nearly no one knows the meaning of .com
also the US centric monopoly of .gov is probably antithetical to many early internet ideals.
.edu is much worse IMO.
Interestingly, a number of corporations that registered their own TLDs seem to have since let them go. You can see them by searching for "Not assigned" on that page.
They removed the one metric that people had to signal that content is crap. So now people have to trust that "the algorithm" is filtering out all the junk. Which of course we know doesn't happen. The algorithm only cares about engagement, it doesn't care if the content is of good quality or even truthful.
But that would be just someone’s personal opinion (or worse). Why should I care? Besides, people discuss things on forums, and a more detailed review is more useful than a simple vote. Finally, it is often not that hard to see whether the presentation or the content is worth your while from the first few minutes of watching it. (There are, of course, some cases when watching is made difficult because of the presenter’s excessive showing their face or gesticulation, or having a distracting accent, but even those do not necessarily deserve being called “crap.”)
Also, why should I care about the algorithm's opinion? IME it's much much worse on average than the up+down vote ratio from thousands of individuals.
For instance a few weeks ago I was stuck on a quest in WoW Classic, so I did a quick YouTube search, 100k+ view video, dozens of likes.
Yeah the video sucked and didn't show anything worthwhile.
Relying on Google to maintain a non ad supported product is very risky. Basing a business on it is suicidal. See the infamous list of dead Google services.[1]
Only for this special educational project. YouTube has been putting ads on un-monietized videos without asking the uploader for some time now.
I don't really know what PeerTube is, and at this point I'm afraid to ask, tried it several time and it just doesn't work, or way inferior to Youtube
The best exemple is when youtubers leave for reasons related to monetization. They always came back when they foud out that not only do other platform don't pay them (without a pay wall) but good platform will actually charge them for the hosting. finding your own ads is also really fucking hard when google isn't doing it for you.
Free unlimited 4k@60 video hosting is a hard to beat when users are extremely hostile to paying for thing they used to have for free (look at the feedback from. Youtube premium)
I'm willing to bet that the algorithms will prioretize these videos over free videos... so, after watching a video on transistors (like you do now), you won't get a related video about history of computing (in the related bar, like you do now), but that video will get hidden, and you'll see a bunch of "pay to watch" content there.
The result it, some people will pay for stuff that's already available for free, hidden by the algorithms, some people won't learn something new, because they won't want to pay, and wont bother doing advance searches, and "free" creators will lose ad revenue and be forced to produce "pay to watch" videos.
I'm also curious what benefits youtube would provide a creator/educator like, say, musician Charles Cornell, who is already perfectly able to sell his course that he advertises in his youtube videos.
Most big creators have (some form of) courses on other platforms as they are a great source of income. For example, Ali Abdaal (back when he had 1M subs) made 40K - 60K[0] per month by making courses on SkillShare. Convincing your audience to buy a course on another platform may be a viable for big creators, but it is much harder for small creators like myself. Having courses directly on YouTube is the best alternative.
I've always wanted this feature, but never knew how to bring it up to anyone working at YouTube! If any one from YouTube is reading this feel free to reach out - I've got lots of ideas on this!
It's almost like they know how addicting their recommendations and other "distractions" are. They have to make a separate product to actually create a healthy environment for learning.
Not sure how paid YouTube content will be better because it seems the incentive of money just draws a bunch of spam content while the good stuff is experts sharing what they love.
However, the niche areas (engineering, CAD, Math, etc) have been taken over by regular shitty offline tution centers (there are hundreds of thousands of such in India at least). They create crappy content and review bomb.
That's now a course for $14.99, BUT DONT YOU WORRY
you get a quiz with it now.
The real issue is, the world loves and perhaps needs "universal video hosting," something like "the open web" but for video. Right now, "Youtube" is that.
And they're not a completely awful steward of it, but we need better. The for-profit model is not ideal.
Gmail used to be ad-supported, but is now just a loss-leader for other Google products.
Bittorrent is built on top of people's paid-for internet connections and cannot scale to anything like the size of YouTube.
Cryptocurrencies have transaction fees.
Couple that with benefits of YT Premium, there's a ton of engaging features they can build here that very likely make it a super sustainable product long term. I'm super excited!
Why not build a new product, that actually does what they want to do? And use the YT infrastructure?
Why does Google have to shoehorn everything into YT?
It is important to note that having your videos on a platform like Udemy or the likes is orders of magnitude better than on youtube.
The clickbaity titles are a drag on cognition in YT.
Has anyone noticed how the YT recommendation algorithm is absolutely shit? I watch one video of some obscure thing, by mistake, and I get recommended for it for weeks.
The business model is unclear. There are no ads, so any income comes from more direct revenue sharing or user fees? If the teaching site embeds the video, what does google get?
The technical model is unclear. This is only to watch embedded in a frame on the creator site, and not on youtube? Yet, google wants to control the community tab and do quizzes? It sounds like Google wants to own the entire interaction.
It's unclear how or when to get started, and who this is relevant for. Who is qualified? Who do you contact?
It violates the first rule of youtube: say it in seconds.
And it's written as if the author/director is himself a creator, complete with personal anecdote about his kids. Must we present ourselves as such even for business communications?
I suspect my expectations of google announcements are dated.
It will be interesting to see how YouTube balances current incentives for long videos compared with online learning often being better delivered in many cases through short videos, known by many names (bite size videos, micro learning).
Learning videos are a lot of work to make and even more work to update, and updates are guaranteed. This provides some tools but whether it eases the workflow wha to hope will happen, it would empower a lot of subject experts.
Structured content is a great idea. Hopefully this won’t go away like the previous features for annotating and interactive in the past.
Having offline capabilities for this learning content is important if it is learning for the many and not the few.
YouTube in some ways is the worlds largest LMS already from a content perspective. We just may be heading into a post LMS world.
I never hear about a new product or changes from them.
For example I wanted to find a specific room on a cruise ship and someone recorded it in 30 seconds on tiktok. The _specific_ room! Youtube is becoming cable TV, too many grifters and long form content for no reason other than to make a buck.
On tiktok, I found great content for replacing a toilet flush mechanism, drilling pilot holes into wood to hang lights, a cruiseship stateroom walkthrough, CPU benchmarks, GPU benchmarks, Anker charging device review, it doesn't stop there.
Google should most definitely be afraid. They are losing this game.
Structured Content sounds great, but we already have that: add a number to your video title.
If it's cheap enough to temp companies like udemy to use it, fine, but then if would effectively be invisible to me. I don't care how udemy hosts their videos.
Quite a few really good coders and designers publish on YouTube, but their courses are hosted elsewhere and can be promoted as an affiliate.
This sounds like you will now have to talk to these creators directly and make direct “deals”, or worse - not be able to affiliate with their courses at all.
Stars are usually worthless. People leave 1 star or 5 stars, that’s akin to a down or up vote. And with the algorithm you never look at the ratings, really; you just trust the feed, because it’s good!
YouTube’s algorithm is extremely good when you know how to give it a helping hand, especially for educational content. I’m quite happy they’re pushing for more educational tools and ways for educational creators to make money.
I'm not interested in youtube cloning good resources we already have only for it to be sunset or charge a bunch. Like when people got upset about the firebase and map price hike
But also sounds like major pandering to me.
Theres no shortage of quacks, frauds, and fakers ready to "teach" you all they [don't] know on a subject, or worse: spread misinformation in the form of structured "educational" content.
Just take a look at LinkedIn these days...
Society benefits when education is free. Keeping educational content behind a paywall just speaks to greed.
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