My channel is now demonetized because I cover the war [video]
youtube.com
youtube.com
I understand his instinct to self-title his video as "I cover the war" which implies a noble journalistic service for viewers but in comparing other youtube channels talking about Ukraine that did not get de-monetized, I'm guessing his type of content crosses the line.
E.g. one of his videos shows a grenade being dropped on a soldier while he has his pants down taking a dump. His commentary is to joke about it and vocalize a "boom" sound effect. The video is not blurred out and he did not set the "age restricted" flag. I won't link the video directly but you can easily find it.
Another perspective to look at the above scenario... if Google Youtube splits ad revenue 55% creator + 45% to Google.... Is the public ok with Google getting 45% of ad money from someone cheerleading a war death?
That's not a rhetorical question. I didn't do a survey so I really don't know what the answer is.
I noticed that several other Youtube channels cover Ukraine topics without getting demonetized:
https://www.youtube.com/c/RealLifeLore/search?query=ukraine
https://www.youtube.com/c/Taskandpurpose/search?query=ukrain...
https://www.youtube.com/c/CaspianReport/search?query=ukraine
I'm guessing those channels will be fine because they don't show raw war footage while jeering at human suffering.
I don't know if Youtube automatically demonetizes because of an algorithm sweeping through the channels or there was a human that decided his particular channel.
The only ad they show is a regular display and on the right hand side out of the video frame, and as far as I know revenue from that ad is never given to the creator anyway.
It may depend on what country you're in or if you're on mobile or not. I wouldn't know for certain, I'm a uBO/NewPipe man.
I may be wrong but I don't see evidence that Youtube continues showing ads on demonetized content like these explicit Ukraine war videos. The reason is that the advertisers who pay money to Google don't want their brands associated with certain types of lurid content. (See Adpocalypse: https://www.google.com/search?q=biggest+advertisers+abandon+...)
So, Google is being extra strict with ads on these videos to avoid an angry call from a giant advertiser like Proctor & Gamble complaining, "Why are you showing my dish soap ads on a video of a naked guy getting killed while pooping?!?" (E.g.: https://www.tubefilter.com/2018/04/20/pg-resumes-youtube-spe...)
There also may be some confusion about some videos with ads and creators not getting the money: the creator has not been accepted into the Partner Program for revenue sharing. Yes, in those cases, the creators are not getting ad $$$ -- even for safe advertiser-friendly videos.
But these Ukraine demonetization videos seem more like not repeating the Adpocalypse debacle and Google will not run ads on them.
Of course, Google/Youtube's system isn't perfect so there will be false-positives. Will there be indecent videos that Google improperly display ads on? Yes. Will there also be high-quality channels that got unfairly demonetized even if advertisers would have no objection to their content? Yes.
You're quite right that there's some confusion between Partner Program eligibility and demonetization proper. This Ukraine war creator actually talks about being removed from the Partner Program in the video linked in this post.
† It was a deepfake of the current Israeli Prime Minister explaining why I should vote for Shas, a party of which he is most definitely not a member. Not relevant to this issue but too crazy not to mention.
Which all suggests, there is something going on other than "no cheerleading deaths".
Patreon offers no way to add a one-time boost, which sucks.
Also added one for Suchomimus, who I assume has also been hit.
Now let's say you're on the other end, an advertiser that pays for placements, and you see your ads showing on videos where people literally die on camera, with funny reactions, videos and sounds. Do you think that it has the potential of ruining your business or not? Sorry to say but I take YT's side in this matter.
Nobody thinks an advertiser paid for a video of death and destruction. Everyone knows that sort of content is 100% between the uploader and YouTube.
Couple of possibilities:
- it may be a temporary false-positive for demonetization : their A.I. algorithm with (with imperfect heuristics) scanned a bunch of channels for controversial Ukraine content and automatically demonetized them skipping any human judgement. In some cases, the youtubers appeal it and they get re-monetized again. As an example, the youtube aviation channel "blancolirio" went through this. He started making videos about Boeing 737-MAX which automatically got de-monetized by the algorithm because it had "737MAX" in the titles but his later crash-analysis videos got monetized after human review. E.g. He wrote[1] "(Note: after initially demonetizing this video, after a human review YT re-monetized it...Why? I have No Idea.)" And his recent video analyzing Las Vegas plane crash is also monetized with Youtube ads.[2]
- Youtube suddenly got stricter about the Ukraine topic so more channels are getting caught up in the dragnet. If that's the case, hopefully the high-quality channels will appeal and a human reviewing it will turn on monetization again. I'm guessing a quality channel like Perun will pass human review and get re-monetized to override the auto-demonetization. However, the channel (Artur Rehi) cited by this particular thread probably will not because his type of content is not "advertiser-friendly".
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8_vl3theT8, [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2Up_Cw8X-g
You are suggesting that there is some sort of moral equivalence between a Ukrainian fighting a war to defend the existence of their country and a Russian fighting to conquer said country.
That is just sad.
It's OK to cheer when the bad guy has a bad day.
In any case, why would you begrudge someone trying to tell the rest of the world what is going on there? It's not like you're going to find any dispassionate, unopinionated, completely neutral news agency out there. That just doesn't exist.
(And by the way there's a massive difference between biaised news, and posting what is basically snuff content... Advertisers have no issue rolling ads on CNN even when it covers wars, but there's a reason why they don't broadcast gore/graphical content.)
I hope this gets sorted soon. I'd hate for Perun to have to depend on ads (I know he's run some VPN and Ground News ads, but those are appropriate for his content, and he claims to donate the money (and I believe he does)).
Update: It looks like Denys Davydov's channel [0] (which is just maps overlaid with arrows and troop boundaries) is also demonetized. How odd.
Reporting From Ukraine https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBEoIbDZFpw Denys Davydov https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6HBaIRPhClw
Both were mostly maps and discussion of news, occasional video from the war but never actual killing, that I saw. Both definitely journalistic in tone. Both are demonetized today. I think this is not just about this person's channel.
It's classic low quality YouTube clickbait videos with a "shocked face" on the thumbnail: "Analyzing 5 new combat videos from Ukraine war", "Estonian soldier reacts to M1 Abrams Tank",... - Maybe not worth demonitizing for, but also not something of worth being lost.
Google is a search engine. Subscribing to a channel is what you do when search sucks/doesn’t exist.
I guess I’ll work on an “ow, my balls” channel.
The real question; what are we doing now that we know these things?
Oh, wait.
The other factor here is that selling creative content/getting people to pay to see you has pretty much always been a long odds crapshoot as far as earning a living wage is concerned and there have likewise pretty much always been random gatekeepers standing in your way for all sorts of arbitrary reasons.
You might say it does no good to complain but I say it does no good to stop complaining.
You don't see much youtube publishing elsewhere to build an alternative, people keep sending all their data to facebook, few people migrate from gmail and firefox usage is not growing.
Putting "funny" reactions, sounds and faces on videos where people are dying literally on camera from bombardments is something that should not be supported in any way.
Nothing of value is lost here.
Among those demonetized is Perun who makes neutral hour-long PowerPoint presentations on war logistics with text, graphs and the occasional harmless picture. His content is higher quality than most news outlet by a margin. This is what he wrote today:
"I am extremely disappointed given that this week's video includes an interview with the former commander of the US Army in Europe, Lieutenant General Ben Hodges (Ret.), on the topic of Ukrainian force generation over the winter and into 2023."
That's not the part in dispute. The part I couldn't find was "getting killed by bombs".
It's true that this guy is essentially profiting off tragedy, though. It's war porn. Not upset at all if he's lost his funding.
The risks involved investing your time into building out your project on a 3rd party platform make it not worth it.
I hear about Google and Apple Apps being banned on the regular. Even a few weeks ago the Google Stadia platform being shutdown after a gaming developer spent several months building out their game. When will people learn?
I also hear about way too many of the younger generation who invest much of their time on social media aspiring to become an influencer on YouTube/Instagram/TikTok. It’s not sustainable long term and it never will be.
It’s important that the message gets delivered that these platforms are not sustainable. Sure there’s a small minority out there making it work for them but for the 99% you’re better off investing in higher education and working a lucrative career starting in your late 20s - early 30s.
While you're at it you should probably deliver the same message to all the would-be actors waiting tables in LA, the mid-level college athletes with dreams of the NFL, etc. Most of these endeavors aren't going to pan out. I'm not sure how different YouTube, Instagram, or TikTok are.
My account doesn’t get banned by a bot and I can’t get in touch with a human behind the platform working as a waiter or trying to become an NFL player.. social media is not normal. It’s Zuck and others creation along with their paid team of nerds who are having their way and harvesting data on their users. It’s unethical in every way and brings no good to society.
Option 1) Hire more staff to do a proper monitoring job on a per-video or per-channel basis. Option 2) Just demonetize every small youtuber who talks about the Ukraine war right now, no matter the guidelines.
1) costs money. 2) some mild reputation impact for us, but who cares about the livelihood of innocent bystanders who trusted our platform and actually respected our guidelines.
You might have cheap S3 storage to tons tons of MP4 video, but to transcode it, add CDN and everything added up.
Cloudflare pricing example is a good guide here. 6 dollar for storage, but egress fee is 72.
https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/products/cloudflare-stream/
>Streaming a library of 500 GB of HD videos over the course of one month with approximately 72,000 minutes of viewing time to a global market.
And below is:
>Streaming costs at a rate of $1 per 1,000 minutes delivered.
So if you have tiktok style short videos of ~1 min, you only need a $1 CPM to break even.
Insanely.
If you take MrBeast's last video which is 200MB when downloaded in 1080p and has been viewed 40M times, we have 0.2GB * 40,000,000 = 20M GB of data transferred just for this one video.
If you look at the price of AWS's CloudFront (a CDN) transfer out to the internet, it would cost $200,000 just to serve that video to the internet.
This is just for pure data transfer. It's not viable even a second.
On a regular scale fine to host videos if you are with a regular hoster and not pay AWS/GCP network prices. The problem is that you won't get traffic, you won't be discovered, you'd have to do a lot of things that you'll get for free on dedicated video platforms (transcoding, keeping a lot of different formats available to work with all devices,...)
I'm sorry but this is just completely wrong.
The price scales linearly, not exponentially, so it doesn't matter if you have 100,000 views or 40M, you will pay more in serving the video than anything you would earn on it.
> On a regular scale fine to host videos if you are with a regular hoster and not pay AWS/GCP network prices.
This is also wrong. If you are lucky your hosting provider will allow 1TB of transfer per month as fair use.
That gets you a grand total of 5,000 views on that 200MB video we talked about. A 17 minutes, heavily compressed video.
If your scope is bigger than sharing a video once in a while with your not-so-extended family, it will NOT be accommodated by a standard provider.
Where did you get that from? That's very outdated information. Popular hosters in that kind of space:
Hetzner (For a 90 Euro / month server): "In this special case, we will charge the usage over 20TB with € 1.19/TB"
OVH: Even on a 20 Euro / month server you can push ~10TB / month easily without problems. Ask all the people hosting their seedboxes there.
Might buffer 3 minutes of video in that time, but hardly any of those views are the full video.
YouTube’s biggest feature is discovery. “The algorithm.”
Sure, you might be able to self host videos, for relatively little money. But who is going to watch them? Alternatives like Floatplane, CuriosityStream, Nebula, etc all are great platforms and far more creator-friendly (mostly because they were built and owned by creators) but they all flounder when it comes to the discovery and hooking aspect because the amount of content on them is minuscule, and at the end of the day the viewer just goes back to YT.
Anything with monetization will have to be within the guidelines of the provider or the advertisers will make the platform provider cancel the content regardless of platform.
You are at the mercy of one companies political biases if you put all your eggs in one bias.
YouTube's own human appeals process is often done by a low paid contractor who often won't view the video as a whole to gain context and only watch the section flagged by the AI, may have the language of the video as a second language, so may miss certain idioms of your speech. These contractors want to process as many reviews as quick as possible so they aint got time to look more closely / get another opinion of what was actually said or not actually be reviewed by a human at all and an AI takes a stab at trying to figure out if you "heavly reuse content".
One of the current "tricks" to getting a video monetized is to upload multiple copies of it with very slight changes (a perfect hash match triggers a "you already uploaded this" error iirc) and playing the numbers game, waiting for the bot to review them all, if none are "green" for ads, request review on all the uploads, chances are they will be reviewed by differnt people and hope of them sees that your content follows the guidelines and approves it, delete the ones that don't get approved, if you get multiple approvals pick one to make public and delete the rest.
The Twitter path (if you can get enough engagement) usually gets it infront of a YT employee to have a closer more indepth look and may come to another decision, if you can't get the engagement then with a whole channel demonetization then your next best thing if to still pump out the content as best as you can to YT's specs and re-apply in 30 days.
But the Twitter method can also "backfire", we have seen on multiple occasion when one channel got a video agegated or demonetized, complaigned on Twitter that other channels covered the same thing and were fine, got the restriction removed and then got the restriction reapplied and also getting the other channels videos restricted/demonetized.
I understand why YT don't publish a CLEAR set of guidelines (much like why game dev's don't publish extactly what they use to detect cheats) because someone will always game the system, however I know more and more YT creators getting highly frustrated with YT because they follow the guidlines, get struck/restricted/demonetized and on follow up get told they broke a rule YT have never publicly published. So they feel its a bit like playing football blindfolded, you know roughly where the goal posts are but you can never be sure when you kick the ball if you are going to hit the goal esp if you feel that YT are moving the posts and changing the size of the goal without telling anyone.
Generally speaking, companies don't publicly state why one of their users was punished, banned or whatever. That leaves the user with the ability to claim whatever they want. They may believe what they're saying. It might be putting a spin on it. It may well be outright lies and they know it. No one is going to correct them.
But even if what they believe what they're saying, they've tried to present the situation fairly and all of their facts are, in fact, facts, you still only half the story.
People do this because there's an audience for this. There are a lot of people who will believe you because it confirms and validates their own feelings about something. rather than their being any kind of objective principle in play.
So for the claim "demonetized for covering the war [in Ukraine]", first it doesn't even pass the smell test. Youtube has way worse stuff than that. There's a legitimate interest in the subject. A cursory look will find plenty of other channels covering Ukraine without being demonetized just fine.
So already the claim falls apart and you can move on what really happened. Other commenters note low-quality clickbait-y videos with questionable material included. That may or may not be the reason but it strikes me as a whole lot more likely that there are issues with this creeator's content more than a general issue with Ukraine content being demonetized.