Hacker News Reader

Comment by pseudosavant | Hacker News Reader

YT most certainly runs ads against demonetized content. They just don't share in the take with the creator. What a principled stance... "I will make even more money because you did something bad somewhere else!"

View on HN

No. Since there is a lot of disagreement about this in the surrounding comments, I just watched 20m of an old Russell Brand YT video. As of a few minutes ago there were no YT ads in the video. That includes the very beginning and the end. However there were Brand narrated promotions in the video.

The video was actually much easier to watch without the blasted YT ads that normally pop up every 5 minutes. And I suppose Brand still gets paid 100% for the embedded promos he narrated and negotiated with the advertisers.

> The video was actually much easier to watch without the blasted YT ads that normally pop up every 5 minutes.

You don't have an ad blocker?

What Youtubers call "demonetization" usually refers to their monetization status changing to "limited to no ads." Even if their video is in the category of "limited" ads, the video tends to make a small fraction of what a regular video would make because there are fewer bidders for these ad slots, so from their perspective, it's basically the same as not being paid at all. In Russell Brand's case, it looks like his channel got completely demonetized, so his channel shouldn't have any ads.

>YT most certainly runs ads against demonetized content.

It seems pretty clear that there are no in-video ads running on Brand's channel currently. People are welcome to check for themselves:

https://www.youtube.com/user/russellbrand

That's not how any of this works.

1. YouTube can show ads BETWEEN videos and keep 100% of the money.

2. YouTube runs ads WITHIN videos if owner "monetizes", and shares the profit.

3. Creators run "promotions" within their videos and keep 100% of the money.

They only stopped #2. Both YouTube and Brand are still both making money off brands videos on YouTube.

Pre-roll and post-roll ads are part of the revenue share agreement, as well as things like the static ads off to the side.

As for 2:

If you are not partnered, YouTube runs ads within videos and keeps 100% of the money.

do creators get from google any % from premium user fees?

The user in question can take out its content at any time as well too.

If they're blocked?

Is he?

That is unclear to me. It changes the story a lot if it is. What does “blocked” mean to YouTube?

Well so much for the "we censor because of the advertisers demands" excuse for their censorship then.

There's a bit more nuance to that. Some advertisers can choose to put ads on videos that are labelled undesirable. But because there's less advertiser demand for ads on such videos, they're generally very cheap.

There was a time after I took a media class where I had insomnia and watched a lot of late night TV. I knew about targeted advertising, and the kinds of ads on late night TV at the time… oh boy. The lowest quality camerawork, dialog, and product. For a while I felt insulted, that they thought I was the target audience for this schlock. Then I realized that no, this is just the cheapest ad slots of the day, and so they are running bottom of the barrel ads during this time.

So I guess we can expect to see wannabe-Billy Mays ads on demonetized shows.

Yeah that's not so bad then. They are probably losing money hosting it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com