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Comment by simonbarker87 | Hacker News Reader

This is where I get conflicted with ad blockers, on the one hand most website ads are trash, on the other hand there is great content on YT and I want those creators to make enough to carry on to get to the level where they proper sponsors. But, YT is so egregious with its ad insertions at times that it drives me mad and I don’t trust the creators will get fairly compensated if I go to premium.

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The creators get more money per view from a premium member than an ad-supported viewer. So not only does being a paying member give you a better experience, it puts more cash in the pocket of those you watch.

Not arguing for the sake of it but is that confirmed? I assume the more I watch the less each creator gets? No idea what the algorithm is they use to share the money out

I think they sum up global watch minutes, despite the bias that causes.

You can find lots of discussion with a quick web search, but yes, it seems to be pretty well supported.

Speaking more broadly, there's the simple fact that people deserve to be paid for the work they do. Many places don't allow you to pay with money, they force you to pay with ads. I find viewing ads to be an unacceptably high price, so I use an ad blocker, and I just go away if they turn me away for that.

But for places that do give a money option, like YouTube, I jump for it, as I find that to be a far more ethical business model[1]. I'm happy to support businesses that give me the option to pay by doing exactly that.

In other words, I wouldn't worry so much about the very fine details. And supporting your creators on Patreon will give them way more money than any amount of individual YouTube viewership.

[1] Yes, I know they're still tracking me. That doesn't bother me as much as viewing ads or supporting the ad-based clickbait attention grabbing business model, so I think it's still a win.

> I assume the more I watch the less each creator gets?

I think this is true, but it still works out such that given the amount the average Premium subscriber watches, creators' typical per-view revenue is still higher for Premium views. They can apparently see the breakdown (ad revenue vs premium revenue, etc., ad-supported views vs premium views, etc.) in the backend, and various people who make Youtube content for a living have reported this to be the case. See, e.g., https://twitter.com/hankgreen/status/1513177490730061829 .

I don't think there's any explicit youtube rule that guarantees they will make more money from premium viewers, but it's confirmed by creators who have showed their income reports, or at least talked about their income breakdown. And Premium views always pay better.

Another anecdote I've heard from several creators is that much longer videos (like a 5 hour livestream recording) are now much more profitable because of premium viewers. With ads they either need to include an ad every 10 minutes, which means 30 ads in one video and turns people away. Or they only include a few ads in which case people do watch it, but it's far less profitable than a 10 minute video with a midroll ad.

It depends. The last numbers YT released was that they took a 45% cut and that they used watched minutes, not views. The obvious way is distributing the remaining 55% out porportionally based on what you watch.

If you watch twice as much, your profit/minute must be half.

Is this how you define fair though? I tend to think more about the revenue split percentage.

Louis Rossman has been saying that he gets much more money if you purchase something from his store rather than from ads, and that for this reason he doesn't care if viewers use an adblocker or not. This is just a single data point though, other youtubers have a different stance on this matter.

Presumably he would care if users used an ad blocker that deleted his ads for his store, given that he appears to be using YouTube as a way to advertise his real business.

He is using YouTube to promote what he does, but AFAIK not in the form of YouTube ads, instead he publishes content about what he does in the form of videos on his channel.

But ad blockers are happy to edit videos to remove sponsorship segments, so they'd also be happy to remove his self promotion. Ad blockers don't care about the exact form of ads, right? They just want to get rid of all of them leaving the content.

I think you're not familiar with Rossman's videos, he doesn't have sponsorship segments.

I know, but what I mean is that he must obviously inform people about his shop in some way, and so ad blockers can just remove those references. With modern AI they could theoretically even re-render his videos on the fly to write out any indication he's selling anything.

The point here is either you're OK with ad blockers in which case, you accept all your work is charitable and unmonetizable (because you can't even advertise what you're selling directly), or you have to accept ads in any form.

On his YouTube channel, he mostly cares about the bigger picture of right to repair rather than talking about its shop. I'm also quite sure he doesn't see his videos as a source of revenue. But saying "it's ok to remove ads from videos" doesn't imply saying "all the work I do is for free, including repairs". Those are just two different things. In discussing ad blockers you're also talking about how they could potentially work in the future, but there's no indication that what you talk about will happen. If it will happen that someone starts using AI to deeply modify a video, content crearors can re-evaluate their stance on the topic, as it would present a very different scenario than the current one.

I would also add that the real world isn't just black or white, one could totally be fine with a certain kind of ads and not with others, as long as is able to provide an argument for it.

YT is so egregious with its ad insertions at times

It's worse than broadcast TV. I'll usually sit through an ad at the beginning and maybe the end of a video because I want to support creators. But YT just sticks them into the middle of things, frequently ruining the experience of the surrounding content.

Meanwhile they promote absolute trash like Nikocado Avocado, which is my view is no different from shooting up heroin.

> they promote absolute trash like Nikocado Avocado

I have never had one of his videos promoted to me. You may have a different filter bubble / reccomendation algorithm pushing it towards you because you watch similar content?

I personally don't, because for potentially sketchy content I watch it logged out or in a private browser. But just the fact that the guy has millions of subscribers and they monetize is his videos at all is bothersome to me. I can't see any qualitative difference between him and a fentanyl aficionado.

For the creators I really care about, I make Patreon donations and the creators generally publish ad-free videos for their supporters - just take YouTube out of the mix altogether from the funding perspective.

> there is great content on YT and I want those creators to make enough to carry on to get to the level where they proper sponsors

Just donate to their Patreon/Kofi or click the big "Thanks" button under their video.

I don’t feel like there’s any conflict.

The ad blockers want a free ride.

We all know what would happen to YouTube if 100% of its users were able to block ads. It would become paid-only or go out of business. The only reason it’s tolerated by so many websites is because only a small sliver of users know how to install ad-blocking software.

These are real people spending real time and money making content. On the YouTube corporate side of things, the people who make YouTube what it is are real people with real families to feed with their salaries. They work full time and then some to keep the site running and lots of resources (computers, energy, etc) are used to serve the content.

It’s funny to me how the software engineering community seems to be the most enthusiastic about stealing the fruits of their own labor. I see people on HN all the time advocating for forever licenses of software, pushing back against the service business model. It’s like you all want a lower salary.

You’d rarely find other types of professionals and artists trying to advocate for their own customers finding ways around paying for their work.

YouTube Premium is a great product and one of the few streaming services I’m enthusiastic about.

I will admit, I do use an ad blocker, but I’ve got as much right to do that as a website has the right to cripple my experience if they detect that I’m using it. In those cases, I just turn it off and add the site to my exceptions, or I don’t return to the website. It’s not a big deal.

> It would become paid-only or go out of business.

Fantastic. Then people would have to host their videos elsewhere, perhaps on PeerTube.

Who do you think would donate all the bandwidth to replace youtube? How would legal complaints and other ops costs be handled? OSS is great until the government shows up and arrests you and you can't afford lawyers.

Yeah, I'm in the same boat. There's some quality content on YT, but A) I don't trust that more than a millionth of my YT premium free goes to these creators, B) normal YT is so intensely terrible that I don't feel good about rewarding google for their practices of pushing me towards premium and C) by paying for YT premium, I can't shake this vague notion of me enabling the further closing down of the internet by getting everything interesting locked up behind paywalls and monthly fees.

Calculate what a creator earns per view. Donate or buy merch with that money.

This is a nice idea, but it's like all those open source projects out there that you use that could use donations, but few remember to actually donate (or buy merch). Long-term subscriptions of one form or another (e.g. Patreon) are really the only way to ensure sustainability.

My approach to that is not to try to donate a few bucks to every project I use, but to randomly choose a few about quarterly, especially among the ones I use the most, and make larger donations to those. Otherwise it is too hard to remember to donate, and just plain too much work.

If a lot of people do that, it'll even out.

I'd like to have an automated way to make my choices more random, and to weight the probabilities better toward the projects that give me the most value, or are the most generally underfunded compared to the global value they produce. At the moment, I do that more or less by guessing. Unfortunately it sounds Hard(TM) to do it right.

It'd also be nice if you didn't have to go searching for how to donate to every project.

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