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Comment by nmat | Hacker News Reader

And YouTubers should make content for free?

It is not my responsibility to make sure people can make money off of me by means of "implied contracts" and other similar bullshittery. It is those people's choice to make those videos, and it's their choice of which platform they publish them on. But then it's MY choice of how I use the internet on a device I own.

Exactly. Which is why I feel no sympathy for the entitled complainers when google says enough and blocks the ad-blockers. As somebody that makes videos and makes a decent amount of money from it, I could care less about people that are so adamantly demanding free content getting cut off by Google. These people clearly don’t care about paying the subscription Google offers if they want to avoid ads, they clearly don’t want to watch ads to even support the creator, why would I care about having these people watch my videos?

It’s especially funny to see this sentiment on hacker news. “Those stupid content creators, clearly if they want to make money, just don’t use YT!”. I’m curious, what’s the alternative? Cable? Good luck. Udemy? What if I’m trying to make entertainment videos? Oh, I guess I could just build my own low latency highly efficient video hosting site and get a paid subscriber base that manages to cover hosting costs and make a profit! Yea, because that’s completely realistic…

The alternative? A job. Don't make vlogging your entire full-time occupation. That simple.

If you do want to make videos that reliably earn you money, charge money for them! Make it explicit. Don't rely on implied contracts that other people may or may not honor at their discretion.

The alternative? Not my problem.

They do until the algorithm thinks they are worth monetizing. Google doesn't give everyone who makes an account and uploads videos ad revenue.

The threshold for starting monetization isn't very high though.

* 500 Subscriber

* 3 'valid' uploads in the past 90 days

and either of

* 3k public watch hours or 3m shorts views

https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/more-ways-for-creators-...

Doing any of those things without the algorithm showing your videos to people is hard though. They also require 3k watch hours in the past year so they expect you to grind for at least a year to "prove" you are worth monetizing.

That or go viral somehow and bootstrap yourself (which is likely why the shorts views are so high). Obvious not impossible as people still do it but the math seems suspect to me.

YouTube gets thousands of hours of video uploaded every second. I'm not sure what the ratio of monetized accounts to non-monetized accounts is, but if YouTube can run a channel "for free" for a year because they aren't monetizing it yet, it seems there's a threshold they are willing to accept to serve videos "nobody wants to see" until enough people do want to see it and they advertise on it.

So the high profile creators are costing YouTube money to serve their videos and YouTube wants help paying that cost. But they only extract it from channels they know are profitable because there are a lot of eyeballs on those videos.

Almost like they are promising X ad views to advertisers and want to keep that numbers game rolling. I feel like ad based spending is going to go through a correction in the next decade.

> They also require 3k watch hours in the past year so they expect you to grind for at least a year to "prove" you are worth monetizing.

No, if you get 3k watch hours on a video you are good to go, you don't have to wait a year. I've seen plenty of channels get monetized within weeks since they already had an audience.

I remember when Game Grumps made "The Grumps" channel and before they even uploaded a single video to it, they were already at Diamond(I believe) subscriber count. I don't remember if they were immediately monetized or not, though.

There are other places you can post to jumpstart your channel like Reddit or social media you're only reliant on the grace of YT if you allow yourself to be. There's also still plenty of niche blogs/news sites that can send plenty of audience to your new channel if you're producing good content. You're also misreading the hours metric it's just a rolling window not a wait period. If you hit those metrics in a week you can monetize basically immediately.

Back in my day, when the Internet was good, we did.

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