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Comment by kaladin-jasnah | Hacker News Reader

It's telling the name of this repository is "MoneyPrinter"—says a lot about the monetization of videos today. I wonder if the creator has made money on YouTube from this repository. I didn't see any stats in the README.

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In the video, they show that some videos got more than 1k views, but most around a couple hundred. YouTube requires 1000 subscribers and 4000 hours of watch time. So definitely no money earned yet on the channel they created.

Unless they have some secret other channel with a bunch of manufactured videos. ;)

I sincerely hope they never earn a dime.

There are already thousands and thousands of channels doing something similar to this, it's very profitable en mass. It wont stop until it's made expensive to do.

And then you can double dip with a little drop shipping on the side.

Don’t hate the player, hate the game.

The players enable the game

I can hate both.

I doubt the creator intends to make a dime. They seem to hate the current state of things as well, and made this to prove how useless channels like this are.

For shorts you need 10 million views in a 90 day period to be eligible for monetization.

With a minimum length of 15 seconds, you'd have to algorithmically waste close to 5 years[1] of cumulative watch time to earn anything from this.

1: https://www.google.com/search?q=150000000+seconds+to+years

Yeah, I'm not aware of anyone offhand who's making big money off shorts. A couple creators I follow have discussed attempting to use them to bring new viewers into their channels, but apparently the conversion rate from shorts viewers to subscribers-who-watch-full-length-videos is bad.

It's still better than $0, but then it costs money/time to make and upload good quality shorts that you could spend on full length videos instead.

Because shorts are well, short, they can't run ads on them the same way they do for full length videos, which apparently hurts the revenue potential.

That's kind of insane. The top few hundred most viral shorts get something, everyone else gets nothing. I heard a Hololive creator the other day talking about how pleased they were to get 1M views on something - but that was also in the context of hoping to drive traffic to their main channel, subscriptions etc.

On the other hand, what's the revenue of a short? They've got to be pretty worthless views. And of course AI just makes them more worthless.

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