Comment by violet13 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by violet13 | Hacker News Reader

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They by and large don't. Most creators on YouTube aren't even eligible to monetize, especially if they're making niche educational content.

Google just pockets all the revenue if you have fewer than 4,000 "public watch hours". If you put together an a concise 4-minute DIY video, an average view time will probably hover around 1 minute, and you will need 240k views to qualify. Most videos on YouTube get under 1k views.

There is a negligibly small percentage of content creators / content farmers who live in a symbiotic relationship with the platform and actually make good money, but let's not pretend you're patronizing the creators when you're paying for YouTube Premium.

> Google just pockets all the revenue if you have fewer than 4,000 "public watch hours". If you put together an a concise 4-minute DIY video, an average view time will probably hover around 1 minute, and you will need 240k views to qualify. Most videos on YouTube get under 1k views.

With less than 4k public watch hours your channel has barely made any money. It is accumulated for your videos for the entire channel, that isn't per video.

And no, youtube isn't making money on those videos, it costs them more to store etc and most of them aren't getting any ads anyway. Instead you get free video upload on youtube, normally you pay for that.

Youtube makes their money from the big creators that draws in a lot of views per video, there efficiency of scale lets them get over the profitability hump.

YouTube runs ads on all my videos, including the ones with fewer than 200 views. I'm not sure what you're getting at otherwise. The point I was making is that paying for YouTube does absolutely nothing to support the vast majority of content creators on the platform. All you're doing is paying Google, and a tiny slice of that supports a handful of celebrity content creators like Mr. Beast. Maybe it's a bargain that makes sense to some, but the parent was deriding the grandparent for not willing to pay.

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