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Comment by jdiff | Hacker News Reader

If this is what they're doing, then it would seem to be negligible. The channels I've heard talking about this don't seem to be taking home any less money despite tanking viewcounts. Earnings are constant, but the numbers supporting those earnings have shuffled around unpredictably. When it's your income, you really don't like things to be shuffling around without warning.

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I think you're not understanding. The claim is that view counts are down but revenue is not because people using ad-block previously did not contribute to revenue but did contribute to view count, and now they are not counted as either. So view counts are down and creators are getting the same ad money because they already earned no money from the adblocking people.

When channels are claiming their view count is dropping 30% but still earning the same amount of money, that would indicate that they are losing out on 30% of their potential revenue because of ad blockers.

The views didn't count in the first place, that's why the money stayed the same.

Creators can now though, knowing how much they make per view on avg, and slot in the avg number of view that were missing, work out how much they are missing out on due to ad-blocking.

For large creators, it's likely in the tens of thousands of dollars per video assuming most are seeing the same ~20-25% drop.

Eventually the "morally pure" internet will need to reconcile it's habit of not compensating creators.

Nobody wants to watch ads to generate $4/hr (a good chunk of which Google keeps). The Ad-driven internet needs to understand that my time is worth more than that.

If you don't like random/inexplicable changes in your income, you probably shouldn't have youtube involved.

YouTube's where the money is. There are very few other places where you can make money like YouTube. Yes, that also means having to deal with their many, many issues, many of which directly threaten that money, but the solution is to work to solve those problems and highlight new ones. YouTube's too big to ignore, and too big to die no matter how many paper cuts and gaping wounds it gives itself.

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