It should be noted that YouTube income is unaffected by this, as Ads are still shown and counted to people without AdBlockers. So this is only harmful to the creators, and not YouTube.
Plenty of closed ecosystem streaming services exist and they continue to be niche things where creators who had no audience before YouTube are trying to keep going. I'm not sure how long the likes of Nebula and Floatplane are going to last honestly, because they have fundamental discovery issues in both directions:
The creators need a constant influx of new viewers to replace people growing out of their content, and the viewers need a platform where they can experiment with new content without a big paywall upfront.
This is why enshittification exists.
If I kept coming everyday, multiple times a day, and never paid "because its bad", it's extremely unlikely that I don't like the lemonade, and extremely likely that I just like that it's free as long as I complain.
It's your choice to go to youtube and watch the video. No one is forcing that on you. Youtube is a service that is offered. If you don't like youtube or the ads, you can not use the service. Just like no one is forcing you to go to the lemonade stand.
It's a very naive view to think that serving videos is a zero-cost endeavor because the video isn't consumed.
Products have more than just marginal production costs, especially true for digital ones.
The seating and good screen and audio? No.
The digital file? I don't expect Disney to provide that free of charge, or at all for that matter, but I do believe it should be free. Copyright has gone way too far of one end of the scale, and I'd like to pull it as far as possible to the other side, then hopefully we can meet in the middle in a position we can both respect. The current position taken by Society™ is one I don't respect.
The value of digital content comes from more than just the final sequence of bytes.
Where did this come from? This has nothing to do with anything.
> We still need mechanisms to pay them for it, the more direct the better.
Patreon is a good option, although I wish we had better ones. It's not like Youtube's paying any significant amount to any content creator other than maybe the top 0.01%. Anyone who's tried that has discovered that Youtube's payout is some extra pocket change rather than anything you can actually sustain a business with; hence why everybody who's on Youtube and does it as a business also has a Patreon or does sponsorships, or something else, as that's the only way to make ends meet.
> The value of digital content comes from more than just the final sequence of bytes.
I fail to see what else I would derive value from. I just want the damn file in most cases, with minimal interference., but Youtube seems to always want plop their schlong inbetween the content creator and their audience, to everyone's displeasure.
Youtube pays $5-$15 per 1000 views. Youtube premium gives a 55% cut of the monthly fee to creators. It's split among them based on who you watch and how long you watch them. If you watch one creator only, they will get the full 55% of your subscription cost. Creators readily acknowledge that yt premium viewers are by far the most valuable.
Generally less than 5% of viewers ever donate, and less than 1% ever give more then $5. It's not a viable income method.
I suggest following pitchfork mobs less, they are usually blind with rage and detached from reality, with a few kernels of truth in the middle.
If Youtube was a platform that clearly cared about its creators, than a 55% split would be pretty fair. Youtube doesn't give a shit about most of them, and if they're just going to be a stupid bytepipe to the viewer, a hostile one at that, then them taking 45% is absurd.
> Where did this come from? This has nothing to do with anything.
Poor wording on my part, because I was typing on my phone. "Everything" refers to everything related to copyright law. Your original comment implied that we should just burn it all down (going "as far as possible to the other side"), and I don't agree with that.
Copyright has been weaponized of course, but there are considerations worth keeping in mind about why it exists in the first place. The intent is to create mechanisms that incentivize creation of art, and allow creatives to distribute said art without other people getting automatic ownership of the fruits of their labor, just by virtue of having the file.
In a world where distribution of media is (relatively) cheap and easy, we need to think more about how we incentivize the creative process, instead of making it a wild west where anyone is allowed to distribute if they have the bits on them. In a world where everyone pirates, very little worth pirating remains.
EDIT: Forgot to respond to the rest.
I agree about patreon, but also:
> Youtube's paying any significant amount to any content creator other than maybe the top 0.01%.
That's not accurate. Of course if you have a couple hundred subscribers you get nothing from youtube, but neither does a random busker on the subway. Arts are just brutally competitive, and there's way more art being produced than people want to consume.
Youtube's partner programs are quite generous as other people have pointed out in sister comments. In addition, a good chunk of your premium subscription goes directly to the creators you're subscribed to.
> I fail to see what else I would derive value from. I just want the damn file in most cases, with minimal interference., but Youtube seems to always want plop their schlong inbetween the content creator and their audience, to everyone's displeasure.
This misses my point, but illustrates the weird thought process people go through when assigning value to digital media. When trying to value a desk we're willing to go through the whole shebang: cost of materials, quality of materials, quality of the craftsmanship and how much labour it would have required, the estimated cost of all the manufacturing processes involved, finishing labor costs etc.
But when the conversation is about paying for digital content we only focus on the direct value it provides to us, the consumer. The entire conversation about input value just gets lost.
Now input value is not always perfectly correlated with the output value (it's shaped differently for each customer), but the fact that the conversation simply shifts away as if creators and people building the platforms don't exist outside of the stream of bytes feels disingenuous.
China seems to be doing that just fine when it comes to manufacturing. Everybody who's doing engineering or design work on products are talking to each other to figure out what works and does when making stuff, and nobody cares about keeping secrets about these things, since it isn't properly enforced anyway, and if you keep one secret and sit on it, without going out there to continue improving, you'll be outclassed by everybody else in a month or a year. Meanwhile, American companies are sitting on 80 years of IP and are unwilling to even consider sharing their hoard even if half of it is functionally useless, just because it might have some value.
People are creative by nature. Nowadays they have a whole internet to take inspiration from, but most of it is locked behind bars for no good reason. If we want to incentivise creative work, then copyright is wholly counter-productive in a world where information can freely and rapidly flow. I'd rather see it burn and see what comes from the ashes than let it rot into nothingness.
> That's not accurate. Of course if you have a couple hundred subscribers you get nothing from youtube, but neither does a random busker on the subway. Arts are just brutally competitive, and there's way more art being produced than people want to consume.
Go ask anyone between 100k and 10m subs. I'm not talking about people who have anything less than that.
> Youtube's partner programs are quite generous as other people have pointed out in sister comments. In addition, a good chunk of your premium subscription goes directly to the creators you're subscribed to.
And I'd have to give more money to a platform that's hostile to me as a user. No thanks.
> This misses my point, but illustrates the weird thought process people go through when assigning value to digital media. When trying to value a desk we're willing to go through the whole shebang: cost of materials, quality of materials, quality of the craftsmanship and how much labour it would have required, the estimated cost of all the manufacturing processes involved, finishing labor costs etc.
When if you hollow out a tree to make a boat, it's value goes up. If you then add a hole to it, it's value goes down again. Work or value you put into a product is not directly correlated with the final value on the other side. I couldn't give a shit about how much money a video takes to make. That sounds like a them problem, not a me problem. If you're spending too much money to make something than you can make back on it, then don't do that. Do something else.
Then the lemonade stand guy feels entitled to bitch about it when more and more people start showing up wearing headphones because they don't want to hear his bullshit even though literally nobody came for his abuse, what they came for was just the free lemonade.
The people still show up though because clearly people like the lemonade, they just hate the annoying guy who won't shut up about his rude opinions nobody asked for.
How dare people genuinely believe they are entitled to this lemonade at no cost, when it's got a huge sign that says "FREE LEMONADE"!
Youtube has every right to take down the free lemonade sign and paywall off their service, but they wont because they know they make far more money luring in the people who come for the free videos, sucking up their personal data, and then increasingly abusing them until some number of suckers cave and start paying into their protection racket scheme.
A racket is exactly what youtube premium is too. Never pay someone for protection against the very harms they're causing you. There's nothing to stop them from demanding increasing amounts of protection money whenever they feel like it, which is exactly what Google has done. Repeatedly. Most recently sticking their oldest suckers with a 62% hike in protection fees. (https://old.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/1jqzu4g/et_tu_yout...)
Don't encourage or try to justify that kind of shit. Just put on a pair a headphones and enjoy the sweet lemonade Google chooses to offer for "free". Don't forget that even with those headphones, Google is still collecting every scrap of data they can get from you and your device while you're using their service and that they'll happily leverage all of that data against you in any way they can think of, any time they feel it might benefit them. That price is itself high enough, but for me still worth what I'm getting from the content I view.
It's also an optional website/app. No need to get heated, you can use another service.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_Broadcasting_Co._v._Dish_N...
Often this means "the way you've implemented ads is terrible enough that I went out of my way to block them" and sometimes it means "any and all ads are terrible and I don't want them"
There's nothing at all wrong with ad blocking. Someone who puts their content on the public internet has zero right to require me to view that content, or to control how much of it I see or how I choose to view it. If I want to block ads, or only watch the last 20 seconds, or watch the whole thing played backwards that's my business. This is equally true for websites where I'm free to decide what to download and how to display it in my browser.
You must be very young if you actually think that. In reality the internet was infinitely better when there was no commercialization at all.
I find plenty of valuable things on the current internet that wouldn't exist without commercialization, the possibility of a career as an individual YouTuber or streamer, for example.
And I'd like to see them continue and be actually paid for their efforts in a sustainable way instead of pining for a return to "all content is just passion side projects".
Because absolutely nothing about the current internet stops people from posting passionately as a side project.
I have the rosey glasses too. The reality is that it was just a bunch of edgy kids messing around with no adults in the room.
Someone you care to watch not making enough money to make the things you like to watch is your concern, because making equivalent content yourself is out of your reach.
If "smart" people use ad-block, then all the content gravitates towards those who don't.
* University lectures
* Conference talks
* Random clips of homeowners doing some DIY repair
i.e. things that were being done anyway, and someone decided to post it online because it's free and they wanted to be helpful. "Content creators" are already almost never making videos with high value information. The entire idea of "creating content" rather than "sharing information" is a bad framing to start from. When we recognize that "sharing information" is the high-value action, we're better able to see that it not only can be done by someone who isn't a full-time "creator", but may actually be done better by people who aren't devoted to it since their occupation is to be a practitioner of the field they're sharing information about. i.e. they are better informed.
Or if you want to enjoy some slop, then apparently we'll all get plenty of that if the smart people block malware, so no problem.
Generally speaking, something with wide appeal is going to be trash anyway because most people aren't going to want to (or will be unable to) engage with any given topic at more than a superficial level. e.g. compare Andrew Ng's Coursera MOOC to problem sets you can find from his real class at Stanford. It is obvious that he watered down the information hard for Coursera. Almost every class on those MOOC sites is of the "X for non-X majors" variety at best (and that's for people who are motivated enough to self-learn!), which IMO is why it could never truly be disruptive. The "creators" people are talking about are generally this except even more targeted at mass audiences.
Even for people who are interested in "smart" stuff, 100x more people will watch some 10 minute video of surface level discussion with doodles about algebraic geometry[0] and then move onto another 10 minute video vs. putting in the work to engage with 15+ hours of lectures on the subject from a Fields Medalist[1]. World-class researchers provide graduate level educational materials for free (which is awesome), but they could never succeed as "content creators" because any given video will only get ~1k views after years of being up.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MflpyJwhMhQ
[1] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8yHsr3EFj53j51FG6wCb...
They will do this whether or not people use ad-blockers. We've seen this happen before; someone will claim that they are an ethical ad company and don't do shady things, people allow-list in ad blockers, then they start ramping up.
I remember back in the day where Google was a "good advertiser" because they had simple textual ads and didn't do shady things. IIRC plenty of ad blockers just allow-listed Google at that time. And then they acquired Doubleclick.
As a consumer this does not concern me in the slightest. The big creators who are focusing on revenue are so sterile they are barely watchable at this point.
And if you watch videos, there is a chance you also enjoy them, so it would be in your own interest to support creators in making more of them. But that's a bit more complicated.
If YouTube could track what you watch anyway, they would have no trouble incrementing their view counter. But apparently that's an unsolved problem of computer science, so they were using something ad blockers and privacy extensions could block.
The context that I am thinking about is, for example, a small hobbyist that might rely on the added value for making some odd things, requiring exotic hardware, quantities of materials that could be prohibitively expensive or the lend of access to said hardware might be blocked behind viewership metrics, and there this might make some difference, and I personally enjoy those little odd channels and this is why I, as a viewer, might care about it. But again, I totally see where you are coming from.
Pretty sure this is harmful to youtube as well as it lowers the value (less personalization data) for advertisers. Also the knock-on effect of impacting creators, meaning less investment in creating content.
That being said, I've always hated this business model. It's created so many other problems in our society. Resulting in a shift to authoritarian leadership in many countries.
Examples: Caspian report, Warfronts, Geopolitics decoded, ...
Many of them (the content creator) are even located in the same city.
I can throw a dart and hit a random podcast that has been sponsored by blue chew for years, but that doesn't mean said podcast is funded by them or bends to their whims.
IMO your comment is pure conspiracy theory.
Just curious, but can't they be both?
I don't know those channels. The one I regularly see are very diverse in their partners, and usually the content is unrelated to the promotions. But overall those promotions are negotiated based on viewer counts, and at a certain size, they are more valuable than earnings from ads.
Where does line go? If a future "Adblocker 3000" don't let advertisers capture you eyemovements in realtime 30 times per second, would that be sad?
Seems the ball is with Youtube. They can compensete and pay out more. Or not.
Personally I would even prefer anything that allows for a Youtube alternative to do better.
Every publisher on the internet has been bleating for years about how adblockers negatively impact their business and their ability to provide [some value] to customers.
If your ability to generate value is hitched to surveillance capitalism then that’s a choice, whether you’re a folksy mom and pop YouTube creator or a multinational publisher.