Hacker News Reader

Comment by quantummagic | Hacker News Reader

Slightly off-topic, but several small-to-medium Youtube channels I watch, mentioned that their yearly Youtube earnings are way down, by two-thirds in one case. It may be that Alphabet is dialing back their profit sharing - across the board.

View on HN

This is because of Gemini/Claude/ChatGPT

People are using AI as a search engine.

https://www.semrush.com/blog/ai-search-seo-traffic-study/

https://searchengineland.com/how-googles-ai-overviews-are-ac...

That is true i'm sure. But in this particular case, there is no search or AI directly involved. It's the ads that get inserted to Youtube videos, and what they pay to creators.

Creator-led channels are competing with AI-generated video channels that pump out many videos every day. The ad spend hasn't increased but now it's shared with people who have automated their channel's content production and who are likely getting the majority of what's available.

That's to be expected. Google needs that money to fund the AI development that will enable them to replace creators with their own slop, allowing them to pocket 100 % instead of sharing anything at all.

Exactly, it is already a pattern that Google will start paying good money for ads and then progressively reduce the pay to its publishers. It is a bait and switch strategy, but they'll certainly say that it is just an algorithm improvement....

Totally an organic and transparent marketplace that joins together publishers and consumers huh?

It has been down since the COVID boom for obvious reasons, and then it has gone even more.. Google needing the billions to put into the AI burner is just and unfortunate coincidence..

Reply on news.ycombinator.com