
YouTube demonetized my tuba videos - DEFCON28
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2018/04/youtube-demonetized-my-tuba-videos-also-i-make-tuba-videos/#
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firasd
I think Youtube creators aren't drawing the connection between media criticism
of YT and the collateral damage to their earnings. It's easy to get mad at
Youtube execs making policies, but Youtube is just reacting to bad PR.

Youtube has faced a series of controversies that led to the 'AdPocalypse', and
now the demonetization of people with not enough active subscribers. The media
has gleefully gone after Youtube in these stories (the latest being
inappropriate videos from Logan Paul and the proliferation of algorithmically-
generated videos that show disturbing cartoon content to children.)

YT creators should start pushing back---by saying wait, the algorithms and ads
help small creators putting out good content as well, not just nefarious
actors---if they don't want the scope of monetized content to get narrower and
narrower.

Otherwise it's easy for the public to align behind criticism of 'big tech'
while overlooking that these are platforms which people depend on to express
themselves and even to earn income.

~~~
rcthompson
I know at least some creators are well aware of the connection. Many have
switched to other monetization platforms (Patreon and Twitch subscriptions
being two big ones) and written off YouTube entirely as a reliable income
stream. (That is, they continue posting on YouTube, but mainly to grow their
viewer base, not to make money.)

But I think you're right that a majority are probably only aware of the
Adpocalypse in the abstract, if that.

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Jabbles
Of all the possible complaints about YouTube demonetization, complaining that
you don't meet the objective criteria for how popular your channel must be is
surely the least important.

~~~
TheRealPomax
It's hard to argue "objective" when those criteria were unilaterally changed
overnight from "objectively meeting the criteria" to "oh look, objectively not
meeting the criteria because we pulled the rug from under you".

If you have a financial arrangement with any company, and that company decides
to change their policy arbitrarily so that they can justify not paying
hundreds of thousands of people like you "because our policy excludes them",
when a day ago they didn't, normally that would be various immediate court
cases and no way for that company to win on any reasonable ground.

This is surely not the least important reason.

~~~
kevin_thibedeau
YouTubers don't have a financial arrangement. Nobody can produce a paper
contract.

~~~
jnbiche
> YouTubers don't have a financial arrangement. Nobody can produce a paper
> contract.

This is false. If money is being exchanged for services or (digital) goods,
then there is a financial arrangement, in the form of an informal contract.
But it's still a contract.

In the case of YouTube, it would probably even be considered a formal contract
since there are the written "Monetization Criteria", "Partner Program
Policies", and YouTube "Terms and Conditions" that the creator agrees to. This
agreement to written requirements is a "meeting of the minds" and thus
constitutes a contract.

------
Trisell
There is a massive chance to disrupt this market right now. But bandwidth
costs alone make it difficult to challenge google in this space.

~~~
creato
I don't think it's bandwidth costs that are the big problem here. People want
a competitor that offers what YouTube offers: a way to get paid for uploading
videos.

I think this service is fundamentally very hard to produce. For all its faults
with monetization, it's not clear it can be done better (beyond toy scale).
It's clearly not profitable to have humans match videos with advertisers, and
computers are inevitably going to screw up, like in this instance. edit: it
seems this case is just a basic policy issue, though that policy is a
consequence of trying to avoid attempting to solve this problem for the long
tail of small time uploaders. I just assumed it was another false positive
based on the title.

Keeping advertisers _and_ uploaders happy seems like an almost impossible
task. Google may not be doing very well at it, but that doesn't mean it's easy
to do better.

~~~
DenisM
Do we have to have distribution tied to ads / monetization? It’s not true for
the text content, yet here we are with the video, YouTube havving consumed it
all.

I imagine a world where creators pay someone for video distribution, but also
plug-in advertising from third party ad agencies that have learned to match
ads to content due to advantages in machine learning. Same as text today.

~~~
doh
It was tried before (remember Vessel[0]?) but never caught on, even with a
massive amounts of money they raised and were willing to spend. Most
competitors believe that YouTube's proposition is similar to Netflix. You get
quality content and people will come. But that's not how YouTube gets its
audience.

In minds of general population, YouTube is a search engine. The was majority
believe that YouTube aggregates the content all around the Web. Why wouldn't
they? The content shows up there minutes after it originates somewhere else.
It's almost impossible to prevent it from gaining any traction on YouTube.
Another company just tried to go against them. You can read how it went here
[https://vid.me](https://vid.me)

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vessel_(website)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vessel_\(website\))

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digi_owl
I can't help wonder if Google discovered that the banking and legal fees
involved with paying channels that are below said threshold were eating their
profits.

~~~
thaumasiotes
Wouldn't it be more sensible to have a minimum withdrawal amount in that case?

~~~
developer2
I can't remember the proper accounting term for the practice, but businesses
do not like to postpone/buffer payments like this. These legally count as on-
the-books debts, and no business wants to track millions of dollars of tiny
debts, each of which may one day need to be paid out. Particularly when these
debts roll over year-after-year across tax years.

I previously worked for a business where both the marketing and customer
service departments handed out promotional credits to users like candy,
without accounting for them. One day we got a new CFO, and a report on these
credits was one of the first things he asked for. He sure wasn't happy to
discover over $2.5 million dollars worth of credits idling in users' accounts
with no expiration. While it's unlikely any significant percentage of them
would have ever been cashed in, there is no guarantee and legally the business
is on the hook to cover them.

~~~
thaumasiotes
> I can't remember the proper accounting term for the practice, but businesses
> do not like to postpone/buffer payments like this. These legally count as
> on-the-books debts, and no business wants to track millions of dollars of
> tiny debts, each of which may one day need to be paid out.

Is the term "banking", by any chance? This is the entire business practice of
banks.

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c3534l
Edit: later on in the article, it was stated that that wasn't the reason.
Sorry.

~~~
vortico
Agreed, nothing to see here. He uploaded infringing property, tried to make
profit, Youtube disabled his profit (for a different reason), he complains to
ArsTechnica.

I mean, if it'd make him happier, Youtube can disable his channel completely
for infringement.

~~~
DEFCON28
YouTube only will go after "covers" if there's a copyright holder complaint,
and allows many cover bands to exist.

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spartas
*demonetized

~~~
dang
Fixed now.

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return1
why isn't the US breaking Youtube from Google already? Not only is it
dangerous concentration of mass media power, but youtube is wasting away its
potential while also wasting the creator's time and energy

~~~
ThatPlayer
Why should they? Google itself doesn't make any media, it just provides the
platform. And why shouldn't they be allowed to waste their own potential?

~~~
return1
a monopoly on the internet's gates is still a monopoly even if you dont own
what goes through it. They cant be broken up for wasting their own potential
but it is possible they are using googles superior bandwidth infrastructure
and ad market domination to stifle competition.

