Many of them are highly influential amongst their viewers and have more views than your average mid-tier TV show. Youtube also offers much better insight in the audience than TV channels ever can achieve.
And yet, the content creators need to rely on Patreon and selling merchandise to pay for their expenses.
I'm not saying all of them are struggling, in some niches (for example cosmetics) YouTube creators are known to make a pretty hefty buck in sponsorship deals, but the majority is highly undervalued.
Alejandro Salomon recently talked about this in his podcast [1], since this phenomenon is especially true in the automotive sector.
If you want to see a really crisp example of this it's with food shows.
Look at this disparity:
"In 2015, more than 400,000 people on average are watching Food Network at some point during the day." [1]
Then check out Nerdy Nummies (a YT channel I found out b/c my 6yo loves it). [2] which is regularly breaking 1M views per episode, has 8+Million subscribers and lifetime has generated 1,949,110,170 views for YouTube [3]
And all of those numbers in a demographic that doesn't even realize the Food Network exists, with a pittance of the resources, no outside marketing and compensated a fraction as well.
Even the more niche creators are getting pretty good attention, I've been watching Binging With Babish [1] and he recreates dishes seen on movies and tv shows. They taste bad mostly so he fixes them. Has been getting good amount of views consistently.
My wife and I have stopped watching food/travel shows. Instead, we just put on some of our favorite food channels on YouTube - like FoodRanger (Trevor James) or Migrationology (Mark Wiens).
I don't even get what TV channels are doing anymore. Trevor James' video on street food in Mumbai has around 8.5M views. He is also awkwardly affable and a great, gracious host.
Why aren't TV execs giving people like him TV deals is beyond me.
Here, you have a guy who has nearly 700,000 subscribers, is fun to watch and averages over a million views for each video...and you hire some no-name moron to host your TV travel shows instead?
Maybe these people do get offers but prefer to work on their own schedules and without cumbersome contracts.
If you were making really good money making youtube videos, why would you want to sign on with food network (who probably demands things like good behavior clauses and stuff in their contracts), have to shoot a real tv show on the networks schedule, doing reshoots and promotional events, etc at the beck and call of some executive?
I absolutely agree that these youtubers are underpaid for the value that they create/the audiences they have accumulated; im just not as surprised that we arent seeing them convert into tv and movie personalities
How "valuable" is a viewer of YouTube channel like that versus a viewer of the food network. For example, I've heard that many viewers of various toy unboxing videos are young children. I can't imagine most advertisers want to pay money only to have their ad viewed by somebody with basically no disposable income.
Edit: My comment was not about advertising to children directly. I was using that as an example. I'm not sure if a view on YouTube has the same value as a view in more traditional media (e.g. Television).
I'm guessing by this comment that you don't have children? Kids are great customers. They are impulsive and buy into whatever flashy thing is on the TV or the current toy their friend has they must have too. The money flows from the pocket of mom, dad, grandparents, and other adult family members directly into junk for the kids. The kids are then bored of hot new toy X after a week and the cycle repeats.
Have you seen YouTube advertisements? Half the time the ad has nothing to do with the video. I've seen ads for cement mix in front of video game videos.
If I want to advertise my stand mixer, I don't want to have to pay when my ad is seen by a 5 year old just because a video about gummy bears was tagged "culinary."
I understand advertisers want to "get 'em while they're young" and want children to pester their parents to buy things, but 2 million views from children is not the same thing as 2 million views from the 18-35 bracket.
I think Youtube advertisements are very targeted toward you, and not necessarily relevant to the video. Google uses the information it has on you and plays the products that have paid the most for your demographic from what I understand.
Considering just how susceptible children are to advertising brainwashing, you might shed the guilt of skirting video ads on YouTube by installing an ad blocker (ex: uBlock Origin). Morality of blocking ads aside, I wouldn't want my children watching the number of pre-roll ads that YouTube pushes out. As a side effect, your child won't spend an hour a week clicking a skip button, or sitting though the ads that aren't even skippable.
The toy unboxing channels exist entirely because they are so effective for attracting advertisers. Those weird 'Spiderman vs. pregnant Elsa' style videos are so popular for the same reason. Kids are perhaps the most valuable demographic for Youtube.
All in all I get the impression that Youtube had difficulty commanding the kind of money that TV advertisements generate, even before the recent ad crisis.
yes but I would argue that product endorsements and advertising to young impressionable minds is extremely valuable.
The example I'd like to highlight is the success Apple gained through placing Macs everywhere in education. Students almost certainly cannot afford these machines but everyone has one and that's better marketing than anything else.
Well, 400,000 viewers on average over 24 hours translates into 9.6 mil unique viewers a day (I estimated a standard Food Network show to run at 60 minutes, hence the 24 hour multiplier). Miltiplied by 365 days that translates into 3.5 bil annual views. Not lifetime, just annual.
And that's just the US Food Network before international syndication rights (as well as rebroadcasting rights through venues like YouTube or cable channel's on-demand), so a relatively clean and monetizable demographics.
Not surprised, considering the producer is HuskyStarcraft, and Rosanna isn't exactly "slacking off" herself. Basically what should be considered the benchmark for high production value on both ends.
If you were to make a food show worth mentioning, your standard for a presenter and production should be no lower. Take that with a different format, food, and possibly a theme and I'd say "general success" for one or two people to make a normal, middle class living is attainable.
I think this is arguable based on the meaning of "value." For example, what I would say are the "highest value" channels, i.e. educational, review, informational etc are not getting as much payout as "Spiderman and Elsa Sit On Eachother's Heads" or "man blows out his microphone screaming at minecraft" videos. I mean, capitalism, yea, I get it, people like Spiderman and Elsa more than learning about stuff.
I think it's fairly obvious that in a discussion about advertising, and how they are feeling the pinch of advertisers leaving youtube, in this discussion value is based on advertisers, since they are the ones paying.
This interpretation seems to be supported by the supporting statements included. Their value to you might be entirely different.
These questionable material in your opinion could have more entertainment value than other those educational and scientific material on YT and entertainment is more lucrative for advertisers than other genres.
This is a value judgement and therefore it's subjective and function of personal preferences.
Agreed. When I think of "goods that are underproduced relative to the social optimum due to how little of the value the producer is able to capture", youtube stars are nowhere near that list.
True but there are likely a few channels or videos that bring new users to the platform and then view other content and yet that creator only gets what that user viewed on their video. Not the fact that they likely brought a lot of views to the platform (rise in water lifts all hosts scenario)
I highly suspect if you look at what all the content creators and people receive via ads. Plus overhead of running YouTube. They are likely making tons more money in profit when main content creators are getting the short stick.
Yes. Highly Undervalued. I look forward to the weekly videos from my favorite Youtubers almost as much as my favorite big budget HBO/TV shows. I'm fairly young (24) but I'm not exactly the audience that most people picture when they think of people who are really into Youtube.
I back my favorite youtubers on Patreon at somewhere between $1-5 each. My monthly Patreon charge is north of $50 right now. I pay more per month for supporting Youtube content than I do for Hulu & Netflix combined.
I find it hard to reconcile people arguing that they love content, and how it's "undervalued" on one hand, then stating that they pay <$1 for the product.
There's nothing to reconcile. "Spot the hypocrite" is just a form of ad-hominem attack and has no place here. Arguments stand on their own merits. If it's true that YouTube creators are undervalued, then it's still true even if the person who said it doesn't pay at all.
Yup, and this is the fundamental challenge Youtube has yet to overcome. Why is it worth $40,000 for a company to run a commercial on a TV show with half a million viewers but only $1,000 to spend on rolling their add before a Youtube video with half a million views?
There is the temporal bit, a TV show ad hits all viewers at the same time and on a particular date so you can put time specific information in it. And there is a diffusion bit, you can spend $40,000 for your ad across all videos that are rolling with > 1M subscribers so your ad money hits a bunch of different people rather than one person.
If Google could convince advertisers to pay more for advertising, they could compensate their content creators more. But they can't so they don't.
There's also ad effectiveness to toss more variables into the mix. There's also the huge difference in the amount of possible content and time slots for a youtube vs a TV ad. There's a very limited amount of commercial time available in primetime popular shows vs the huge number of videos uploaded each day to youtube.
I jist wish I could tell youtube "I've seen this ad more than 200 times. I am well aware that if I ever want to lose a bunch of money and feel shitty about myself, I can download Trading212. Please sell me different things."
Then again, I can't convince gmail that I'm not interested in local singles, despite the fact that 70% of my emails are sent to another gmail user that I share bunches of calendar events with.
Right now, YouTube has to deal with advertisers on behalf of its creators, which means the perverse incentives of advertisers leak through and affect YouTube's relationship with its creators. YouTube could seek to outsource the advertiser relationship to the "Networks" that aggregate YouTube creators. There could be a model where you have independent creators that thrive off of micropayments, while larger channels could be aggregated by networks which deal with the advertisers.
Right now, Patreon is great, but the friction is still a bit too high.
Micropayments are hard in general, because you have to solve a problem "for everybody" without creating a single monopoly ad-network-alike corporation to handle the money in the process.
But they can be solved in the specific case. Spotify is basically micropayments: you pay a subscription, the site tracks plays, and then the site reimburses content creators proportionally to their plays.
I feel like you could create a "Youtube killer" that used the Spotify system pretty easily.
But, of course, you would need people to actually pay a subscription. Youtube Red doesn't seem to be doing very well. (That might just be because people expect Youtube content to be free, though. It might be different if all the content is behind the subscription paywall from the start.)
Either way, you'll lose Youtube's viral aspect, that comes down to millions of ten-year-olds with tons of time and no money spreading your content.
(That might just be because people expect Youtube content to be free, though. It might be different if all the content is behind the subscription paywall from the start.)
Either way, you'll lose Youtube's viral aspect, that comes down to millions of ten-year-olds with tons of time and no money spreading your content.
You can have advertiser-driven content for ten-year-olds and paywalled content for people who have money.
...which is what Youtube Red is. But everyone starts by consuming the advertiser-driven content, and this content anchors them on what the platform "should" cost.
Cognitive Load -- TL;DR: this continues to compound the cognitive overload of payment for content.
Under Brin's system, now I've got to:
Decide if I want to read something.
Decide if I want to pay for reading something.
Decide if I've got buyer's remorse for having paid for something, and if so,
Wrestle with the vendor's reimbursement system in the event of any dispute.1
1) Happens no matter what.
2) Can be automatic, so no decision applies. If the cost is low enough, it could just amount to some slightly varying small amount that gets auto-paid every month. It would be just like FastTrak toll payment -- something I don't really think about.
3) and 4) I don't think like this with regard to Patreon. If I decide a creator doesn't deserve my money anymore, I just stop paying them. I really couldn't give a rat's ass about the $1 I sent them last month.
So fundamentally at odds with information goods, particularly in mass media -- Wat!? Where is the evidence? Is Netflix massively out-earning Amazon Prime Video? If this was the case, why did video rental ever happen, and how does RedBox still exist? How does Steam and the Apple App Store exist and make money, for that matter? Apps and video games are just media, after all.
Fair questions. I've addressed a number of these in existing articles concerning information and markets. A search of my subreddit turns up most of these:
1. The problem with per-article paid access is that the question of access is tied to the question of cost. I'm working at a scale of information where I'm looking at thousands of books and articles. The overhead is nontrivial.
A library model -- where you simply have stacks access and don't pay per item viewed -- works out quite well. A rental model, where you're aware that each item carries some access cost, however low: $10, $1, $0.10, $0.1 -- adds up. For much of the world, any per-item cost is high.
The Internet offers us several such "library" models --Sci-Hub, LibGen, and BookZZ each provided unencumbered access to massive troves of published material. Extralegally.
Yes, you might find some way of wedging a paid-access metering model onto this, but to what end? Consider that the average American spends something on the order of $200 on direct media purchases (books, magazines, music, video) in a year, and an indirect $600 or so in advertising. Which has all kinds of distortionary effects on what is available, or produced. There are ~300k writers and editors in the country, whose core need is to a) keep a roof over their head and food on the table and b) have the tools for writing available to them. Seems to me that cutting out the inefficiencies and distortions of advertising would be a net win.
Your 2) is false: at some point, I've got to consciously decide whether or not I'm paying for content. Otherwise you're making a sham of the concept of a discretionary payment system.
For 3 & 4: it depends on what the granularity of the system is, on both payments and units of consumption.
First, with Patreon, you aren't paying for access to individual items of content, for the most part. The models vary, but range from "I'm pitching in to support someon I believe in" to "I'm gaining time-based channel access".
There's a word for that last, it's call a subscription. And subscription-based media access ... is very much a thing.
There's an entire industry that grew up around this, at a previous time when per-item access to media was expensive, and the joint problems of "how do I sample the wares" (for audiences) and "how do we keep our authors fed , housed, and clothed" (for broadcasters) came up.
The answer was the literary or publisher's magazine.
This was a regularly-produced (weekly, monthly, quarterly) publication, with a stable of writers, a compilation of works included with each issue, often publishing longer works in serial form, etc., etc.
It served as an advertisement for long-form books, should subscribers choose to buy them. It mitigated the risks (and bundled purchasing decisions), at the level of multiple authors (anywhere from a handful to 100s), on an annual basis, and generally offered something in any given issue worth reading.
It wasn't until the 1860s or so that additional advertising (beyond the books and publications themselves) became a significant component, though that grew rapidly through the last half of the 19th century. Hamilton Holt's Commercialism and Journalism, 1909, covers this in a brief 115 page booklet (available at the Internet Archive). (Holt was a magazine publisher, reporting on the industry.)
I see the present situation of one in which the question of where and how the bundling size has changed, and is shaking out. The previous regime served the needs and limits of paper-based publication, as well as vinyl & CD-based audio, and VCR and DVD-based video. In a world of ubiquitous digital distribution, those limits and gateways no longer exist.
And information is a public good, as Google's Chief Economist argues.
1. The problem with per-article paid access is that the question of access is tied to the question of cost. I'm working at a scale of information where I'm looking at thousands
Prices should be in tenths of a penny.
Your 2) is false: at some point, I've got to consciously decide whether or not I'm paying for content. Otherwise you're making a sham of the concept of a discretionary payment system.
Much as bundling has made a sham of cable programming consumer choice? Micropayments done correctly would pay directly per view. You'd exercise consumer choice by visiting or not visiting. If you're dissatisfied with a content producer, you stop visiting. If micropayments are measured in tenths of a penny, it's not even worth getting the refund. Instead of having your eyeballs paid for indirectly through advertisers, both viewers and advertisers can be bidding for your eyeballs. Long tail advertisers will be better served, and long tail consumers will be treated better by advertisers.
For 3 & 4: it depends on what the granularity of the system...The answer was the literary or publisher's magazine.
Note that digital goods aren't as limited in granularity as they were in the days of paper, vinyl, & CD.
And information is a public good, as Google's Chief Economist argues.
There are problems with advertisements paying for public goods. That's subject to its own kind of "Tradgedy of the Commons."
On what basis? What do you see a total spend being? What kind of income do authors, composers, filmakers receive? Independent of work length or effort? What works are you incentivising as a consequence?
And again, to what end, and providing what kind of information structure.
Think through the pricing system, because 1) this isn't trivial, 2) what you incentivise matters and 3) what matters, ultimately, is whether and how those who can write are paid relative to other options.
> Micropayments ... would pay per view.
Why is that a desireable objective?
Should, say, healthcare, education, or fire prevention be paid on a per-service basis, by those who receive those services directly? Why or why not? What are the consequences of such a payments system? How do those consequences change with different social (or urban) environments, or shape those environments.
Bonus: Look up Crassus. After you answer. Adjust accordingly, if you like.
> Digital goods aren't limited in granularity...
No, but attention is markedly finite. Purchase decisions are a high-attention action.
> Advertising ... "Tragedy of the Commons"
I'm generally familiar with advertising, and quite familiar with the Tragedy of the Commons. I don't see how these two go together.
If Google bought Patreon they could integrate it directly into YouTube, but Patreon isn't platform-specific. It's hard to get something that's platform independent like Patreon and have it also integrate well with all the different content platforms out there.
Youtube created a place where thousands of content creators were free to produce and generate a following while making a decent living. The issue of course is once Youtube fell, that ecosystem felt the pinch. Once again, we are seeing yet another issue with having a monopoly in a market.
People are spinning this as either incompetence of Youtube or the sheepish fears of advertizers, but I think the real story here is this serves as a good example when there isn't competition and there are a lack of alternate providers.
I recently started seeing some great YouTube musicians (Davie504, Pellek, etc) have to make videos to promote their Patreon due to sharp decline of revenue and I feel bad for them. Music production, especially for indie musicians, is very expensive (equipments, DAW plugins, hiring people to mix and master, etc). It's a very sad situation and a massive discouragement for YouTubers to keep up their video quality, in a long run, bad for YouTube as a content distribution platform.
I feel like YouTubers of this caliber should have a more direct relationship with YouTube and the advertisers. They should be able to agree to set specific points in videos for commercial breaks and have the commercial steam directly as part of the main content to avoid ad blocking.
It would help, but you don't have to....more and more people are treating YouTube like TV - I watch on my TV via Chromecast, laying down on the couch, if a commercial comes on, I'm not getting up to skip it, first because I'm too lazy, and second because a 30 second commercial now and then seems perfectly reasonable compared to the alternative.
It shouldn't work fully, the preference and power ads are given now is already way too much, which is why everyone is trying so hard to block them. Besides, there are things that can be done, such as, if the user seeks past a commercial point, they get a commercial and then the normal content resumes. I'm sure cable providers would love this evil power for their DVRs too but even normal people would flip out over that.
These creators are very smart and very good at what they do. But they lack the most basic understanding of why it is such a bad idea to create an entire business around something you cannot control.
Yes, there is that risk with anything you do (including your own website and your own email list), but surely by now they have heard enough people complain online that it is very unwise to build a tall building on a shaky foundation.
Aside: why don't they use competitors such as Vimeo and post the videos on Vimeo [1] first, and then post those same videos on YouTube after two weeks? If their audience is really that engaged, shouldn't they be following them to Vimeo also? It would be a two in one deal - the creators create competition between two online video services (which is usually good for them), and if more creators move away from YouTube the consumer also benefits from greater choice and is more likely to go check out Vimeo, leading to a possible virtuous cycle. A third and unexpected side benefit - less data collection about your online practices by an internet behemoth.
Easy to say you shouldn't put all your eggs in one basket, and who would disagree with you? But I think it is not saying very much. E.g. someone loses their job: "see, I told you it would have been better to work 2-3 jobs. You relied too much on your only job."
At some point you spread yourself too thin and it's better to concentrate on an ecosystem with a critical mass that actually cares about your content.
Do I feel bad about someone who built up a ghost hunting video empire on YouTube see their castle crumble as advertisering industry pivots on standards? Abstractly, no. But just compare the trending content on YouTube to Vimeo and try to imagine the likelyhood of the majority of your users inconveniencing themselves by introducing a rift in their YouTube subscription consumption flow. It's a stretch.
There are certainly other baskets, but none have been as nice and profitable, with as large a user base, as YouTube. So to say they should be using other platforms is great in theory, in reality they would just lose their followers. There are other platforms just as technically competent as YouTube. But I don't believe there is a replacement for the community and the brand YouTube has just yet.
It also stands to reason that if there were competition, and say half the users used one platform and half the other, that you would get half the viewers on each, the possibility for massive growth on either is smaller as more channels compete over fewer users. Even if you were on both, it would be harder. This is one of those situations where as a creator and a user, it would be nice if one monolithic platform just worked out well for everyone.
Remember when the major studios pulled out of their Netflix streaming contracts at the first possible opportunity? After all, they could have just stayed on Netflix, and it might have been this nice monolithic platform which could have worked well for everyone. At that time, their decision seemed not just stupid, but Netflix certainly tried to milk it by portraying the studios as being very evil. A few years down the line, you now have more choice, Netflix has improved without raising prices, and in general online video streaming has become a significant threat to another entrenched beast - cable TV.
People may not diversify their streams of income for a lot of reasons, but if you are a YouTube star, you already have some advantages which are extremely valuable:
1. You have already shown that you can wait for the months/years it takes to get to the point of becoming a star. That is time you could have instead invested (at least a portion of) in other platforms.
2. You are obviously tech savvy - or atleast savvy enough to get someone who is tech savvy to do the work for you
3. You are already in possession of a very valuable commodity - the attention of people who actually like you. Why don't you get people into your email list from your channel? Why don't you give them special incentives to take them out of YouTube (over which you have no control) into your website (where you have so much more control)?
>> Even if you were on both, it would be harder.
Derisking any business is hard. If anything, YouTube stars, who usually do not have additional constraints such as employee payroll, unsold inventory, a board to answer to, stock prices to take care of etc. should be able to add this derisking if they actually want a business.
> A few years down the line, you now have more choice, Netflix has improved without raising prices,
Netflix has raised prices[1]. They raised it from $8.99 to $9.99 (+11%) - they even scrapped the previously grandfathered $7.99 subscription from early adopters.
> E.g. someone loses their job: "see, I told you it would have been better to work 2-3 jobs. You relied too much on your only job."
It is a bad idea to rely too much on your job. You should have investments and multiple streams of income as soon as possible if you want anything resembling security.
The bottom line is that the platform is often stronger than the personality[1]. There are TV personalities/pundits etc who are fired from whatever network they were on for some misconduct, and even though they were a very popular draw on that network (i.e. platform), they often can't recreate that success elsewhere because they were dependent on ingrained user habits. Yes users care about differentiated content sometimes, but oftentimes the lowest friction thing wins out if it's "good enough".
If my user behavior habit is "go to youtube and check out what new videos are available from my subs", I'd only visit a non-youtube site if I'm really into that non-youtube content. Otherwise whatever comes up in the queue in a low friction manner is "good enough".
Some exceptions exist of course. Conan O'Brien would be a good example.
Because Vimeo sucks for the end user. Unless you're in a major metropolitan area, it's much slower than YouTube. Last time I checked it didn't remember the position in the video. With YouTube, I can start watching a video on my desktop and switch to my phone at some point - it would simply continue playing at the same point in the video and I don't have to wait (seek and time-before-playback-starts is awful with Vimeo).
YouTube is technically superior product and it's much easier to use. If Vimeo wants to attract users, they first need to get on par with YT.
> Last week, the company announced a slate of new ad-supported shows on YouTube, including projects with Ellen DeGeneres and Kevin Hart.
Gotta support "well behaved" brands and cut the small man out of the picture. Insipid low brow content that'll please advertiser is all these will be.
Sadly it seems certain parts of the internet are turning into cable...
Let's not even get started on the appalling support YouTube offers content creators when things go wrong. If you are not Coca Cola I guess you basically don't exists.
Shame bandwidth is such an expensive part of the video market, because Youtube deserves to have some stiff competition thrown at it.
Things like Patreon help offer alternatives but it could help with being better integrated into the platform.
You aren't entitled to money just because you post stuff on YouTube. Brands want to advertise on "insipid low brow content" specifically because it has mass appeal and caters to advertising. Nothing stops you, as a content creator, from finding your own advertisers.
There is a very strange mentality among YouTube creators that they are somehow "entitled" to have advertisers run ads on their channel and pay them.
Like you said, bandwidth is expensive. YouTube is already giving you something for free.
In reality, you don't get a choice about hosting your content on YouTube.
If you have something popular and hosted outside YouTube, someone will repost it to YouTube and you will lose the revenue as everybody goes that direction.
The problem is that Google subsidizes YouTube's bandwidth and sucks the oxygen out of the entire online video space.
Has nothing to do with youtube. This is the definition of a peer agreement. Basically each operator negotiates a price based on the traffic the agree to pass for the peer. In some cases, very large operators agree to pay nothing because they are passing essentially equal traffic.
So if google is spidering all over the internet, pulling pages from other networks, would having a service like YouTube which will most be traffic leaving google's network be a good way to balance that?
When a creator's videos go from making $700 per video to $150 per video, without being caused by any action on the creator's part, and without any kind of transparency from YouTube's part... I think they are absolutely justified to be concerned.
And that's what this article shows - concern. Concern about laying people off. Concern about having to find another job. Nobody's is acting like they're entitled to money, just concerned about the sudden changes they have no control or visibility into.
Of course they should be concerned. They should be concerned that their entire business model exists on the whims of a single company and proprietary technology stack. They were happy to live in ignorance of this problem for years and are now living with the consequences of that.
This describes every programmer who writes code for Apple, Windows, or even AWS, and a good portion of professional musicians, writers, songwriters, lawyers, etc.
A lot of creative professions are tied into a single point of failure, but what choice do they really have? Where else can a video content creator make a living wage? Or is your suggestion that they find a different job?
Microsoft and apple could disappear tomorrow and it would have zero immediate effect. It is an example of how regressive the app store model is and why we should have never allowed it.
As for what can be done about it, everything from hosting on multiple sites to self hosting so that you can't be censored by a corporate entity. And yes, it's an example of why centralizing services on something like AWS is a terrible idea.
But that's too hard, easier to just cry louder and continue to enable the behavior.
The content likely was not attractive for an advertisers to put an ad on in the first place and so revenues dropped the minute ad controls for advertisers were added. Google didn't really have a choice but to do this given the billions that were pulled. Will be interesting to see impact on AMJ quarter results.
That's our assumption. But all we can do is assume; nobody seems to have a way to verify those assumptions. It appears that the content creators can't even see what category their content has been assigned to, WRT advertisements, to make changes to regain their revenue.
Content creators are the ones feeling the pinch now, but we'll all be poorer in the long run.
There are specific issues, mostly regarding clarity with regard to demonetization. It's all automated, and there are lots of errors.
H3H3, for example, made the video "Christian moms against dabbing" as a test for ad-friendly content, but was demonetized because of the word "Christian" in the title. It was not a controversial video, actually quite light-hearted, but the algo still triggered.
The frustration you hear/read is that many creators do understand the advertiser issues, but find nevertheless find it difficult to work with YouTube's automated systems.
You need to understand the economic incentives in operation.
Advertisers and Google have a risk avoidance incentive. It doesn't matter if they pass up good ad friendly content. They definitely don't want to take a chance to put their brand in front of ad unfriendly content.
Now unlike television where ad inventory is limited, on the internet, it's a buyers market. Even if the advertiser passes on something potentially good, he can always find some other content to place on. Indeed what he is buying is actually access to the people watching content, not the content and since the same people on YouTube will probably watch other videos as well, why not de-risk by automatically screening out everything potentially controversial?
No. The problem isn't with advertisers wanting to avoid controversial videos. The problem is with YouTube's classification of what is controversial. Their definition of controversial does not match what advertisers think they're buying, partly because of the intractability of trying to classify the billions of videos on their platform in real-time.
And YouTube isn't entitled to thousands of people producing high quality content on a daily basis, just because they provided a means to do so. Nothing stops those same people from leaving for other platforms, and the number of people switching over to twitch.tv means that's already happening. Having a user hostile attitude and making life harder for small content creators is probably an unwise long term play for YouTube to make.
> Nothing stops you, as a content creator, from finding your own advertisers.
I thought YouTube had a specific prohibition against sponsored content they weren't getting a piece of? Product placement, "this video brought to you by"-style bumpers, etc?
JonTron and a number of other video content creators on YouTube are sponsored/brought to you by Audible or Audiobooks or some other name I can't actually remember because by the time they do that bit I've already closed the video (thankfully most of the creators do it at the end of their videos, not the start of them).
So I'm not sure that they do - maybe they prohibit turning on ads and "double dipping" the videos? But I've ran an adblocker for years so couldn't tell you if the "brought to you by ____" videos have ads or not.
> Gotta support "well behaved" brands and cut the small man out of the picture.
Not sure about the second half; doesn't a stable of "well behaved" brands make your platform a more palatable 'name' to advertisers generally? Any ads advertisers would buy because of this would run on the "small man"'s channels as well.
[Maybe a bit of a stretch—] this is more like 1940s America importing German nuclear physicists: you're taking eminent people from outside your society, and inviting them to consider themselves part of it, in the hope that their efforts will help save all the people who already were a part of it, even if it's just as a byproduct of those eminent people working to save themselves.
“The great promise of YouTube is the potential for this to be an important job, for there to be more professional, independent creators than coal miners in the U.S.,” Mr. Green said. “If we’re just going to remake TV and put all of the power to make money and distribute content back into the hands of a few people, then burn it all down.”
> Gotta support "well behaved" brands and cut the small man out of the picture. Insipid low brow content that'll please advertiser is all these will be.
YouTube is really weird, the whole reason I go there is to watch people who don't have TV shows. If YouTube turns into Jimmy Fallon clips, then why even have the website?
YouTube is being tempted by corporate money to turn it into another TV channel. But as soon as the only good content you can get is made by NBC or CBS, then why would people go to YouTube?
It's amazing that they seem to promote these TV shows when their own creators get pushed to the side. I mean, talk about bad business.
They should have the Jimmy Fallons on youtube, but why wouldn't you push your own creators? That's what makes youtube unique.
The small Youtube creators are the ones that should be protector and promoted by Youtube and it seems like it is the opposite. They are ones hurt the most by these changes to youtube's systems. It's like youtube just wants them to leave.
Look at how they treated their #1 overall channel. He freaking left for Twitch. Are you kidding me?
Presumably Pewdiepie (the largest channel by subscribers), but he's very much still posting to YouTube. Not sure what that's about.
Twitch, incidentally, banned IcePoseidon because he was doing IRL streams and attracting too much attention (getting threatened with guns) who moved to YouTube's streaming format.
Twitch and YouTube are looking more and more like a little proxy war for Google and Amazon.
The article underplays the success of Patreon in solving this problem; almost every video creator I follow has set up one. It's a win-win for both content creators and consumers.
I'm actually surprised more programmers/engineers have not set up a Patreon. (in disclosure, I have one set up, but have zero expectation of it replacing a full-time salary.)
One of my favorite OSS contributors in scala was recently asking on twitter if any companies would be interested in sponsoring him to spend a couple months working full time on issues on his OSS stuff. Lots of people responded asking for his patreon, enough that he went ahead and set one up[1].
It'll be interesting to see if this kind of thing continues.
My cousin is a YouTuber, and for him (and a few others) they follow a "Premium Content" model.
Their YouTube channel has free, ad supported content to develop an audience, and Patreon subscribers get that content ad-free, as well as extra content.
It's a decent model, but as I find myself watching more YouTube than Netflix/Hulu these days, I really wish this concept was supported by YouTube itself. They have YouTube Red, but that doesn't directly support my favorite YouTubers.
I think he's saying that he wants $X per month to be delivered directly to the content creator's bank account regardless of how many of that content creator's videos he watches. That's what Patreon does.
Twitch has a clearer subscriber model, I think. When you "subscribe", you're actually giving your actual real money to the channel. I'm not sure why YouTube doesn't have that. (Different horses for different courses, I guess. YouTube is more about the "1 billion people will watch this and some people will see an ad", versus "I know I like you, here's some money." Both can be profitable for everyone involved, but the models are very different. Scale vs. curation, or something.)
Only somewhat. As far as anyone can tell, because afaik Google hasn't come out and said precisely, all the money goes into a large pot and then the whole pot is split by the portion of minutes watched with Red that for each channel. ie in a simple case with two channels and 2 Red viewers if person A watches 20 minutes of channel A and person B watches 10 minutes of channel B in a month: A gets 2/3 of the pot and B gets 1/3.
At least that's what seems to be happening as far as I can see from the various articles written about it.
Given how a video has to be monitized by the creator (i.e. set up with ads) to get Red dollars as well, I'm curious if the changes to ad placement will have a knock-on effect for Red dollars as well...
It has the wrong model. The consumer isn't choosing what THEY want to support al-a-cart or even automatically based on what they watch. (Either of these would be good models for the consumer.)
The least regressive model would be for viewers to pay per time unit of video, say in 5 min blocks (round down) and probably with a decaying rate of compensation on a series per block of content produced (recovery time would probably vary depending on the popularity of the series, really popular things would recover more quickly, the producer should have some feedback from this metric).
That kind of a model avoids penalizing groups of content creators, having them compete against each other (other than for viewer time, which is unavoidable), and it reduces the advertiser influenced network effect of more popular creators being over-paid compared to more niche / rising creators.
In 2008, Kevin Kelly theorised that a successful creative person only needs a few thousand true fans to have a successful career. If that small group of fans are willing to throw you $20 for a book or a t-shirt or a CD every year, you can make a middle-class income. You don't need to be a star, you don't need the backing of a record label or a publisher or a movie studio.
While initially promising, this theory didn't seem to bear out in practice. Many creative people replied that the numbers just didn't add up. Margins are too thin, expenses are too high, promotion is too difficult. Unless you're absurdly lucky, you can't make a decent living without access to a mass audience via the traditional media.
Patreon seems to be the technology that brings this theory to life. A huge variety of creative people now have a regular, sustainable income thanks to their Patreon subscribers. If you can find 1000 people willing to throw you an average of $5 a month, you're earning more than the median US household. With those subscribers paying your bills, your merch sales and ad revenue and whatever else are just gravy. It's SaaS for creatives - recurring revenue always trumps one-off sales.
Big advertisers don't want to give money to indipendent content creators, because they are a lot of people and much more difficult to control since they own themselves and are not owned by corporations.
Think about the reaction pewdiepie had after being dropped by disney. If he was a tv star it would have meant the end of his career. Instead it was just a big "meh" and moving on.
Tv networks are easy to control. Networks are often owned indirectly/in part by the very same people who ask for the ad space.
It is not about the value of the ad, it's about not giving too much power to normal people and risk too much decentralization. Having so much voices it's bad, globalist billionaires and corporations risk losing an amount of control over population they don't want to lose, also because they often crave total domination, both in politics and in the markets.
I know this could be difficult to understand, because many of us are sane people and don't crave that kind of power. It's difficult to put ourselves in the shoes of the people with the very big money, but they really do think in term of having absolute power and control (in fact they did get there).
They think "okay, those people have an audience, they make people I can easily control lose the audience, I need a solution", and they do it immediately. Instead it's difficult to us to imagine being so big and rich, and yet feeling treatened by some kids on youtube. It looks crazy to us, but that's really how they think.
Yet that's how corps and billionaires often thinks, because they have a complete different mindset from normal people.
Of course I could be completely wrong, it's just an opinion, no math involved so can't really prove it. Use your gut.
There is going to be a huge push for invite-only creator-centric platforms like LinusTechTips' Float Plane. YouTube should have developed something like this instead of YouTube Red ages ago.
Yeah Float Plane Club is already working and they're trying to make a proper website and have some friends partner with them.
Youtube made a tip jar where people (from a select list of countries) could tip a creator whatever they liked but they scrapped it before ever making the feature international.
Everyone hopes they do well but that project its going to crash and burn big time or stay as another patreon, because what makes YouTube great is the huge device compatibility it already has with several platforms, i can't be the only one watching YouTube on my TV rather than my smartphone, tablet or PC.
I exclusively watch it on my TV. I find it funny when they will talk about information at the bottom, or click the links on the video which assumes a less passive device than the TV. I've been subscribed to You Tube Red for quite some time now as well.
There is no lose scenario for LTT re:Float Plane, just a less monumental one.
They've released early-access subscription-based material before through the defunct Vessel platform (which exited successfully via buy-out). Now they're building that platform themselves for their audience.
Whether they can expand it successfully to other creators is another question, but I see no reason why they wouldn't...
> His firm recently conducted a survey of 100 YouTube creators and said that channels focused on comedy and gaming experienced the sharpest drops in revenue last month compared with February. At the same time, creators in food, beauty and fashion, and family and parenting had increases. YouTube shares ad revenue with creators, who keep more than half.
I'm wondering it this is just a coincidence, or whether Youtube are trying to shift advertisers to these "family friendly" channels, and away from anything that might cause controversy.
Ad rates on the internet go in only one direction: down. They're OK to bootstrap your "brand" but you'd better start looking for alternate revenue sources immediately, whether that's merch, Patreon, whatever.
A channel I watch recently mentioned the reason it has been posting more often (at expense of quality) is that YT algorithm heavily punishes infrequent uploads.
You have to post frequently and build a community to be successful now.
As a consumer this is what irks me the most. YouTube is forcing indie creators to make content at a scale and rate they just can't live up to leaving larger productions (from tv) to migrate into this "new market" and the end-game is that if youtube is just TV, then this discussion is a resounding "no thanks"
No matter what kind of business you’re in, it’s wise to diversify your sources of revenue. YT’s ad-focused monetization model disservices a variety of creators for a variety of reasons, many of which are mentioned in this NYTimes article.
Fan patronage in the likes of what Vidme (disclaimer: I’m a co-founder) and Patreon are offering help creators diversify their revenue streams and make content for their fans, rather than to please advertisers.
Google and Facebook aren’t well incentivized to offer this kind of model on platform because they can make considerably more money allocating resources towards optimizing ad revenue. Hunter Walk, an ex YT employee turned investor, writes about this in this blog post: https://hunterwalk.com/2017/03/26/why-were-paying-for-conten...
A lot of the videos being demonetized don't seem any worse than what's on daytime TV. It will be interesting to see if Twitch can capitalize on this and start offering more options for non-live content. There already seems to be some youtubers moving to streaming on there to try and diversify.
Youtube in general seems very poorly run lately. The app on my phone right now won't play videos unless I update or wait 30 seconds. Who okayed that? You might as well just tell me to fuck off. I'd happily use something worse out of spite at this point. "Don't be evil, but really annoying is ok"
Where are people getting that youtubers are undevalued? There are some really dumb channels out there where people are making $10k a month, easy from a few million views, with maybe one person helping them. There are many, many salty people out there that they are losing money because they don't know how to adjust to YouTube's algorithm changes. Sure, there may be some changes to advertising & some people may claim to 'leave' the platform, but the reality is, they make money. People just don't realize how much, even if many people out there have adblockers enabled.
Why hasn't "Twitch but for {food, cars, cosmetics, etc.}" cannibalized youtube yet? Twitch was basically a row boat that cut off Google's battleship by firing a nerf gun across its bow. And they won. And they got acquired for billions. Their product is great, I've learned a fair bit of design and function just by looking at it.
I suppose gaming has a large user base that is quick to download and try new tech. It also has a way of slow "dopamine dripping" its audience into spending countless hours of viewership. Does this not exist in other genres?
YouTube specifically didn't like dealing with copyright complaints from video game makers. People posting game streams got sick of their videos being taken down from YouTube, and moved to Twitch. I don't see food or cosmetics having similar pain points on the platform that would make room for a competitor.
I wonder if the opacity and significantly less money coming from YouTube (YT) here is a bit of "Headline bad - Bottom line pad"
i.e. When a business encounters a major problem like this, fix the problem ASAP but also use these opportunities to try to add new profits (another example of how this works: when Uber faced criticism about driver background checks they used the negative publicity to add a $1.50 "safe ride fee" to every ride)
Q: Could enough YT stars with 7 and 8 figure subscriber counts band together and move to a different platform or get staked by a well-funded new startup to create a YT competitor site?...In theory sure anyone can try to compete with a google product...but how realistic is this here? And if it's not realistic then YT can cut the % it has been paying content creators and get away with it.
I have no clue if ad revenue $ will return to previous levels for YT content creators. I hope so. But I wouldn't be surprised if YT used this opportunity to change how it has been doing things and grab a bigger piece of the ad money profit pie at stake. Either way this is a fascinating story: on one hand YT has almost a monopoly when it comes to this kind of monetized online video content. On the other hand, YT is dependent on a pyramid of quite powerful content creators to maintain the very monopoly they are subject to.
It's crazy to me how nobody, even the (usually remarkably candid) Youtube stars themselves, acknowledge that this story is mostly about ad fraud. I would expect people to be hush-hush about this in a normal industry, but Youtube creators are usually really good about incisive analysis and being open with their audience. Do they themselves not know?
What fraud are you referring to? The type where ads are reported as clicked, but advertisers don't see the user come to their site, or the type where influencers don't tag when they've been paid to promote a product?
Create content that a half a million people find interesting enough to subscribe to to earn $72k/yr -- easier to make a website/service/app that does that.
Let's not forget YouTube relies on these people too. Yes, YouTube has near monopoly in the area right now, but there can always be changes. These influencers can bring a new site overnight 500k new users if they want to.
And the whole advertisers don't like that content is stupid and complicated. I can't remember the name but some popular guy made series about serial killers, no NSFW pictures but probably something you wouldn't your kids watch. Most of his videos were banned completely. Yet we have a shitload of rap music that sings literally about killing people making money with big brands. Go figure. This song gives me nice Amazon.com ads: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJwKKKd2ZYE
I'm really hoping for YouTube (Google) vs. Twitch (Amazon) competition. YouTube is clearly moving into Twitch's market, and there are signs that Twitch is looking to expand into non-streaming content.
Classic HN comment. Only education-focused content is of value. There is no value in entertainment, especially when it is for children and plebs. When they get off work, why don't they view the science videos instead of lowly clickbait?
There are reasons those videos exist, get off your god damn high horse komali2.
Because I can't reply to your "correction" of my English in the relevant thread anymore, I'm telling you here:
You don't know what fop means; you just typed into google and looked at the first dictionary definition to come up. Look it up better this time, and don't (pettily) correct people unless you actually know what you're talking about imo.
There's also a reason why we've got a president who blatantly lies and yet half the country can't be bothered to do a simple fact check.
So no, don't get off your high horse. Encourage everyone you know to spend more time educating themselves for entertainment and less time wasting away watching pointless drivel - whether it's on YouTube or broadcast tv.
If you find people encouraging you to better yourself through scientific education "intrusive and annoying", you need to take a long hard look in the mirror. Quite frankly I'm not even sure why you'd participate on this site other than to troll.
yep, definitely intrusive and annoying - I don't need other people telling me how, in their opinion, I need to better myself. What an incredibly dumb comment.
You mean YouTube's decision to allow advertisers not to be on your channel if they didn't want to? Surely advertisers should have that choice, right? That's what caused you to lose money, not any executive decision by YouTube. And this comment is probably dead because of the out of context advertisement for your channel.
Many of them are highly influential amongst their viewers and have more views than your average mid-tier TV show. Youtube also offers much better insight in the audience than TV channels ever can achieve.
And yet, the content creators need to rely on Patreon and selling merchandise to pay for their expenses.
I'm not saying all of them are struggling, in some niches (for example cosmetics) YouTube creators are known to make a pretty hefty buck in sponsorship deals, but the majority is highly undervalued.
Alejandro Salomon recently talked about this in his podcast [1], since this phenomenon is especially true in the automotive sector.
[1] https://youtu.be/fcIgvYzSFm4?t=1936
edit: typo