Here's a reddit thread from 8 months ago
https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/5z4pww/whats_...
or a tv report on how its being called out on twitter 4 months ago
http://wgntv.com/2017/07/26/elsagate-hashtag-calling-attenti...
A lot of what monetisation did was encourage spam, or content quality just above the spam threshold. Meanwhile, patreon (though obviously which a much smaller footprint) seems to encourage the kind of content youtube should want to encourage.
What I meant by just above the spam threshold is just a mishmash of content thoughtlessly cut together to match a keyword result, game the "up next" suggestion engine and/or draw clicks through shameless clickbait.
Hope you're learning to enjoy cable TV again, folks!
People like Philip Defranco, while still pointing out the damage YouTube is doing to the ecosystem, monetize outside of YouTube to maintain control of their product. If the people you watch don't have a Patreon / Sponsors / merch, they are willingly submitting to the YouTube monetization algorithm. It feels kind of entitled to want to get money from YouTube ads, but not produce content that those advertisers are willing to place ads on.
No, YouTube takes a cut of their ad revenue. YouTube isn't a charity, it's a business.
> It feels kind of entitled to want to get money from YouTube ads, but not produce content that those advertisers are willing to place ads on.
Advertisers historically haven't really cared much about language. This whole mess was triggered by ads on a terrorist video iirc.
YouTube lets anyone upload videos to their site for free. All of the ad revenue is theirs, as they have the direct relationships with the advertisers. They give content creators a cut of YouTube's ad revenue, not the other way around. When creators manage their own connections to advertisers (sponsors, native, merch) YouTube doesn't get a cut.
Yes, YouTube doesn't charge you to upload a video.
> All of the ad revenue is theirs, as they have the direct relationships with the advertisers.
All of the money goes _through_ YouTube but it doesn't belong to YouTube. There's a (formal, legal) agreement between YouTube and creators that predetermines how much of that revenue belongs to YouTube and how much belongs to the creator.
Yes, that is the cut that they give the creator. Not the cut that they take from the creator. Advertisers are not talking to hundreds of thousands of creators, they're talking to YouTube. They give YouTube money and YouTube places advertisements on videos. The value that YouTube provides is necessarily greater than the portion of the advertising revenue they keep, otherwise creators would host their videos on their own sites / DailyMotion / Vimeo. And some creators do host on those sites, because they've decided that they aren't getting more value out of YouTube than elsewhere, that's a decision they're always free to make.
My understanding is that YouTube sells billions of dollars of advertising against this content and keeps quite of bit of that money for themselves.
Of course, this is not a super close analogy, because you wouldn't be gaining anything by giving me a lunch.
I think a closer analogy might be barter, maybe? Or, here is an odd analogy that might fit fairly well, but which maybe goes against the point I was trying to make:
If one person wants to interact with a pet dog, because they like dogs, and another person wants their pet dog to be taken care of for a while, so the first person agrees to take care of the other person's dog for a while. This case does seem to capture a fair bit of what is happening, but it seems like it makes sense to call it "for free".
Here is a variation on that idea though, which seems a little closer, but a bit less clear cut:
What if the person who is taking care of the dog for a while also said that they were going to enter the dog in a dog show (and that maybe if they got prize money they might share it with the dog owner), and that the owner of the dog was pleased by this idea. This would be a quite strange situation, so maybe intuition based on this example might not be the best guide to other things, but my intuition in this case is that it seems like it seems a bit more strange to say that they are doing this for free, though it would still be technically true.
(The dog show is analogous to showing the video(the dog) to other people, and the prize money is analogous to ad revenue, in case that wasn't clear.)
I don't know.
In the firearms/gun rights communities, it seems like the prevailing opinion is that YouTube is specifically targeting them based on political bias.
I've not really considering it much, but your comment makes me wonder if their issues are part of a much larger pattern.
No IKEA doesn't want to put an ad under your video of your daughter's first AR-15.
I used to think the NRA was nuts, then I saw that there's no negotiating with the other side. Gun owners only stand to lose, and have consistently had their rights destroyed. If they didn't have a persecution complex, they wouldn't be paying attention.
They absolutely have not, and this formulation illustrates the extreme positioning that the NRA has fostered for you to adopt.
If you think the NRA stands for gun owners' rights more than the profits of the manufacturers, explain their response to the Philando Castile murder.
The only NRA response I found echos what I first thought. Gun pointed at you? Don't move a single bit unless exactly directed. I figured that out in real-time, because I'm not going to trust some stressed out cop to stay chill. Particularly more if I appeared to be part of the highest crime demographic. It's still unfortunate and the cop should have had more training perhaps. But I guess I'm falling for propaganda.
That's because they like to be victims. It's all about the narrative.
If you look around you see this happening broadly. You see a lot of people concerned about it who don't even mention politics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lauren_Southern
> Lauren Southern (/ˈsʌðərn/; born 16 June,[3] 1995) is a Canadian far-right political activist, book author, and internet personality associated with the alt-right.[4][5][6] In 2015, Southern ran as a Libertarian Party candidate in the Canadian federal election. She worked for The Rebel Media, a far-right online media company based in Canada, until leaving in March 2017.
She also tried to physically prevent refugee rescuers with a far right "identitarian" group
Now she doesn't sound so innocent and the reason for YT decision seems pretty clear and uncontroversial
Conservatives love to push the idea that they were targeted purely for being conservative. Look at the reaction around Damore, for example. It's all about how conservatives are being oppressed, how you can't trust the media and tech because they hate conservatives.
People also need to realize that the alternative is massive amounts of ad dollars simply being removed from YouTube altogether. The demonetization drive came from advertisers' outrage over the lack of control over where their ads appear. Without the demonetization push, they start pulling out en masse and everyone loses out.
They're effectively sacrificing an entire genre (Gaming) at the alter of advertisers. A great way to lose the very content that brings advertisers and viewers to the platform in the first place.
Some serious double think right there.
What a shitty fucking law.
Fast? People have been complaining about this for ages.
https://www.theverge.com/2017/2/20/14489052/youtube-kids-vid...
ElectroBoom: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjN3j0jZirs
Abroad In Japan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5lMM160etI
AvE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSxgn0_yU-8
Neistat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZakJFqdpRY
Philip DeFranco: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOa6PA8XQtQ
Sid Alpha: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pe5eODFxwy0
Reddit has a lot more examples https://www.reddit.com/r/all/search?q=demonetized&sort=top
But Google doesn't want to risk the PR nightmare of admitting that they no longer want 99% of their userbase poisoning the well for the 1%, so they use pretexts like demonetizing content to encourage them to go elsewhere.
It's probably not true, but Google either seems to be fantastically inept or malicious at this point, when it comes to their interactions with content creators and their UX.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/17/arts/youtube-broadcasters...
http://www.tubefilter.com/2017/05/04/how-youtube-adpocalypse...
It started when some big advertisers made waves about their ads being placed on "extremist" videos on YouTube. Some quit Google's network at the time, too. To beg them back, Google essentially started removing anything that might upset those big advertisers. Like anything at all.
The "demonetization" actually came a bit later when there was backlash against those removals from users, so it was Google's way to "compromise". It wouldn't remove the more "sensitive" (but not extremist) videos, but it would demonetize them without much thought.
There is actually a really simple solution here that nobody wants to talk about.
DO NOT MONETIZE YOUR VIDEO
It's probably the only thing they can do, but it really is an awful way to treat people who should be your partners.
https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/7b3v93/12million_s...
Gives you some good insight on where their priorities are.