https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/products/google-preferred/
> Google Preferred aggregates YouTube's top content into easy-to-buy packages for brand advertisers. Brands access the top 5% of content on YouTube and receive the measurement results they need to maximize the impact of their campaigns.
I'm not disagreeing with you, but just because you don't like something doesn't mean there's not a huge audience for people like PewDiePie, especially among the younger demographic - which still spends money, and which is a constantly-replenishing spring.
EDIT: And PewDiePie won't disappear. He provides the perfect wish fulfillment for kids that would love to stay in their bedrooms and be paid to play videogames all day long.
Maybe if YT wasn't so fixated on ad revenue it wouldn't be missing out on a huge potential market.
- people who will never earn more than this off youtube, but aren't motivated by earning money.
- people who are currently earning less than this, and are motivated by money but are on a trajectory to quickly exceed 1000 subscribers. they'll be minimally affected.
- people who are currently earning less than $100/yr, but are motivated by money and are unlikely to exceed 1000 subscribers anytime soon. If they're actively working to grow their channel but can't break 1000 subscribers, losing them is probably for the best.
I don't see how this is going to really harm youtube's content pool.
- There are people who just need to do some work and get out of their house and aren't motivated by earning money.
- There are those who make it their career and want to work up the chain. They will be minimally affected.
- There are those who are part time and but can't make it into full time any time soon. Let's hypothesize that they're not actively trying to be the best workers so let's just get rid of them. No harm done.
That sounds like a pretty scary world.
I remember when Google was known for actually thinking things through.
"The YouTube Partner Program (YPP) lets creators monetize their content on YouTube. Creators can earn money from advertisements served on their videos and from YouTube Red subscribers watching their content."
And in order to apply for YPP you just try to enable Monetization per: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/72857#apply
The two (YPP and Monetization) seem to be the same thing?
If YouTube monetizes only a few big channels it becomes much easier to track political content manually.
[1] https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/youtube-hate-preachers-sh...
So what is their aim? The only thing I can frame it as is a power play. Advertisers working together to collectively ensure they have more strict control on what they can be advertised on has the nice side effect of them getting to decide the fate of many companies dependent on advertising for revenue. If a company acts in a way contrary to the interests of advertisers, they thus gain the ability to destroy that company. Similarly, it allows them to elevate companies that further their interests. Put another way, I wouldn't expect a documentary detailing the behaviors of Coca-Cola in South America or Nestle's behaviors... anywhere... to see much in the way of funding. But a documentary detailing healthy at any size? That's some advertiser worthy content.
However, in the long-run the challenge is enabling the transition from small to big. Doing one without the other would be quite short-term thinking from YouTube - they would massively disincentivise the new users who become next year's big channels. I haven't seen many platforms both care and execute on this.
Advertisers don't have a choice - they need YouTube. YouTube could easily dictate this relationship. They choose not to.
They could but if you look at 2017, the stuff YouTube got in trouble from advertiser for is the stuff they got in trouble for from large segments of the public or the media. YouTube doesn't want to take a stand forcing advertisers to accept PewDiePie's Hitler jokes, some guy making fun of feminism, or Logan Paul filming suicide victims. If they do, they'll get destroyed by the media and advertisers will leave anyway.
Internet culture is taking over the mainstream, demonetisation of edgier content might have a shortterm effect of restricting content, but ultimately, it's unlikely to stop the cultural shift - people want edgier humor, and if it's popular enough it will eventually appear on Twitch, Vimeo or elsewhere.
Brands are happy to be associated with edgy humor if Jimmy Kimmel is producing it: check out the examples on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pj8n78AuN3w. They'll soon be comfortable if a YouTube equivalent is doing the same.
Youtube's problem as I see it is differentiation. Howard Stern was "edgy" for his time, similar to how some Youtube producers are "edgy". Yet he has no problem attracting advertisers as far as I know (Googling suggests his radio rates in particular were quite high). But it seems like it was/is much easier in traditional advertising to say "I [do / do not] want to advertise with Howard Stern" then it is to say "I [do / do not] want to advertise with PewDiePie". That's really the crux of the problem as I see it, it flat out sounds like Youtube can't do targeted marketing very well (a ding made more painful considering this is the success story of Google Search). Heck, "I do not want to advertise for ISIS recruitment videos" seemed to be a request Youtube couldn't fulfill for a while.
I don't think "edgy" in itself is a problem to many advertisers per se (except for certain step-over-the-line moments) and I agree with you that Youtube is tackling things in a way too crude manner.
It doesn't help that there are apologizers who spread the idea that YouTube is somehow targeting "the bad stuff", when that is a very small fraction of what is happening. Everyone focuses on the sensationalist garbage reported by the media; meanwhile all the small channels that are playing by the rules are being left out to dry.
Health insurance can be divided into the healthy-young-professional-who-pay-premium-and-never-get-sick package and the old-sick-people-costing-us-money package. Now one group is subsidizing the other and the premium the sick people package would have paid is so shit it makes the current premium look like winning the lottery. What to do? Drop the weakest performers.
Airlines make most of their money from first class which is essentially subsidizing all coach tickets? What to do? Just get rid of the average rider.
Politician X spent 1.2B$ campaigning for presidency and most of that money didn't come from private citizens? Now you have a rich voter coalition and a normal citizen coalition and the new normal citizens' influence on politicians would be so shit that the current resemblance to democracy start to look like normal citizens winning the lottery. What to do? Just get rid of universal suffrage.
Is this meant to be a revelation to anyone? Well back in 2007 when ads started appearing it became clear YouTube's remit has shifted. It was a transition that was perhaps fully realised by 2012, when they began to pay out in view hours.
I'm sure they're hoping fervently that this plan leads to more lucrative ad deals considering how knife-edge YouTube's chance at profitability has always seemed.
All the small creators also saturate the search space with all kind of topics and content, which drives people naturally via suggestions to the larger channels with fat advertisers, so the benefit is twofold.
Bet they did the math and they still come on top for now, but social are quite generational and live off the network effect, so there's that.
It will be interesting to see the shift in the suggestion algorithm since so many more videos will be non-monetized.
Any YouTube video that currently shows an ad, the uploader has chosen to do so in order to make money from it.
I have no monetization enabled for my account and still get text ads because of that.
Or to one of the other sites.
Lets face it most of the stuff on YT has very little ad revenue.
Plus Amazon purchased Twitch and then removed the app from the Roku which does not help grow the platform.
https://www.cordcuttersnews.com/amazon-pulls-twitch-channel-... Amazon Pulls Their Twitch Channel from Roku - Cord Cutters News
What do you mean by "trend-chasing and reputation"? I really want to understand this point, but I'm not seeing why an advertiser would care if their ad was shown once on 10 small videos, rather than 10 times on 1 big video. Do advertisers specifically ask for the most possible impressions on the least number of videos?
All of the above dread showing up next to eg some jackass going to a suicide forest and showing a dead person for kicks. Showing ads primarily against bigger videos means youtube has a chance to check the content. ie so-called brand safety.
See how the ad industry views the changes:
http://www.adweek.com/digital/youtube-is-finally-addressing-...
Which does fall down somewhat when the jackass going to a suicide forest is one of the biggest creators (estimated 4th highest paid in 2017) -and- was a Preferred Partner.
> means youtube has a chance to check the content
Sure but they apparently approved his suicide forest video.
https://www.polygon.com/2018/1/9/16869430/youtube-logan-paul...
"[...] YouTube moderation team had reviewed Paul’s video and deemed it acceptable."
No, the thing is advertisers do not want their brands associated with thing x. YouTube already has automated classifiers for demonetization. This is recognition that these classifiers do not work - from the side of advertisers.
Google could tell them "deal with it" and they'd probably oblige. The manual side was Google Preferred program.
That watershed moment is what caused YouTube to develop the whole demonetization algorithim in the first place
They want whatever is IN. Whatever is BIG. Whatever is the most POPULAR.
It's all about "big names" swirling around the community. "Have you heard of X?" Because "discovering X" and getting a big deal makes you famous.
"Driving profits up 3% over last quarter" is not what a hot shot maverick does. It's not cool.
So finding tens/hundreds/thousands of smaller (but successful!) channels isn't popular. Humans can't process that easily. And when it comes to impressing your boss in that industry, you want bite-size chunks. You want the next Macklemore, not 30 amazing electrical-engineering channels.
Didn’t Google crush their directory of vetted content model because they were able to give users what they actually wanted?
Youtube is. their official email explicitly says those changes are for the creators and that they were reached after discussions with said creators.
it's another PR shitfest like only google can do.
edit: ironically, it doesn't solve their content problem. which is advertisers buying into the expensive platinum package and their top content creator saying something racist and sexist.
The advertising industry is hardly a small market; are you arguing that billions of dollars in profit opportunities are just lying there untaken simply because the industry operates on trends? What's stopping the nerds from taking this money?
I think it's more likely that the ad industry simply knows what a liability those small channels present; your product could be associated with all manner of odious content, and YouTube has thus far failed to exclude that at scale.
But nah man that's the old way of doing things.
Still, getting paid something is better than getting paid nothing, right?
YouTube is renting out billboards at a music festival, and the advertisers, predictably, want to know who's playing. "Well, I dunno, like, whoever shows up" has proven to be an answer that they can't get away with. YouTube's negotiating position with advertisers depends on how they can position their package of advertising space. Right now they're trying to sell a big bundle of uncertain providence, with loads of little no-namers mixed in with the heavy hitters.
But what can YouTube do? If they split it up, they now have a gold package, a silver package, and a shit package. The rates for the shit package would be so bad that current YouTube revenue starts to look like winning the lottery. The smallest channels are subsidised by the bigger ones, not in terms of views but in terms of reputation. So if you need to improve the reputation of the group, what's left to do but drop the weakest performers?
If you're thinking "but that's totally illogical! Smaller channels collectively contribute an enormous number of very valuable advertising impressions", you're right, but making the same mistake YouTube did. The advertising industry isn't logical, it's 18 layers of ticket-clippers and con men playing telephone with money. It doesn't run on economically rational real-time bidding systems, it runs on trend-chasing and reputation. That other stuff is just to keep the nerds happy.
So, like in every other field Goophabet has entered, the techno-utopianism lasts right up until it hits the balance sheet. Party's over, folks. YouTube is an advertising company and now it's realising it has to act like one.