The problem is the economics won't be any better anywhere else. Youtube is the way it is because of all the many stakeholders (viewers responding to clickbait, politicians, copyright holders, bad actors etc). Any other platform would eventually have the same problems and either cave into them, or be sued into oblivion.
As for the ad-related issues Youtube isn't profitable, and it's clear people aren't yet willing to pay for it.
The reason for "Repackage scenes from movies, previews, upload documentaries, sports clips" is because that's what people want to view quite simply. Those videos have millions of views.
Youtube certainly could do a lot better, but you have to at least understand the factors that pour into why it's struggling. Managing communities is hard. Managing a platform where 300 hours of video are uploaded every minute is very hard.
YouTube content creators have responded to the flaws in this model by choosing a better one: one where advertisers pay them directly; they put the ad directly into the video; and YouTube isn't involved.
The production side of this alternate relationship is a big hassle, though; it's like it's the 1930s again, when the actors in soap operas would stop to advertise soap.
It'd be very easy to build a "middle way" where the platform handles inserting the ad creative into the video, and handles payment processing between the advertiser and the content-creator, and even captures view metrics to allow the advertiser visibility into their spend—but where the platform doesn't decide which advertisements run on which videos (with that instead being entirely up to the advertiser and the content creator to schedule between themselves.)
Yes, insofar as Google is an ad-tech company, that distributed-ad-auction is their business model's secret sauce/moat, and I'm suggesting they just throw it away. But in this case, the "tech" part of ad-tech is precisely what's killing YouTube as a monetizable platform. Content creators just need ads, not ad-tech.
And I don't see how this middle way is any better for most YouTubers anyways. The reason some YouTubers get demonetized is that advertisers don't want to show ads on certain types of content. If advertisers don't want to show ads on a video through YouTube, they probably won't want to do that through this third party service either. For large YouTubers it can certainly help (which is why they are already doing it) since advertisers can seek out large YouTubers who have a fanbase matching their requirements, but I don't see how it helps in general.
With current YouTube, any fees paid in by advertisers are theirs to do with as they like, and payment-of-content-creators is just a nice thing that YouTube happens to do, but can not-do on a whim with no ill effects. "Revenue from advertisers" and "expenses paying out content-creators" are two entirely independent lines on their balance sheet.
In this alternate model, the money they would receive from advertisers would now be a liability on their balance-sheet, something owed (except for the fraction taken as fee) to the content creator, just as if it was money in a savings account they were holding for the content-creator.
Its those creators that have the most to gain at an alternate site, the restrictions of youtube are all downsides, and they receive no money directly from it, the only real upside youtube offers is audience reach.
"$0.25 to $4" $ per thousand views -- https://techwiser.com/how-much-can-you-make-from-youtube/
huh, I would not have guessed that. But I also have no concept of how much a few million views is for a typical content creator.
Go full time crushing things with an hydraulic press? Yes! Go full time discussing medieval weapons? Yes! Go full time building things with no tools from scratch in the woods? Yes! Go full time trying to beat Super Mario as fast as possible? Double yes! And so on.
My point is, this revenue is more than enough for interesting content to be produced, content that would never exist without this kind of monetization scheme. It might not be the best model for high end documentaries or movies, but it works for a different set of content which is still highly sought after.
A common fallacy in business.
> Go full time crushing things with an hydraulic press? Yes! Go full time discussing medieval weapons? Yes! Go full time building things with no tools from scratch in the woods? Yes! Go full time trying to beat Super Mario as fast as possible? Double yes! And so on.
They're not that much a weird niche really. Go to any large university and there's probably a club full of people who discuss medieval weapons full time. Actually there's probably at least two (one that's more purist in terms of historical accuracy, and another that's more focused on fun), then there's probably also a fencing club, a kendo club, maybe a HEMA club, dozens of gaming groups.
And it's not like it's not niche that isn't served by TV. There's plenty of documentary / infotainment series on medieval weapons and combat. There's serious series. There's Deadliest Warrior. Youtube often gets viewers because it's a different format, not because it's serving a very weird niche. Cheap, regular content (and often the comment box keeps creators a bit more honest), suggested next episode, more talky, short episodes.
As for those other examples, there's Mythbusters (smash stuff!), survival shows (primitive technology in a different format). Gaming is the only really odd one - it just isn't shown on TV much.
The ad-supported internet has turned to garbage. The academic and hobbyist internet is fine, and not that much different from the old days. The governmental internet depends a lot on where you are, but .gov.uk is really rather good, and vastly better at what it does than snailmail and Post Offices were in the old days.
YouTube, and dreams of monetization, have infected the hobbyist internet too. I am active in some niche travel hobbies. It used to be that people in this subculture would write detailed text blogs with tips about various routes and definitions. Now, people think video is the default medium for sharing one’s information, and so they make YT videos that have lots of whizbang effects and GoPro shots but aren’t very information-dense. You have to sit through many minutes (or up to an hour) of a guy stuttering “Uh... So...” to eventually glean details that might help you. It sucks. For a while the people who made these videos would also spam Reddit and specialist forums with links, clearly interested in the prospect of monetizing, but now everyone seems to understand that YT is not a reliable path to financial success.
The decline of text blogging is also partly Google’s fault, in that lots of hobbyist blogs are now excluded from search results even if you try to search for the exact terms you know are found in the blog entry.
Maybe one day there will be a platform that makes following blogs as convenient as following youtubers
There was such a platform: the RSS ecosystem. Unfortunately, Google managed to attract something like 80% of the market to its offering, Google Reader, and then it shut Google Reader down, which basically killed off RSS. RSS does remain today, but it is a shadow of what it once was.
Interesting; I wasn't aware of that. Do you know whether alternative search engines like DDG have the same problem?
How people decided to default on the absolutely least effective medium for doing this is beyond me, but oh yeah, I’ve seen this.
For me it’s a clear sign of worthless content not worth my time.
If it’s not text, I’m not going to consume it. EOT.
Old days: random cool stuff, sea of garbage, impossible to find anything.
Middling days: random cool stuff, sea of garbage, Google!
Now: random cool stuff, sea of garbage, impossible to find anything.
It’s still gotten easier to put things on the Internet than ever before. There are still even more hobbyist sites than ever. Google hasn’t actively rolled those things back, it’s just taken us back to the garbage fire of the old days.
I called the agency, they said, "You should print out the PDF, fill that out and bring it to our office."
Can you believe that?? There aren't enough programmers to make the .gov stuff work right because FAANG is buying them all. So, I'm not sure you are right on that.
There are enough. There certainly are in the US and likely so other places. It's that government often pays peanuts compared to private sector and adds poor management and poor advancement prospects on top.
If people aren't willing to work for you because your working conditions suck, it might be worth considering better ones.
I agree with you. This is just a huge side conversation.
Also, there is a TON of great educational content on youtube produced by governments. Google won't show me those videos on web pages at the government website, but they'll show me the youtube video with ads on it.
Secondhand anecdotes recount fistfights in the office and the unfireable-until-the-election official viewing porn during working hours and continually infecting their desktop and the intranet with malware.
You should also look at volunteering with Code for America.
The joke is they can easily pay a contractor 150$/hour though. But can’t pay an employee hourly wage of 100$/hour
You disregard ebay but ebay actually has economic alignment with its sellers. The buyer experience isn't as good as Amazon's, but the seller experience is better in that you can control your destiny more.
But this apparently makes it a flea market?
There's going to be a tradeoff between curation and producer freedom. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
First, Amazon's fees were higher (not sure if that's still the case). When you're selling low margin items, like I was, it was nearly not worth it. Second, the way I was grouped with similar sellers was madness. I had multiple returns because my item didn't match the picture. Well, considering Amazon used someone else's image and description on the listing, that makes sense.
eBay was many times better for selling items. I was able to use my images, customize descriptions, and ultimately pay less fees.
Low-quality goods and the increased possibility of scams.
The problem comes when you don't realize you're digging through crap looking for pearls and imagine that it's all pearls.
> Nowhere. There's no other amazon. Ebay? The flea market of the internet? That's where people who wanted to sell to wal-mart go.
If I wanted to make it sound good I'd call it a bazaar or something.
I think the above is one of the key takeaways from the collective experience of the 20-teens! In a way, it's a summary of the whole history of the Internet.
Isn't this a pattern with big tech companies and their walled gardens? "App devs thought they were starting a business on the bigco app store, selling direct to users. Then bigco started making their in-built versions of the popular apps themselves... basically doing more and more of the work and taking more control and taking money from the people who helped them become powerful."
It's a huge drink the google kool-aid cult.
If you want to be on Google, you need to have adwords bringing people to your site, ads on your content, popups for the ad-targeters, click-bait at the bottom, tons of overlays.
Why is that all there is anymore, I don't get it.
What happened to the good content? Why can't I find it anymore?
Come, lovely summer child, we will teach you to survive the winter.
This will have almost no effect. YouTube does not have a quantity problem. They have enough content that every YouTube user could watch YouTube 24 hours a day for the rest of their lives and never see the same video twice. They wouldn't even have to go deep into their back catalog.
Worse, viewers have relatively little attachment to any particular content producer. They obviously love some YouTube celebrities, but if a given artist disappeared, people would get over it quickly. It's not, like, say books where people really want access to the last Harry Potter book.
There is a wealth of content on YouTube, including a surprising amount of niche content. But there are a limited number of very high value creators -- a circumstance that's always the case. High-level creativity takes talent, time, some degree of money, and a network that's conducive to it -- which has an audience that can, will, and does find and view it.
Right now, that dynamic plays strongly to YouTube's benefit, though there are some extant alternatives -- Vimeo specialises in higher-quality content, Facebook and Reddit offer social "friends-and-family" or short-content platforms, and there are emerging platforms such as PeerTube which offer federated hosting options.
Mind: PeerTube presently has significant limitations, and I was discussing the issue with a video producer earlier this week:
People leave YouTube all the time, and crowds don't tend to follow them anywhere. They just watch different YouTubers who fill a similar niche.
It's as if the cloud you were really enjoying blew away, but there were plenty of new clouds, so you didn't get into a car to follow the old ones.
* Consumers do not pay money for each transaction of content they consume. Instead, they pay with their attention. But that doesn't work like a currency because their goal is not to minimize the attention they spend. It's burning a hole in their pocket and they want to give their time to YouTube.
* YouTube spends next to no money on each unit of product they deliver. After they show a user a video, they still have it.
So looking at this as any kind of supply and demand situation is going to just completely muddle the economics. The supply is nearly infinite and the "demand" is hard to even define.
Like, “oh we don’t have John Oliver anymore but here’s Redacted Tonight with Lee Camp! Everyone’s happy, right?”
Neither of those statements are true, but you seem to be commenting as if one or the other are.
I'm not arguing that the YouTube market is perfect, but that the gap between the average and most popular channels isn't so wide that the loss of some of the latter has a dramatic impact on their viewership. This is so manifestly and obviously true that I'm puzzled about any counter-examples you're envisioning.
Top brands -- like College Humor -- are never going to be happy on YouTube forever. The cream of the crop cannot be kept happy forever. If CH decides they'd rather keep 100% of X ad revenue instead of smaller-percentage of Y ad revenue, and that the math will work out in their favor, they're gone, and there is nothing YouTube could do to keep them. After all, why should CH work as serfs on YouTube's property when they can be lords of their own?
There are very, very few people who can make the math work, given the expense of supplying streaming video (which fortunately, CH has been doing themselves for a very long time already) and building/keeping an audience, etc, but there will always be some.
And yet, to my point, YouTube doesn't seem to be suffering. There's no way for YouTube to keep 100% of all video revenue, and it's possible that enough popular YouTubers acting in concert via collective action might figure out how to extract slightly more from YouTube, but most popular YouTubers are making more money from Patreon than YouTube themselves, and YouTube is still a big enough player that they can afford to wait out quite a few high-profile defectors, most of whom will come limping back after things turn out to be harder elsewhere than they expect.
Google knows what percentage of time is spent on big high-profile YouTubers vs mid-range and lower. I suspect the long tail is very, very long indeed. A Logan Paul might want to believe he's crucial to YouTube's success, but I don't think he's more than a tiny blip.
Wrong, AdWords sponsored results are promoted (just in a less obvious manner than before), but other websites also appear.
For product searches, there's also Google Shopping-- this started out (as Froogle and Google Product Search) indexing any shopping sites Google found, but, as of the rebranding to Google Shopping in 2012, exclusively shows paid listings.
Google Shopping also gets more prominent placing in web searches for products than the actual web results do.
Google things new, updated content on large sites is more relevant, but it's not. That content is recreated from older content on the web that doesn't have ads on it.
I'm sure it's just that google requires more and more work from webmasters to easily find searchable content, meta tags, modern HTML, etc, but the way new content is being produced now is under the guise of ultimately getting the content reader to buy a product.
The old internet was, "Omg, I can share my knowledge with people." Now it's, "Omg, I can make money with ads."
Google knows you want to click on that link. If your niche hobby had an ehow article how to do it, that'd be first for me I bet, unfortunately.
Everyone would have to coordinate it at the same time, and a massive capital outlay would be needed to create a service everyone could switch to at once. If it is done piecemeal Youtube's strong lock-in though things like driving traffic through recommendations on other videos etc. would win out and punish the early switchers too much.
That's the only "strike action" they have, in fact; if they just stop producing, others will rise and they'll be forgotten. If they move, they might shed some audience but they have a chance at keeping enough to impact Google and making a non-YouTube platform a success.
Predatory practical monopolies and outdated labor laws functioning as intended.
This is one of the under-appreciated aspects of capitalism: the profit motive encourages the unscrupulous to surface ethical holes in the market. If only we were principled enough to do something with this information.
It actually does in fact take less time to build something to share your own content than it does to create the content itself.
That's why I don't understand why does airbnb take 10% of the transaction? They are just a website. Why does Apple take 30%? They are just a search engine.
And google makes something like $1.2 million per employee. How much of that on average does the google employee get to keep? Is it more or less than content creators?
This. I remember when getting a single ad in YouTube was news. Or an unstoppable ad. Now I've bumped into videos that have close to an ad a minute.
Moreover, you can feel how in order to keep up with the algorithm YouTubers have forsaken creativity and landed in just clickbaity thumbnails and repeating their formulas. I know YouTubers have been saying this for years, but it finally hit me like cold water recently. There used to be so much clever, creative content on YouTube but now so much of what I see in my home page is content that's shallow and uninspired at best from channels I'm not subscribed to.
And YouTubers have to make this sort of content! If your lively-hood and/or relevance depends on putting videos out every day, you're just gonna find an idea that worked "well enough" and repeat it for weeks.
> They both grew through the expansion of the long tail. The reality is: where are people in the long tail going to go to sell their repackaged stuff?
I wish other platforms like IGTV or Vimeo had taken off. I think there's things Snapchat and Twitter could try for video. Snapchat could experiment with longer-form, edited content for blogs, as a compliment to stories. Twitter is already where personalities are and there's already plenty of video content uploaded there. Facebook seems to want to have a solid go at video, but it feels like they're completely lost. What is Facebook Watch? It has random content from pages but also shows trying to compete with Netflix?
> The internet has turned to garbage. You're better off going to the library like the old days. The internet has been ruined by the mainstream and the money grubbers.
As much as I dislike a lot of what the internet has become, I still don't think this is the case. I don't remember the time of old as better days, TV was (and kinda still is) pretty terrible. The internet is also for much more than just entertainment. Sure, read a book instead of going on YouTube, I agree with that. I'm also very thankful that I am not limited to what's in a library to learn about random topics because I can just click through science sites or Wikipedia.
Though there's certainly a lot the ambition for money and building empires has changed for the worse.
If it bothers you so much, just pay up for Youtube Premium and the problem goes away.
These days paying for ad-free actually is an option. So if what you want is ad-free youtube either pay up or admit to being a hypocrite.
You can post digital content on multiple platforms at the same time.
Setting aside derivative works, which it sounds like you are attacking the value of, there is shit tons of purely original content on YouTube that carries a lot of negotiating power.
It's the same thing with Uber and airbnb, etc. Big corporations are making billions while those doing the real work that is valuable to the consumer are making pennies.
Sharecropping. This is not a new concept. It wasn't ever an equitable model and yet, here we are right back in it.
It feels like a lot of big corporations are taking advantage of a lot of people who hope to change their lives. It's a fraud. It's not ... right.
I want it to be right. It takes hours of filming, lots of equipment, courage, etc.
Each one of the content creators -- those creating original content -- are taking as much risk as the founders of YouTube, even more really in the big scheme of things and yet they and now Google are making billions, while the people they make those billions off of are making pennies.
Why does it work this way? I don't know why it works this way.
I might be having a philosophical break down atm or something, idk, but it feels like there's a huge fraud being perpetrated out there in internet land and I don't like it one bit.
As an aside, I'm seeing the same pattern at Amazon. People thought they were opening a business on amazon selling retail. Then amazon started selling the profitable products themselves, storing the products themselves, ... basically doing more and more of the work and taking more control and taking money from the people who helped them become powerful. Businesses there are now devolving into repackaging jobs.
Now Youtube is doing the same. They used focus on being a search and distribution mechanism. Now they produce content, allow sponsorships, have more ads per minute of viewing then television, ... jobs there are again, repackaging jobs. Repackage scenes from movies, previews, upload documentaries, sports clips...
They both grew through the expansion of the long tail. The reality is: where are people in the long tail going to go to sell their repackaged stuff?
Nowhere. There's no other amazon. Ebay? The flea market of the internet? That's where people who wanted to sell to wal-mart go.
The only place for them to go would be to create their own online store, or their own website where people can watch their movies. Then you have to be found through...
... that's right, Google. Nope. That won't work either, because only AdWords sponsored content appears in Google searches anymore. Google wants you adding data snippets to google.com so people won't even visit your website.
The internet has turned to garbage. You're better off going to the library like the old days.
The internet has been ruined by the mainstream and the money grubbers.
It's just gross. So sad.