I know there are several content creators (such as Jim Sterling) that have their videos ad-free as a perk for their supporters (since he's supported enough via Patreon). He's pretty angry about this change.
I somewhat understand Google's stance on this, as it's a service that should be allowed to make money even on people who don't want to make money. They don't really have such a way to opt out of pretty much any other service of theirs that has monetization.
But at the same time, there are people who have so heavily invested into the YouTube ecosystem with certain expectations for a very long time, and pretty much have their entire business on there, so they can't very easily take their business elsewhere if they're unhappy with the change.
This isn't a 'Netflix raising their subscription cost' scenario, where users can just cancel their subscription and sign up for a different service. It would be a massive undertaking to shift their backlog of videos onto another service, and they'd lose all their existing subscribers and have to build it up elsewhere.
So in that respect, it's kind of a shitty move by Google.
This sounds like a pretty straightforward cause & effect here. Creators went for direct monetization outside of youtube instead of ads, and youtube responded by keeping their net income the same by just showing ads anyway.
> But at the same time, there are people who have so heavily invested into the YouTube ecosystem with certain expectations for a very long time, and pretty much have their entire business on there, so they can't very easily take their business elsewhere if they're unhappy with the change.
A key part of running a business is risk management & mitigation. YouTube has very obviously been an ad-supported video platform for at least a decade. Hoping nothing changes about your little ad-free corner of that platform is not a sound business plan.
It's shitty that Google didn't give a heads up, but anyone whose business is riding on this should definitely have been expecting something like this and had a backup plan. Literally free content hosting is obviously not a thing that will exist for very long. Enjoy it while it lasts, but you know also have a Vimeo account ready to go as well or something like that.
It's kind of business as usual for Google. Why would anyone expect them to be kind and generous suddenly when they have consistently for years pulled the rug out underneath previosly-free services. (or killed them off completely https://killedbygoogle.com/ )
>So in that respect, it's kind of a shitty move by Google.
12 years of free video hosting with no ads and a platform for people to discover your videos is quite the deal.
They always had to add ads at some point, hosting video, and the bandwidth and transcoding that goes with it, is incredibly expensive, not to mention the dev time going into creating such a massive platform.
If you thought you could eat a free lunch forever... Well, I guess this is your rude awakening. But you honestly should have expected it.
The discovery feature of Youtube shouldn't be understated either. A large number of creators have most of their audiences because of Youtube. And honestly your example of Jim Sterling sounds like a smaller company would have gone out of their way to ban them. He's reaping all the benefits of the platform while giving nothing back.
Jim uses an interesting strategy to achieve ad-free status, though. He purposefully includes content from many copyright holders that default to claiming the entire video. Since apparently highlander rules apply, the system just won't play ads on his stuff.
> I know there are several content creators (such as Jim Sterling) that have their videos ad-free as a perk for their supporters (since he's supported enough via Patreon). He's pretty angry about this change.
That just comes off as entitled. Youtube is providing free bandwidth, hosting, and advertising for his patreon.
"...and pretty much have their entire business on there..."
This is what I don't get about YouTubers. They created a business with basically only one source of income. This is bad practice in every business book.
I am a freelancer. If I only had one customer my business would be instantly over when they didn't hire me anymore.
YouTubers put too much trust in an untrustworthy business partner.
I hear Floatplane is pretty good these days and really should check it out as the initial creators were more technical than average YouTube (Linus Media Group aka LTT). I have YT premium so won't see any changes but it's not something I'd advocate signing up for at this point. I'm locked into like 2013 pricing and am not touching YT Music.
This is definitely a Google push that will change the platform, I think. RoosterTeeth founders have pushed the whole "your content, your site, your store/etc" for a decade at least and though FloatPlane might be a capable rival as it builds more creators I think that is still true. You need to own your own distribution methods even if YT or another site is primarily where your views come from but that takes resources away from creating your primary content. Hard to do for a solo creator.
It would be cool of creators such as Jim could start hosting their vids on Peertube or something similar. They could still post on Youtube--just also link to the other option for an ad-free experience.
Hopefully Goog won't bring down the hammer on cross-posting videos!!
I imagine creators like Jim Sterling would be even more outraged if YouTube asked for a percentage of their Patreon revenue or whatever they make from external sponsors.
> But at the same time, there are people who have so heavily invested into the YouTube ecosystem with certain expectations for a very long time, and pretty much have their entire business on there, so they can't very easily take their business elsewhere if they're unhappy with the change.
> It would be a massive undertaking to shift their backlog of videos onto another service, and they'd lose all their existing subscribers and have to build it up elsewhere.
To me this sounds like a description of YouTube's business model — one that works for other services too, because people go along with it.
So this seems... unsurprising to me. I'm genuinely curious to know what YouTube users were expecting instead. I get the impression some people see this as a breach of trust, but to me it seems like the obvious thing YouTube would do.
If let's say that google charges 1$ (or more, adjust yourself) per gb of stored video, or 1$ per 20gb of bandwidth use to opt out of ads, will it be better?
> It would be a massive undertaking to shift their backlog of videos onto another service, and they'd lose all their existing subscribers and have to build it up elsewhere.
Fortunately that’s not entirely true, IIUC — LBRY and BitChute can automatically mirror their channels. Anecdotal accounts say LBRY pays orders of magnitude more per view IIRC, and doesn’t decrease YouTube growth. minutephysics uses it and still has >5 million subscribers on YT. And failing those, it shouldn’t be too hard to youtube-dl a channel and upload it to a Peertube or GNU mediagoblin (here ’s hoping ytdl starts using git the way its creators intended and moves issue tracking to an antifragile mailing list).
Hosting this video requires a lot of storage and bandwidth. I would not be surprised to learn YouTube alone requires $50,000,000 to $75,000,000 in hard drive purchases per year. Sure, they make a lot more than that in advertising, but I imagine every year those hosting and storage costs go up.
Why not implement an option for creators to share some of that load if they want to opt-out of advertisements on their videos? That way, everyone wins. YouTube gets money for the hosting of video, creators keep content ad-free.
> But at the same time, there are people who have so heavily invested into the YouTube ecosystem with certain expectations for a very long time, and pretty much have their entire business on there, so they can't very easily take their business elsewhere if they're unhappy with the change.
Anyone who has invested in creating content and thinking that it would be the way it was forever is naive and has learned a lesson. Most 'old timers' would realize (I know I would) that any business situation can change.
Likewise I fully expect Amazon once they have killed off the competition to raise prices on many items. Sure they will have loss leaders and sure they are already doing it. But it's business no expectation that they won't do what is in their best interest. And this is not a 'shareholder' thing it's a business thing. Same thing would happen if it were a small pizza shop that decided to lower prices and drive others out of business. As long as no rules are broken it's not any worse than a sports team doing whatever they can to win the game. They are not 'in the business' of making it good for others to win. (Same with online gaming).
Easy fix, Google can charge the youtube channel owner for hosting their videos or just show adverts.
If you are not familiar with out google do things, They change terms and conditions and bandwidth allowances quite a lot. thats if they don't move their service to the google grave yard. https://killedbygoogle.com/
> it's a service that should be allowed to make money even on people who don't want to make money.
Many countries have regulations against non paid work. If google wants to limit monetization for creators but monetize themselves there is something that does not adds up.
I was going to say, Vimeo directly targets the people that want video hosting, want to keep most of their rights and are willing to pay and have a more discerning or targetted audience. Just move to that.
As a content consumer I see this as a positive thing for me.
A few months ago when YouTube decided to auto-add ads on all videos, my watch time on YouTube decreased by more than 50% since I consume all video content on either my phone or my tablet (where I don't have access to AdBlock), and I find the amount of ads I have to go through to watch a video so annoying that I'd rather not watch it at all.
As a result I spend my free time on Coursera or listening to audiobooks instead and I log in to YouTube once a day to have a quick scroll through the subscriptions page to see if there's anything worth watching. Keeping the amount of ads in mind and the stress they cause me, I am more selective and will often not click on a video that I previously would. And I don't mindlessly binge-watch video for hours on end any longer.
With the new monetisation coming in place, I can see my consumption of YouTube declining even further to the level of Google - use it as a tool, when you really have to and not just for entertainment. And I welcome it! Just thought to share a perspective of a consumer rather than a creator.
On the other hand I do understand YouTube's move. After all, it's their platform and they're not running a charity - people often forget that it's not their birth right to use a company's product or a service without paying for it one way or the other.
I get why people are mad that something that exists is changing, though at this point I've stopped being surprised when something that was free either stops being free or has the free offering diminished. This particularly was a very weird setup where if you didn't want a share of ad revenue, you got to use the service completely for free. While Google offers ad free YouTube to users, it'd be nice if they offered a way for creators to pay for YouTube hosting so they can continue to offer their channels ad free, with maybe a small discount based on the percentage of your user base with YouTube Premium.
Edit: I just talked to YouTube support directly and yep it's exactly what I anticipated below. It only affects channels not yet in the YPP. Larger channels who are in the YPP but explicitly choose not to monetize videos will not get these new ads placed into their videos. At least not with this TOS change.
Original comment:
The wording of this isn't 100% crystal clear but I have a feeling this article might be making this out to be way worse than it is.
I have 10k subs on YouTube and made a decision not to run ads on my channel from the beginning because I care more about the viewing experience than profiting.
Technically I'm in the YouTube Partner Program and I choose not to turn on monetization for my videos. Monetization is basically a checkbox you can turn on and off for each video and then if you enable it, you choose some information about how the ads are shown.
Going by the TOS update's wording, it sounds like if you're in the YPP then your videos will have not have these new ads placed in them if you choose to disable monetization for a video.
It sounds like it's only going to affect channels who have a handful of subs and views, in which case you were making $0 guaranteed anyways because you couldn't turn monetization on due to not being in the YPP. The only difference now is YouTube will make some money off your views which seems reasonable since they are hosting it for free, and realistically it'll be pennies at best if you have a small channel with 15 views per video.
I have YouTube Premium, so this doesn't affect me as a YouTube viewer. However, this is the sort of foundational service change that you simply don't do ten years into a lucrative partner program without a good reason. "It's 2020 and our investors are hungry for growth" is not a good enough reason, IMO. Any good business needs to keep it's goals aligned with it's customers or it will stop being a good business and people will want to leave. "Changing the deal" in a very big way like this makes your customers - the people giving you video content with no up-front expectation of payment - very, very mad.
I have a feeling you're going to start to see certain creators deliberately put advertiser unfriendly content in their videos just to get out of monetization now. Certain videos are already deliberately not monetized because they either are viewer-funded channels (which YouTube very much missed the boat on) or are promotional videos. YouTube should grandfather those channels and videos in as monetization-exempt, because that was "the deal" that people signed on to. Hell, if that's already financially untenable, you should at least still allow YouTube Partners - i.e. the people whose financial incentives are most aligned with monetization anyway - deliberately demonetize their own videos. Because, again, they are your customers and that was the deal they signed on to.
Most of the creators I watch are switching to a combination of Patreon and in-video advertising "reads" (have you heard about Kiwi Co?!?) both of which cut Google out of the equation so it's not too surprising to me Google is cranking up the dial on their own advertisements.
I wonder how long YT will tolerate those in-video ads when YT Premium is supposed to allow for an ad-free experience.
I'm also curious as to how the advertisers and YT channels come up with pricing. The advertisers will have no metrics on how often the ad was skipped over, and maybe it's a coincidence, but the channels seem to keep the in-video ad lengths to integer multiples of 'skip 10 seconds' button presses.
Bait and switch. This is what big companies do. They buy products that are a threat to them, or allow them to address the threat of another company. Then they offer the bought company's services for free for a period. Then it ends.
The point is to kill competition so they can settle in and collect rent.
Having youtube premium is definitely the biggest time saver for me.
Other than not showing ads, lets you listen to videos like a podcast on mobile in background. For podcasts that also posts youtube videos, I just use youtube since it lets me see reactions when I want to from podcasters.
I never understand HN Crowd complaining about ads on YouTube. It literally costs(1 month sub) less than typing a comment like this for most people on HN (At least in opportunity cost).
YouTube premium is great, I'm surprised it's not more popular. I'd cut my Spotify subscription way before YouTube, but that's not what I typically hear from my friends.
Spotify = Streaming music $12/month
YouTube = Streaming music + learned SolidWorks + learned Blender + learning Spanish + general entertainment of all sorts... $12/month. YouTube is incredible.
For me, the biggest plus of YouTube Premium is supporting the creators. Almost every initiative to pay a large number of blogs and creators at once has failed because it's too difficult to get them all to sign on and distribute money to all of them. YouTube is a monopoly for better and worse, so it was easier for them to implement ad-free for almost every video creator.
I wish Google Contributor could live up to the same promise, but Google killed it and replaced it with a different version. It made you a participant in the bidding process for your own ad views. So unless an advertiser was bidding a crazy amount of money, you would win the bid and an empty ad (or no ad at all) would load instead. Like YouTube Premium, this took advantage of the existing ad payment infrastructure while removing almost all the ads from your pages and videos.
Google is already making money by raping privacy. Why should we keep advocating additional streams of revenue? I'd gladly pay for google's services as long as they pay me for the data they steal. My data is worth a lot more to me than some bandwidth costs.
I feel like YouTube as we knew it before is probably going to come to an end soon. Between youtube ads, ad reads, sponsors, patreon plugs and merch ads, it is either going to wind up looking like cable tv or it is going to die and make way for some paid service.
I saw a video with a sponsor, a separate THREE MINUTE ad read for some stupid mobile game AND 2 youtube ads. The video was 10 minutes.
I understand video creators need to make money but at this point i’d rather just have some patreon service where I can subscribe to channels individually for a dollar or two a month.
It seems like the fate of all streaming services is to end up like cable.
This makes me reconsider Vimeo as a video platform. This year I decided to invest my free time in creating two channels for Painting(art in general) and Drawing (design focused), all is planned and tested and the only thing left on the table is video platform. YouTube as a platform rewards "dopamine reaction", controversy topics, kick-bait thumbnails, short form format and so on. Yes, there is a ton of good stuff that is actually hard to find because the Algorithm is fine-tuned to work in absurd way by pushing non relevant content. As a creator after recent changes to UI/UX you cannot tailor user experience in full. Using playlists is not enough of a tool for me.
YouTube is useful for big brands with lots of content with high revenue and everyone small is pushing it hard to find a way to be liked and stay relevant to "monetization" practices. At this point if you as creator don't rely on ad-revenue YouTube is not your place.
/rant I really hate YouTube now. Everyone wants to put every bit of information in a 10+ min long video b/c 10 min videos get better ad rates. So they spend the first 4 min w/ a long ass 'intro' sequence on all videos, then pleading you subscribe and 'hit the bell' then plugging patreon, then some long backstory, then the gem of info you came for that could have been a tweet. Oh and all this is broken up by ads at the beginning and middle of the videos, it's a cesspool I refuse to pay for. /rant
Funny that everyone here is talking about small creators when an even larger impact will be on large companies using YouTube for content and for product instructionals. If I'm a brand, and I'm reaching you organically through branded content. I do not want another ad play before my content.
YouTube doesn't give me any network effect anyways (all my views are from external sources), I was just trying to do good in the world.
What tech should I look at for self hosted streaming on Digital Ocean spaces and a CDN? Please give me hints as to what I should do from a self-hosted perspective. I'm going to "DevOps" a solution, using webservers just like I do for many of my web domains. Where do I start, I want to build it from scratch using open source.
Having just recently bought a Smart TV, I was shocked by the amount of ads that played. I pretty much stopped using it at this point.
There is just too many ads. I dont even know how they can cram more ads into videos at this point.
I had the same experience using the native Youtube app on iOS.
In my browsers (including on mobile), I always have adblock enabled but playing the video in the native Youtube app crams so many ads into a video it's ridiculous. They deliver ads on videos as short as 2 minutes long. Move onto the next video after watching an ad + 2 minute video == another ad.
I've stopped using the native app and have now switched to the mobile-browser version now (I use Adguard as an ad-blocker for mobile Safari which blocks YT ads in browser)..
YouTube has a demonetization feature too. Let's say you run a programming tutorials channel that's too small to monetize and you don't want Google layering ads over your content. Just crosspost something like a Tim Pool video and hope the YouTube AI categorizes your channel as too toxic for advertisers. Otherwise it'll be interesting to see how the standard changes when Google is the sole beneficiary. That money is too toxic for thee, not for me.
Darn, I use YouTube as a quick communication channel to users of an app I maintain. I’ll throw up a video to show a new feature or that something has changed. Sometimes I answer single tech support questions with a short video. That’ll be lame if ads start showing up.
Why not pay for Youtube Premium? We're often talking about how we would gladly pay to keep a sustainable product going on but people are outraged that a _free_ service is increasing monetization through ads.
I think Youtube is great, it's where I find a lot of content, I use it a lot and not seeing ads makes a huge difference. Plus, Youtube Music is great value for the price.
I don't even mind ads before videos however the current way ads are being shown is pathetic and ruins the experience. My toddler likes to watch 15 mins of cocomelon while drinking milk and ads show up every few mins in the middle of the nursery rhyme playing. It is extremely infuriating.
[+] [-] cableshaft|5 years ago|reply
I somewhat understand Google's stance on this, as it's a service that should be allowed to make money even on people who don't want to make money. They don't really have such a way to opt out of pretty much any other service of theirs that has monetization.
But at the same time, there are people who have so heavily invested into the YouTube ecosystem with certain expectations for a very long time, and pretty much have their entire business on there, so they can't very easily take their business elsewhere if they're unhappy with the change.
This isn't a 'Netflix raising their subscription cost' scenario, where users can just cancel their subscription and sign up for a different service. It would be a massive undertaking to shift their backlog of videos onto another service, and they'd lose all their existing subscribers and have to build it up elsewhere.
So in that respect, it's kind of a shitty move by Google.
[+] [-] kllrnohj|5 years ago|reply
> But at the same time, there are people who have so heavily invested into the YouTube ecosystem with certain expectations for a very long time, and pretty much have their entire business on there, so they can't very easily take their business elsewhere if they're unhappy with the change.
A key part of running a business is risk management & mitigation. YouTube has very obviously been an ad-supported video platform for at least a decade. Hoping nothing changes about your little ad-free corner of that platform is not a sound business plan.
It's shitty that Google didn't give a heads up, but anyone whose business is riding on this should definitely have been expecting something like this and had a backup plan. Literally free content hosting is obviously not a thing that will exist for very long. Enjoy it while it lasts, but you know also have a Vimeo account ready to go as well or something like that.
[+] [-] draugadrotten|5 years ago|reply
It's kind of business as usual for Google. Why would anyone expect them to be kind and generous suddenly when they have consistently for years pulled the rug out underneath previosly-free services. (or killed them off completely https://killedbygoogle.com/ )
gmail subscriptions are next, just wait and see.
[+] [-] ApolloFortyNine|5 years ago|reply
12 years of free video hosting with no ads and a platform for people to discover your videos is quite the deal.
They always had to add ads at some point, hosting video, and the bandwidth and transcoding that goes with it, is incredibly expensive, not to mention the dev time going into creating such a massive platform.
If you thought you could eat a free lunch forever... Well, I guess this is your rude awakening. But you honestly should have expected it.
The discovery feature of Youtube shouldn't be understated either. A large number of creators have most of their audiences because of Youtube. And honestly your example of Jim Sterling sounds like a smaller company would have gone out of their way to ban them. He's reaping all the benefits of the platform while giving nothing back.
[+] [-] jabroni_salad|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Aunche|5 years ago|reply
That just comes off as entitled. Youtube is providing free bandwidth, hosting, and advertising for his patreon.
[+] [-] thdrdt|5 years ago|reply
This is what I don't get about YouTubers. They created a business with basically only one source of income. This is bad practice in every business book.
I am a freelancer. If I only had one customer my business would be instantly over when they didn't hire me anymore.
YouTubers put too much trust in an untrustworthy business partner.
[+] [-] charwalker|5 years ago|reply
This is definitely a Google push that will change the platform, I think. RoosterTeeth founders have pushed the whole "your content, your site, your store/etc" for a decade at least and though FloatPlane might be a capable rival as it builds more creators I think that is still true. You need to own your own distribution methods even if YT or another site is primarily where your views come from but that takes resources away from creating your primary content. Hard to do for a solo creator.
[+] [-] swebs|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wahlrus|5 years ago|reply
Hopefully Goog won't bring down the hammer on cross-posting videos!!
[+] [-] paxys|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arkh|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] grey_earthling|5 years ago|reply
> It would be a massive undertaking to shift their backlog of videos onto another service, and they'd lose all their existing subscribers and have to build it up elsewhere.
To me this sounds like a description of YouTube's business model — one that works for other services too, because people go along with it.
So this seems... unsurprising to me. I'm genuinely curious to know what YouTube users were expecting instead. I get the impression some people see this as a breach of trust, but to me it seems like the obvious thing YouTube would do.
[+] [-] fendy3002|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] boogies|5 years ago|reply
Fortunately that’s not entirely true, IIUC — LBRY and BitChute can automatically mirror their channels. Anecdotal accounts say LBRY pays orders of magnitude more per view IIRC, and doesn’t decrease YouTube growth. minutephysics uses it and still has >5 million subscribers on YT. And failing those, it shouldn’t be too hard to youtube-dl a channel and upload it to a Peertube or GNU mediagoblin (here ’s hoping ytdl starts using git the way its creators intended and moves issue tracking to an antifragile mailing list).
[+] [-] cbozeman|5 years ago|reply
Why not implement an option for creators to share some of that load if they want to opt-out of advertisements on their videos? That way, everyone wins. YouTube gets money for the hosting of video, creators keep content ad-free.
[+] [-] gist|5 years ago|reply
Anyone who has invested in creating content and thinking that it would be the way it was forever is naive and has learned a lesson. Most 'old timers' would realize (I know I would) that any business situation can change.
Likewise I fully expect Amazon once they have killed off the competition to raise prices on many items. Sure they will have loss leaders and sure they are already doing it. But it's business no expectation that they won't do what is in their best interest. And this is not a 'shareholder' thing it's a business thing. Same thing would happen if it were a small pizza shop that decided to lower prices and drive others out of business. As long as no rules are broken it's not any worse than a sports team doing whatever they can to win the game. They are not 'in the business' of making it good for others to win. (Same with online gaming).
[+] [-] ehwhyreally|5 years ago|reply
If you are not familiar with out google do things, They change terms and conditions and bandwidth allowances quite a lot. thats if they don't move their service to the google grave yard. https://killedbygoogle.com/
[+] [-] Shorel|5 years ago|reply
If they can coordinate their efforts of course. It is a big if.
[+] [-] Hokusai|5 years ago|reply
Many countries have regulations against non paid work. If google wants to limit monetization for creators but monetize themselves there is something that does not adds up.
[+] [-] surge|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] polski-g|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bsd44|5 years ago|reply
A few months ago when YouTube decided to auto-add ads on all videos, my watch time on YouTube decreased by more than 50% since I consume all video content on either my phone or my tablet (where I don't have access to AdBlock), and I find the amount of ads I have to go through to watch a video so annoying that I'd rather not watch it at all.
As a result I spend my free time on Coursera or listening to audiobooks instead and I log in to YouTube once a day to have a quick scroll through the subscriptions page to see if there's anything worth watching. Keeping the amount of ads in mind and the stress they cause me, I am more selective and will often not click on a video that I previously would. And I don't mindlessly binge-watch video for hours on end any longer.
With the new monetisation coming in place, I can see my consumption of YouTube declining even further to the level of Google - use it as a tool, when you really have to and not just for entertainment. And I welcome it! Just thought to share a perspective of a consumer rather than a creator.
On the other hand I do understand YouTube's move. After all, it's their platform and they're not running a charity - people often forget that it's not their birth right to use a company's product or a service without paying for it one way or the other.
[+] [-] bsharitt|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nickjj|5 years ago|reply
Original comment:
The wording of this isn't 100% crystal clear but I have a feeling this article might be making this out to be way worse than it is.
I have 10k subs on YouTube and made a decision not to run ads on my channel from the beginning because I care more about the viewing experience than profiting.
Technically I'm in the YouTube Partner Program and I choose not to turn on monetization for my videos. Monetization is basically a checkbox you can turn on and off for each video and then if you enable it, you choose some information about how the ads are shown.
Going by the TOS update's wording, it sounds like if you're in the YPP then your videos will have not have these new ads placed in them if you choose to disable monetization for a video.
It sounds like it's only going to affect channels who have a handful of subs and views, in which case you were making $0 guaranteed anyways because you couldn't turn monetization on due to not being in the YPP. The only difference now is YouTube will make some money off your views which seems reasonable since they are hosting it for free, and realistically it'll be pennies at best if you have a small channel with 15 views per video.
[+] [-] kmeisthax|5 years ago|reply
I have a feeling you're going to start to see certain creators deliberately put advertiser unfriendly content in their videos just to get out of monetization now. Certain videos are already deliberately not monetized because they either are viewer-funded channels (which YouTube very much missed the boat on) or are promotional videos. YouTube should grandfather those channels and videos in as monetization-exempt, because that was "the deal" that people signed on to. Hell, if that's already financially untenable, you should at least still allow YouTube Partners - i.e. the people whose financial incentives are most aligned with monetization anyway - deliberately demonetize their own videos. Because, again, they are your customers and that was the deal they signed on to.
[+] [-] randlet|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] btreecat|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] secondcoming|5 years ago|reply
I'm also curious as to how the advertisers and YT channels come up with pricing. The advertisers will have no metrics on how often the ad was skipped over, and maybe it's a coincidence, but the channels seem to keep the in-video ad lengths to integer multiples of 'skip 10 seconds' button presses.
[+] [-] eznzt|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] superkuh|5 years ago|reply
The point is to kill competition so they can settle in and collect rent.
[+] [-] kumarm|5 years ago|reply
I never understand HN Crowd complaining about ads on YouTube. It literally costs(1 month sub) less than typing a comment like this for most people on HN (At least in opportunity cost).
[+] [-] testcase_delta|5 years ago|reply
Spotify = Streaming music $12/month YouTube = Streaming music + learned SolidWorks + learned Blender + learning Spanish + general entertainment of all sorts... $12/month. YouTube is incredible.
[+] [-] gonehome|5 years ago|reply
Being able to pay for a service without ads is worth it.
Users complaining about a free ad subsidized service come across as unreasonable to me (and maybe a little entitled).
[+] [-] andrewia|5 years ago|reply
I wish Google Contributor could live up to the same promise, but Google killed it and replaced it with a different version. It made you a participant in the bidding process for your own ad views. So unless an advertiser was bidding a crazy amount of money, you would win the bid and an empty ad (or no ad at all) would load instead. Like YouTube Premium, this took advantage of the existing ad payment infrastructure while removing almost all the ads from your pages and videos.
[+] [-] benhurmarcel|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jd24|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wintermutestwin|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] peanut_worm|5 years ago|reply
I saw a video with a sponsor, a separate THREE MINUTE ad read for some stupid mobile game AND 2 youtube ads. The video was 10 minutes.
I understand video creators need to make money but at this point i’d rather just have some patreon service where I can subscribe to channels individually for a dollar or two a month.
It seems like the fate of all streaming services is to end up like cable.
[+] [-] OzzyB|5 years ago|reply
- One Ad per video that the creator chooses to elect
- Each Ad can be skipped after 5 seconds
- Two Ads now but the first can still be skipped the second cannot
- The first Ad's skip time increased from 5 seconds to 6 seconds
- Videos get Ads regardless of creator consent
I'm noticing a trend, and it sucks for those that like to use YouTube in app form since you're kind of stuck w/o the use of Ad Blockers.
[+] [-] nbzso|5 years ago|reply
YouTube is useful for big brands with lots of content with high revenue and everyone small is pushing it hard to find a way to be liked and stay relevant to "monetization" practices. At this point if you as creator don't rely on ad-revenue YouTube is not your place.
[+] [-] hkchad|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Clampower|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] foxhop|5 years ago|reply
Will this be my last video hosted on YouTube?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUYrN0o-cfk | Hardneck Garlic Planted For High Yield.
YouTube doesn't give me any network effect anyways (all my views are from external sources), I was just trying to do good in the world.
What tech should I look at for self hosted streaming on Digital Ocean spaces and a CDN? Please give me hints as to what I should do from a self-hosted perspective. I'm going to "DevOps" a solution, using webservers just like I do for many of my web domains. Where do I start, I want to build it from scratch using open source.
ideas?
I already have the domain unturf.com
[+] [-] Okawari|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nacs|5 years ago|reply
In my browsers (including on mobile), I always have adblock enabled but playing the video in the native Youtube app crams so many ads into a video it's ridiculous. They deliver ads on videos as short as 2 minutes long. Move onto the next video after watching an ad + 2 minute video == another ad.
I've stopped using the native app and have now switched to the mobile-browser version now (I use Adguard as an ad-blocker for mobile Safari which blocks YT ads in browser)..
[+] [-] jesuscyborg|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mildavw|5 years ago|reply
I guess I’m free to host my own videos...
[+] [-] gtirloni|5 years ago|reply
I think Youtube is great, it's where I find a lot of content, I use it a lot and not seeing ads makes a huge difference. Plus, Youtube Music is great value for the price.
[+] [-] 0xcafecafe|5 years ago|reply