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So this is apparently going into the YouTube TOS:
So is this just a clause to allow them to terminate service to bad actors and people they are in legal disputes with, or is it a clause to excuse ousting small creators and dissident political views? Both? Is it just a weasel clause to let them do whatever?
My read is both, but most likely whatever makes the most profit. It’ll be used to throw off lgbt creators and hardcore nazis alike.
Some channels are talking about how it’s laying the groundwork for when they start getting demonetized they’ll just be getting the axe entirely. So instead of creators complaining about getting demonetized they just won’t be creators (at least on YT)
My reading of it is more like “If getting YouTube to you doesn’t make us a profit, we reserve the right to pull out”.
I think it is all encompassing:
Whether you are a viewer, commentator, or video uploader, it doesn’t matter. If your usage of YouTube is economically and commercially damaging to YouTube, then you can be banned are their sol discretion.
Watching lots of those child porn adjacent videos, which hurts Youtube’s repuation even though the videos themselves are completely innocent? Banned.
Writing racist comments on otherwise great videos? Banned.
Uploading videos that give YouTube a bad repuation like PewDiePie? Banned.
Are your videos bringing in tons of views, using lots of bandwidth, costing YouTube lots of money, but not bringing in lots of ad revenue? Banned.
My problem with this is the commercially viable part of the clause. They should just be saying “We can ban anyone, at any time, to any degree, for any reason. Deal with it.”
So like Scott is right in a perfect world, but I tend to view things not in the spirit in which they are intended but in the consequences that they bring. (I hereby declare myself to be a consequentialist I guess)
Anyway, while I believe this policy currently exists in “wait and see land” when you consider that all LGBTQIA+ content is demonitized on YouTube this sends a pretty clear and horrifying message…
Does YouTube show ads on Joey Jojo Shabbadoo’s channel with nothing but vacation videos that only his friends watch? My though is this is laying the groundwork where only Content Creators ™ can have channels and its just another streaming service.
Yes, this is the rabbit hole they went down when they started paying creators.
Flickr never paid users for their photos. Twitter doesn’t pay you for your tweets. Instagram never paid users for anything. But YouTube does it, and so does Twitch and mixer (although differently). If YouTube stopped, people would go insane. Instagram pays 0 and people don’t give a shit.
And Instagram is exactly what is going on here. YouTube used to be the only place to upload any video whatsoever. That’s why you had all those kinds of joey joe joe shabadoo vacation channels. Nowadays people can upload video anywhere, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, etc. YouTube only sets itself apart as the place you can upload long high resolution videos. The only people with those kinds of videos are people who spend time editing and producing “real” videos. Those kinds of videos need work, and their creators need money. The kinds of videos that don’t take work to make are being uploaded elsewhere, not on Youtube anymore. YouTube gave up on short, unedited, uncrafted, now/low effort video. That’s why this issue of monetization, advertising, etc. is central to their biz.
Solid points but it still doesn’t do anything to assure people that if their well edited and produced educational content gets demonetized they won’t potentially be without a viable distribution platform, as the only marketable alternatives are super niche or expressly explicit, ie PornHub.
Not that I feel it’s YouTube’s job to provide that platform. But it is a problem in that they more or less were doing that job, and now it’s becoming clear they cannot be relied on. And we will need some sort of outlet that is expressly for being that platform, that also will stand up to the actual problems. There’s a few candidates. I would like to support them. But the problem is the only real viable competition or alternative to YouTube will be another YouTube. Just one that isn’t quite so censored or sensitive to content when it comes to ads.
But I want to be able to watch my music videos and watch dumb entertainment and watch infornational videos and watch tech demos and watch interviews and lectures and watch news and watch rocket Livestreams and watch my ASMR and computer hardware reviews and learn how to pour drinks and so on.
So even with a new platform that could host all of that going forward, all of the existing content is already out there on YT. So we are stuck going to that source until all that content is lost to time. YouTube has succeeded too well. Time to reign that shit in.
Video is REALLY REALLY expensive. Especially high resolution video. The costs in storage, bandwidth, and transcoding CPU time are immense. The fact that anyone is willing to host your videos without charging you for it is insane. People are not grateful enough for this. The fact that YouTube not only will offer this, but sometimes pay you is even more insane. Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.
Consider this.
About 7 minutes of 1080p video takes up about 1 gigabyte of space. The price to stream a gigabyte of data costs about 8.5 cents. So let’s just call it a day and say 1 cent per minute. One person watching one of our panel videos would cost us 60 cents. 1000 views would cost us $600. That’s just for the bandwidth, not the storage or the encoding or the development effort or the labor or anything. Not only is YouTube just going to give us that for free, but maybe even share revenue with us? And they’ll let us stream? And they’ll let us do 4K?
We have no fucking right to complain about fucking anything. If they demand we come into the office and sexually pleasure the YouTube employees while they work, we should be happy to do so. We’re getting so much for free it’s unbelievable.
Compare that to Twitter where we aren’t getting shit. The cost to send some text is like, nothing.
Now if we were the ones paying YouTube for service, then we could complain about every damn thing. There are actually services like YouTube where the video uploader pays. If you are someone with a lot of viewers, it’s actually beneficial to use them instead of YouTube because the economics will work out. If the economics of your channel don’t work out, then it doesn’t make sense for you to use those services, but it also doesn’t make sense for YouTube to host you either.
EDIT: My math is a little off. Maybe more like 17 minutes per gigabyte. Still would cost like $300 for 1000 views of a 1 hours video in bandwidth alone.
Honestly, I think content creators should start using PornHub. You don’t normalize something with the flip of a switch. I think it was on Geeknights where it was mentioned that porn sites have outrageously fluid file type requirements. If I was a content creator, would I advertise my content directly through the Pornhub mirror? Probably not, but that’s some wide open exposure available, and I think you would have some sweet high ground advantage if anyone tried to shame you for using a porn site to post non-pornagraphic content.
Yep, was about to say a lot of more professional content producers (more towards academic research) tend to host on Vimeo for the ultimate control they get over there as paying customers.
I’m all for trying it and I’ve been following InRange TV who has tried this. Realistically though they weren’t getting any actual pragmatic viewership volume. No platform other than YoutTube really, truly generates nearly the sort of viewership volume to even justify spending the time to upload and tag content on the other platforms other than for having some sort of high ground stance.
Here’s the latest video reacting to this topic:
I don’t always agree with Karl, and this is one of those times where I’m not taking all of what he says on its face; but he has a perspective on it.
Clearly YouTube doesn’t owe anyone any services. It’s more about what do we, as consumers, do in response to potentially try and steer the direction of the future? What can other platforms do, in this new context, to provide a viable alternative?
If the only answer is just get used to going to 10 different sites, one for educational content, one for social issues, one for music, one for high-concept content, others for this that and the other, and just cut out YT entirely, maybe that is what we have to start on. But I tend to think this is an ongoing situation. In any case most people, myself included, are lazy. There’s no technical reason one site that hosts video content can’t host all types of video content. Or at least be a portal to all of it. There’s no serious technical specialties that make one platform much better than the other for playing back the media.
Of course if there was a really high quality music video streaming service that played really nice music videos and you could like turn on a pop-up video type option, and the music was being streamed in at high bitrate and there were lyrics and other things, then it starts making sense to choose that over just straight generic YT.