Nobody is gonna like this, but YouTube, and also Twitch, should never have setup systems to pay creators. You have any idea how much it costs to host and distribute online video? Try buying some hosting on AWS or Linode and see how much it costs to host your own little YouTube just for your own videos. The ads or whatever else they do is paying for the hosting so that you can upload videos to YouTube without having to pay. Otherwise it would be a LOT of money to make your own YouTube channel. Look at what podcast hosting services like Linode charge just for audio, and thatâs cheap.
If they had gone this route, then people who want to make money on YouTube would have to do it with their own direct deals. No more worrying about channels being demonetized, because that only makes Google lose money, not the creator.
Not a negative comment an inappropriate comment. If some shitlord is posting their slur-laden diatribe on your video about cats then yeah PetSmart isnât going to want to advertise on your video. This is why when I start publishing my writing (soon!) I will not interact directly with readers nor allow them to interact with each other in spaces I control. I donât want the hassle professionally and commercially or the headaches personally.
If you think about it, comment sections on anything are completely insane.
You put time in and create something which you publish on a page. You then give free reign to everyone else on earth to also publish absolutely anything on the same exact page directly below your work. Insanity.
Creating a separate place for discussion like a forum or a chat or Twitter, or Reddit, makes perfect sense. Those are separate places where a community can gather, link to content, and discuss it. But to publish random comments directly on the same page next to the content itself is completely stupid and only exists because itâs become an unquestioned expectation.
Newspapers choose which letters to the editor to publish. Imagine if every letter to the editor magically appeared in your newspaper as you were reading it. It would be one thing if comments were by default blacklisted and the publisher would whitelist specific good comments. But to by default allow comments to appear without review and to have to manually remove the really bad ones is nuts.
On this tangent, this is why I think you should specifically stay out of moderating a subreddit or whatever about your own content. Let the fans do their fan things in their fan places. If you must have some kind of official forums, you better be big enough to have actual CMs or have the free time to handle the moderation thoroughly. Youtube suffers because you get the worst of both problems. If you allow comments, you or someone you proxy has to moderate them, and most of these channels donât do that. But also itâs not even community self managed and separate from your work like some unofficial forum or subreddit would be.
I used to moderate one of the easiest to moderate things ever, a play-by-post forum. What was great about that was for the most part everyone keeps to âtheir ownâ game threads. Generally people donât get into a fight about whether or not someone elses games content is appropriate. There were a couple questionable situations, and I recall reading some games I wasnât participating in and knowing thatâs not for me, but it was relatively âlet each to their ownâ.
Considering that situation, perhaps some kind of fork for youtube comments where you can only see comments by people you know⌠or something similar.
It doesnât help that YouTube comments specifically are very hard to moderate. Anyone with a Google account can just post there. The tools arenât great. If your video is popular, you need a full time staff to moderate the sheer quantity of comments. Meaningful discussion canât happen there.
The only valuable comments I see on YouTube are the ones that add something to the video. For example the ones on AGDQ videos that tell you at what time the speedrun starts so you can skip the intro. The ones on cooking videos that contain the actual recipe, or have converted the recipeâs measurements from volume to weight. Also on KPop videos letting you know extra information like the names of the group members or other interesting facts.
Basically instead of comments YouTube should really only have user-submitted liner notes.
I donât not like this. In fact I love it. Only question I have about it is I remember when making money on youtube first became a thing people could do. If I recall correctly they did it for selfish reasons, not out of the goodness of their hearts. They wanted to incentivize people to watch their platform and drive the cost of their adbuys up and increase the size of their market. They needed a reason for people to watch stuff there. They figured paying the people doing the making of the stuff was the way to go.
Would youtube style online content have gotten as popular as it is today? Is that ok as the price of them never having made youtube ad money available to regular folks?
Our youtube channel actually does make money. Not a ton, but more than youâd expect.
The people who buy ads are trying to target a particular demographic, and GeekNights is one of a shockingly few sources of content for that demographic.
Itâs really fascinating to see what people search for when they find our channels.
I discovered Geeknights after watching some other random non Geeknights panel years ago. âGame Mechanics and Mechanism Designâ happened to be a recommended video that appeared at the end.
Iâve noticed that a few companies post their videos to YouTube with comments disabled, but these are typically adverts themselves, and so they can, of course, decided what is associated with their products. Like Apple, who can reliably find an army of trolls to attack and spew bile about them, have no reason to roll that dice.
Even some of our close friends mystifyingly ignore our strong recommendation to block all ads everywhere always.
Also, on YouTube, we get views from people who just stumble upon our videos. Some of them of course, may not block all ads everywhere always. There are also people like me who pay for YouTube Red/Premium and that can make us money even though no ads have played.
I donât run adblock on my firetv, which is pretty much just for crunchyroll, game of thrones, and queuing up youtube and just letting it run in the background.
I really feel that this is YouTube moving in a direction where only corporate, commercial, sponsored, heavily controlled channels can be monetized. Joey Joe Joe Shabbadoo can upload their cat videos and stuff but only corporate controlled channels make money.