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.
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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.
Doesn’t really change the argument, but Digital Ocean charges one cent per GB.
Yeah, if you want to get technical I was looking at prices for CDN/streaming bandwidth. That’s the only kind of bandwidth that is suitable for video distribution. If you put an mp4 on your Digital Ocean “Droplet” and try to let people watch it, that shit will go down HARD. Doesn’t matter how cheap the bandwidth is if nobody can actually watch.
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How many places could even come close to handling the load of a YouTube-class battleship? Presumably google cloud, but I don’t know if they actually use it for their own stuff.
Maybe AWS and/or azure? I would be skeptical even of those, let alone any of the smaller players.
I agree with Scott that youtube should kill ALL of their monetization features. Or, charge UPLOADERs to use the service.
The 2.0 release of Peertube, the Mastodon of Youtube, came out today. I like the idea in principle, but good luck with that everyone.
https://framablog.org/2019/11/12/peertube-has-worked-twice-as-hard-to-free-your-videos-from-youtube/
The language in this tweet makes no sense.
Yeah, and the video is edited to be as scaremongery as possible. YouTube has functions in place where if a video is uploaded and marked as not for children you have to sign in with an account with a birthdate that says you’re over 18 to view it. There is no statutory or judicial precedent that I know of that holds a content creator responsible if someone lies about their age. A hyperbolic example is holding Hustler magazine responsible because a kid found their older brother’s magazine under their bed.
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EDIT: Also this.
MS…N
AIM…
YAHOOOOO??
What on Earth…
They’re really AIMing for their own future with choices.