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YouTube monetization analysis

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Re: YouTube monetization analysis

#41

Post by iainmerrick »

What is "demonetization"? I've never heard of this before.

Does it mean YouTube stops inserting ads in your videos? As a viewer, that sounds pretty great to me. It sounds like they also stop suggesting your video to random viewers, which is understandable if they're not making money off it.

Surely the real problem is that ads are toxic, the ad-supported content model is toxic, and YouTube's automatic recommendations are horrible (see the recent article on terrifying race-to-the-bottom videos for kids: https://medium.com/@jamesbridle/something-is-wrong-on-the-in...)

Edit to clarify: yes, of course I realize that content creators need the money. I'm just saying that this is a bad system that often rewards bad content and punishes important-but-uncomfortable content. Unfortunately it's almost the only system in town. I would love to see e.g. Patreon rivaling YouTube in revenue.

Edit edit: and ads aside, relying on YouTube (Facebook, etc) to tell us what to watch is terrible. We should instead do our own crowd-sourced curation, aka recommend good things to each other. And we need to defend ourselves against the likes of Facebook and Twitter insinuating their own filters between us and our friends.

Re: YouTube monetization analysis

#42

Post by tantalor »

naz wrote: post #8
dbatten wrote: post #5

Serious question: what is HTBQ+? Googling doesn't seem to turn anything up.

It seems to be a variant on LGBTQ. Except I guess with "Homosexual" replacing "Lesbian and Gay".

The article only uses that term in the abstract, and doesn't mention anything related to LGBT elsewhere. Hard to take that claim seriously.

Re: YouTube monetization analysis

#43

Post by pwinnski »

adekok wrote: post #40
make3 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this would be an extremely dirty dataset, as there is no incentive to not put your videos in as many categories as possible. if you can only have one, people will still put it in the most popular category a large fraction of the times I'm sure, not the correct one

> there is no incentive to not put your videos in as many categories as possible. We are talking about how to incentivize people here... why suddenly decide that there's magically "no incentive" for something? Youtube is free to also de-incentivize people for using the wrong category.

Which they would determine using... an automated algorithm which decides which category a video should be in, and comparing it to the category chosen. At which point...

Re: YouTube monetization analysis

#45

Post by make3 »

adekok wrote: post #40
make3 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this would be an extremely dirty dataset, as there is no incentive to not put your videos in as many categories as possible. if you can only have one, people will still put it in the most popular category a large fraction of the times I'm sure, not the correct one

> there is no incentive to not put your videos in as many categories as possible. We are talking about how to incentivize people here... why suddenly decide that there's magically "no incentive" for something? Youtube is free to also de-incentivize people for using the wrong category.

The implicit goal of most YouTubers is to get views, as that's how they make money. Putting your video in a smaller category/in not the max amount of category reduces your exposure, reducing your potential views. The incentive of having a lesser chance of being flagged feels tiny compared to that

Re: YouTube monetization analysis

#47

Post by adekok »

simias wrote: post #38
adekok wrote: post #18

I never understood why Youtube didn't have uploaders select various categories for videos. It would do a number of things: * allow them to demonetize / ban / block videos for abuse of categorization * train machine learning on the various categories It's a lot more socially palatable for Youtube to say "Hey guys, we HAVE a blood and violence category, but you didn't use it for this video. So we'll punish you for that…

That seems like a reasonable idea to me but I think part of the answer is that a mind boggling amount of videos are uploaded to Youtube every second. Tracking categorization abuse seems straightforward in theory but good luck automating that reliably over millions of videos especially when you know that some very dedicated people will try their best to game the algorithm in their favor. People will start using the "b…

> Tracking categorization abuse seems straightforward in theory but good luck automating that reliably over millions of videos

Is Youtube (a) automating video categorization now, or (b) not automating video categorization?

> People will start using the "blood and violence" category exclusively if it means they're less likely to be demonetized, rendering it useless

No... it means that the advertisers can determine whether or not they want to monetize ads in that category.

So there would be no "demonetize EVERYTHING", just categories that advertisers can choose to place ads on, or not.

I think you're assuming that a different system would work exactly the same as the system works today. That isn't the point...

Re: YouTube monetization analysis

#48

Post by make3 »

pwinnski wrote: post #43
adekok wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there is no incentive to not put your videos in as many categories as possible. We are talking about how to incentivize people here... why suddenly decide that there's magically "no incentive" for something? Youtube is free to also de-incentivize people for using the wrong category.

Which they would determine using... an automated algorithm which decides which category a video should be in, and comparing it to the category chosen. At which point...

it's not a training set anymore, but a machine learning production task

Re: YouTube monetization analysis

#49

Post by iagovar »

iainmerrick wrote: post #41

What is "demonetization"? I've never heard of this before. Does it mean YouTube stops inserting ads in your videos? As a viewer, that sounds pretty great to me. It sounds like they also stop suggesting your video to random viewers, which is understandable if they're not making money off it. Surely the real problem is that ads are toxic, the ad-supported content model is toxic, and YouTube's automatic recommendations…

The report not only talks about that. It also talks about videos that, because of being demonetized, they also appear less in YT searches and related content.

In other words, if you video has ads, then the probability of appearing in searches and related content is higher, thus you, as used, are more exposed to ads.

Re: YouTube monetization analysis

#50

Post by dopamean »

adekok wrote: post #18

I never understood why Youtube didn't have uploaders select various categories for videos. It would do a number of things: * allow them to demonetize / ban / block videos for abuse of categorization * train machine learning on the various categories It's a lot more socially palatable for Youtube to say "Hey guys, we HAVE a blood and violence category, but you didn't use it for this video. So we'll punish you for that…

Other commenters speculate that there is a technical reason why YouTube doesn't allow content producers to choose their monetization categories but I bet it's more likely to be a business reason. I'm sure it would be technically challenging and possibly for not much reward (for Google), however, I bet it's even harder to sell advertisers on ad packages that include Google ads when any producer can opt out of any group of ads. It would make it much harder to tell advertisers how many eyes their ads would actually make it in front of.
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