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YouTube monetization analysis

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Re: YouTube monetization analysis

#81

Post by kakarot »

krapp wrote: post #31
kakarot wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a cool project. However, to make videos with quality content at a reasonable frequency, many of these creators depend on YouTube for income or at least partial income. Any P2P / federated service would have to find an agreeable way to A) send ads in a safe and private way to each viewer B) stop people from manipulating the system to game ads while accurately determining if an ad was viewed.

Any form of advertising would likely be unacceptable on a platform like this, as would any attempt to enforce copyright or limit the redistribution or reuse of content. Creators would just have to find another way to make money and accept that they have no practical right to "ownership" over the content they upload, regardless of legality. To clarify: I don't believe the set of people willing to adopt a FOSS distribu…

> I don't believe the set of people willing to adopt a FOSS distributed peer-to-peer video streaming platform and the set of people who believe advertising to be tolerable would likely overlap enough to provide a better or more stable market than the existing web already provides.

> And advertising on the web is already breaking down and likely doomed to fail as a concept.

How did you reach these two conclusions?

Re: YouTube monetization analysis

#82

Post by kakarot »

nathcd wrote: post #55
Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tools like Patreon can help fill this gap.

Also, there's no reason creators couldn't use "dumb ads" where they read ad copy during their videos, and sell the spots themselves. Seems to be the main revenue source in the podcast world. It feels weird to be an advocate for something like dumb advertising (maybe "content-targeted advertising" is a better name?), but dumb ads and Patreon really are a breath of fresh air relative to the status quo of web content.

Yes, it's one thing for serial content like a podcast or talk show, it's another for more artistic endeavors where it would lesson the artistic credibility to have an ad ingrained into the video.

It's also not a suitable format for those who create many small 1-5m videos.

Additionally, it prevents you from retroactively changing what ad gets sent with the video, which can lead to conflicts arising over severed business ties, and limit your overall ability to make residual profit from older videos.

Re: YouTube monetization analysis

#83

Post by kakarot »

Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #25
kakarot wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a cool project. However, to make videos with quality content at a reasonable frequency, many of these creators depend on YouTube for income or at least partial income. Any P2P / federated service would have to find an agreeable way to A) send ads in a safe and private way to each viewer B) stop people from manipulating the system to game ads while accurately determining if an ad was viewed.

Tools like Patreon can help fill this gap.

It's not enough. Patreon only works for certain audiences in its current state, and additionally lacks certain integration tooling that would make it more transparent.

Re: YouTube monetization analysis

#84

Post by mc32 »

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…

Absolutely. Flickr had a pretty good system.

I think the reason YT avoids this is for fear of monetization loss as fewer things get exposed to wide audiences so there is less "vitality", and YT loses advert potential.

If they cared about users and creators, they'd take a page from Flickr.

Re: YouTube monetization analysis

#85

Post by Phlarp »

staltz wrote: post #28

Who is Karlaplan? And why choose Google Docs to share information which Google may dislike and remove?

Solid game theory on both sides. The Demonitization bot and its shenanigans are well known in the Youtube content creator community. They know they aren't fooling anyone and this data is going to be "out there" along with countless anecdotes from content creators who reliably upload content only to have it get "demonetized" during the most profitable portion of a video's lifespan. (the first 48 hours)

If Google pulled the doc they'd likely get a lesson in the Streisand effect, and they likely know not to try. Posting it on Google docs is actually smart bait by the author in my opinion-- intentional or otherwise.

Re: YouTube monetization analysis

#86

Post by wybiral »

benawad wrote: post #80
wybiral wrote: post #15

Every single video, without exception, that I've uploaded in the past few months has been demonetized within a day or two. Then I request manual review and they're monetized again within another day or two. My content is clean and all of it is programming/tech related (programming tutorials and some Raspberry Pi stuff). So if there is an algorithm it's really naive at this stage or it doesn't apply until you request…

I make programming videos too, and a similar thing happens to me. The first day I release a video it's demonetized, and even if I don't request a manual review the video will be remonetized a couple days later.

Interesting. Maybe YouTube needs to adjust their algorithm for that category or something.

Re: YouTube monetization analysis

#88

Post by pwinnski »

adekok wrote: post #69
pwinnski wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

> At which point... They have more data than they do now for machine learning, and a better PR story. i.e. uploaders can't be mad about the categories, because the categories are chosen by the uploader. Uploaders can be mad about Youtube double-checking the categories and getting it wrong... which is less likely to happen if they have better data for machine learning. What, exactly, is the down side of that?

Ultimately the determination is still made by the machine learning process, so you're describing extra work to provide an interface of dubious value that will be used more to misrepresent video content than to provide useful signals, and it seems that customer support related to this would increase dramatically.

I think Google relies overmuch on questionable ML in most areas, but in this case, the alternatives are either ridiculously expensive, or easily exploitable.

Re: YouTube monetization analysis

#89

Post by falcolas »

krapp wrote: post #79
falcolas wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think they're under that misunderstanding. However, they correctly believe that they are the hook which pulls in viewers - the product - to sell to advertisers. Take away those hooks by removing their incentive to post videos, and you pull in fewer viewers, resulting in fewer ad sales to YouTube's customers. Sadly, the most affected are those who cover niche categories, which means YouTube can afford to fuck…

>Yes, I consider 90% loss in revenue for their bait, err, content creators to be worthy of the phrase "fucking it up" I'm not certain Google are "fucking it up," or at least, that this effect isn't intentional. How much revenue do those niche creators generate for Google? How much first party content do they include, that media companies might object to? Google may consider them to be a risk not worth the reward if t…

It comes down to what do you (or what should Google) value more:

Varied content covering a broad range of topics, pulling in broad and varied audiences

or

Google's short-term bottom line.

Personally, I value the former, which is why I think that Google is doing it wrong. Focusing exclusively on the bottom line doesn't help society, doesn't even really help companies in the long run. If you fire your entire R&D team, you'll goose the bottom line, at the cost of your company's future. If you (effectively) fire your content creators, you endanger the future of your video platform.

Everyone yells "Patreon" as the solution for content creators, but this is a bad thing for Google. It removes their control over the content creators by removing the biggest form of "stickiness" to the platform.

Twitch started out as a platform for gaming live streams. Youtube is demonetizing gaming videos. It's creating conditions ripe for an exodus of gamers (creators and viewers) from YouTube.

Re: YouTube monetization analysis

#90

Post by krapp »

kakarot wrote: post #81
krapp wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any form of advertising would likely be unacceptable on a platform like this, as would any attempt to enforce copyright or limit the redistribution or reuse of content. Creators would just have to find another way to make money and accept that they have no practical right to "ownership" over the content they upload, regardless of legality. To clarify: I don't believe the set of people willing to adopt a FOSS distribu…

> I don't believe the set of people willing to adopt a FOSS distributed peer-to-peer video streaming platform and the set of people who believe advertising to be tolerable would likely overlap enough to provide a better or more stable market than the existing web already provides. > And advertising on the web is already breaking down and likely doomed to fail as a concept. How did you reach these two conclusions?

From observing the hostility towards advertising on the web grow and become mainstream through the adoption of ad blockers, and ad-driven sites (like Youtube) seeming more and more desperate to actually find profitability through advertising. It seems to me that we're approaching a watershed where advertising on the web just stops being effective.

And at least, on the web, sites can enforce some degree of control over content and have a monetization strategy in place. With a decentralized platform, it's more difficult to integrate and guarantee the efficacy of advertising because it's more difficult to control the platform and user experience.

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