Watch Out Google, YouTubers Are Unionizing • Hacker News Board

Re: Watch Out Google, YouTubers Are Unionizing

#251

Post by scarejunba » Thu, Aug 15, 2019, 10:16 AM UTC

wisty wrote: post #171

username90 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A typical full time content creator creates a new video per day. To go full time you'd need a couple of thousand per month, lets say $2,000. With these numbers that is 500k to 8 million views a month, or around 15k to 350k views a video. That might not sound like a lot, but given that it is for the entire world you can fit basically any niche within those numbers. Go full time crushing things with an hydraulic press?…

> That might not sound like a lot, but given that it is for the entire world you can fit basically any niche within those numbers. A common fallacy in business. > Go full time crushing things with an hydraulic press? Yes! Go full time discussing medieval weapons? Yes! Go full time building things with no tools from scratch in the woods? Yes! Go full time trying to beat Super Mario as fast as possible? Double yes! And…

He's mentioning each of a few very successful YouTubers. I'm sure all of these competitors exist but the YouTubers are killing it.

Re: Watch Out Google, YouTubers Are Unionizing

#252

Post by Mediterraneo10 » Thu, Aug 15, 2019, 11:02 AM UTC

Smithalicious wrote: post #231

Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The academic and hobbyist internet is fine, and not that much different from the old days. YouTube, and dreams of monetization, have infected the hobbyist internet too. I am active in some niche travel hobbies. It used to be that people in this subculture would write detailed text blogs with tips about various routes and definitions. Now, people think video is the default medium for sharing one’s information, and s…

People just go to where the audience is. I've considered both starting a blog and starting a YouTube channel, and realized that if I actually want people to see my content then only YouTube makes sense. After all, I don't even follow any blogs myself! Maybe one day there will be a platform that makes following blogs as convenient as following youtubers

> Maybe one day there will be a platform that makes following blogs as convenient as following youtubers

There was such a platform: the RSS ecosystem. Unfortunately, Google managed to attract something like 80% of the market to its offering, Google Reader, and then it shut Google Reader down, which basically killed off RSS. RSS does remain today, but it is a shadow of what it once was.

Re: Watch Out Google, YouTubers Are Unionizing

#253

Post by derefr » Thu, Aug 15, 2019, 2:03 PM UTC

eclipxe wrote: post #223

derefr wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In such an alternative approach, YouTube would still be taking a cut of the fees as the payment-processor interceding between advertisers and content-creators. Their business model would be equivalent to that of Patreon's, in the sense that when the content-creator gets paid, they get paid. With current YouTube, any fees paid in by advertisers are theirs to do with as they like, and payment-of-content-creators is jus…

But...why?

Because then YouTube has no incentive (or ability, really) to prevent what it thinks of as “advertiser-unfriendly” content-creators from being monetized. As long as there are advertisers making deals with a content creator, that content creator is, by definition, advertiser friendly.

Re: Watch Out Google, YouTubers Are Unionizing

#254

Post by pwinnski » Thu, Aug 15, 2019, 4:52 PM UTC

patrioticaction wrote: post #240

pwinnski wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure why this is hard for you to understand. Is your contention that nobody popular has ever stopped making videos on YouTube? Or that YouTube has already lost a large chunk of viewers due to popular former-YouTubers no longer making videos? Neither of those statements are true, but you seem to be commenting as if one or the other are. I'm not arguing that the YouTube market is perfect, but that the gap betwe…

The reason top YouTube content is so good is because creators have spent many years honing their skill and building relationships. That can’t be easily replaced and I also must say that the revenue of College Humors’s Dropout service is an indication of a lost opportunity for YouTube. If done in larger amounts, it could be death by a thousand cuts. Plenty of reason to come to the negotiating table.

Okay, I think you are now making what seems like a different argument, and I agree to an extent, but only an extent.

Top brands -- like College Humor -- are never going to be happy on YouTube forever. The cream of the crop cannot be kept happy forever. If CH decides they'd rather keep 100% of X ad revenue instead of smaller-percentage of Y ad revenue, and that the math will work out in their favor, they're gone, and there is nothing YouTube could do to keep them. After all, why should CH work as serfs on YouTube's property when they can be lords of their own?

There are very, very few people who can make the math work, given the expense of supplying streaming video (which fortunately, CH has been doing themselves for a very long time already) and building/keeping an audience, etc, but there will always be some.

And yet, to my point, YouTube doesn't seem to be suffering. There's no way for YouTube to keep 100% of all video revenue, and it's possible that enough popular YouTubers acting in concert via collective action might figure out how to extract slightly more from YouTube, but most popular YouTubers are making more money from Patreon than YouTube themselves, and YouTube is still a big enough player that they can afford to wait out quite a few high-profile defectors, most of whom will come limping back after things turn out to be harder elsewhere than they expect.

Google knows what percentage of time is spent on big high-profile YouTubers vs mid-range and lower. I suspect the long tail is very, very long indeed. A Logan Paul might want to believe he's crucial to YouTube's success, but I don't think he's more than a tiny blip.

Re: Watch Out Google, YouTubers Are Unionizing

#255

Post by fucking_tragedy » Thu, Aug 15, 2019, 6:56 PM UTC

preommr wrote: post #237

Isn't this kind of good for youtube? They've been struggling with better organization and would probably like to deal with one collective than many small youtubers. It would probably help with things like better overall quality, better understanding of legal issues like parodies, better communication, etc. In a worst case scenario, how much can a union even hurt youtube? If they decided to go on strike, the barrier t…

Power structures see other power structures as a threat. Google would like to be able to do what they want, whenever they want, without having to negotiate with another entity, or even worse, getting sued by another entity.

Re: Watch Out Google, YouTubers Are Unionizing

#256

Post by autoexec » Thu, Aug 15, 2019, 7:56 PM UTC

scarejunba wrote: post #250

autoexec wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Without ads YouTube is worthless to Google. Nonmonetized content isn't bringing revenue to Google. S Google gets huge volumes of valuable data with nearly every video that's uploaded. Google knows things like who the uploader is, what kind of people are in their home and their approximate ages, what clothes they wear, what products they buy, what pets they own, what interests they have. They also get data on every…

You're overestimating the value of this data. It is not worth that much.

You underestimate the value of data. Our personal data is what has allowed google to become what they are today. it's worth so much that companies are grabbing up as much as they possibly can and the data brokers who are selling and buying it are a multi-billion dollar industry

Re: Watch Out Google, YouTubers Are Unionizing

#257

Post by scarejunba » Thu, Aug 15, 2019, 9:00 PM UTC

autoexec wrote: post #256

scarejunba wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're overestimating the value of this data. It is not worth that much.

You underestimate the value of data. Our personal data is what has allowed google to become what they are today. it's worth so much that companies are grabbing up as much as they possibly can and the data brokers who are selling and buying it are a multi-billion dollar industry

Are you in the programmatic advertising business? I am, and have been for about half a decade, and I'm confident you valuing this incorrectly. As a matter of fact, I was at one such data company until recently.

Re: Watch Out Google, YouTubers Are Unionizing

#258

Post by dredmorbius » Fri, Aug 16, 2019, 6:56 PM UTC

munificent wrote: post #75

anon1m0us wrote: post #9

What they should do is collectively take their content somewhere else. As an aside, I'm seeing the same pattern at Amazon. People thought they were opening a business on amazon selling retail. Then amazon started selling the profitable products themselves, storing the products themselves, ... basically doing more and more of the work and taking more control and taking money from the people who helped them become powe…

> What they should do is collectively take their content somewhere else. This will have almost no effect. YouTube does not have a quantity problem. They have enough content that every YouTube user could watch YouTube 24 hours a day for the rest of their lives and never see the same video twice. They wouldn't even have to go deep into their back catalog. Worse, viewers have relatively little attachment to any particul…

People ... or at least, the demographic attractive to advertisers, won't watch endless hours of dreck. That's what's streaming on OTA broadcast now, and the audience and advertisers are in an ever accelerating race to the bottom. YouTube knows network effects and virtual and vicious feedback cycles.

There is a wealth of content on YouTube, including a surprising amount of niche content. But there are a limited number of very high value creators -- a circumstance that's always the case. High-level creativity takes talent, time, some degree of money, and a network that's conducive to it -- which has an audience that can, will, and does find and view it.

Right now, that dynamic plays strongly to YouTube's benefit, though there are some extant alternatives -- Vimeo specialises in higher-quality content, Facebook and Reddit offer social "friends-and-family" or short-content platforms, and there are emerging platforms such as PeerTube which offer federated hosting options.

Mind: PeerTube presently has significant limitations, and I was discussing the issue with a video producer earlier this week:

https://mastodon.social/@unfa/102599106680590597

Re: Watch Out Google, YouTubers Are Unionizing

#259

Post by kazen44 » Sat, Aug 17, 2019, 2:05 PM UTC

fucking_tragedy wrote: post #84

Mirioron wrote: post #32

I don't see how this would work. Creators are from all across the world and many of them have to deal with wildly different issues due to a differing legal system. Furthermore, being a youtuber isn't something that's clearly defined either, because there are many that create content for a bit and then never create content again.

This is a solved problem, many unions are international. The AFL-CIO is the largest federation of unions in the US and is international.

unions have a history of internationalism aswell, considering their close ties to ideologies which have internationalism as a core tenant. (social democracy, socialism, communism etc).