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YouTube blocks Russell Brand from making money through its platform

nytimes.com

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Re: YouTube blocks Russell Brand from making money through its platform

#511
post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

His means of supporting himself has not been cancelled, just his ability to get paid from YouTube. Don't conflate them.

There are people whose main income is YouTube and if YouTube can do this to famous people, surely they can do it to smaller creators who are paying their bills with YouTube money. Don't be confused by the situation and the precedent it establishes.

The precedent has already been established well before YouTube made this decision.

In most places in the US you can lose your livelihood for any reason or no reason at all, safe for protected classes.

I’d rather see this energy be used to end fire at will and protect employees in general from losing their livelihood on a whim than to use this to pander to celebrities with questionable pasts under the guise of “it could happen to you!”

Re: YouTube blocks Russell Brand from making money through its platform

#512

Did I read this correctly? It sounds like YouTube will continue to host his content, but will now pocket the money they would have paid him. That doesn't seem right to me. If they were to cease hosting his material, that would maych their corporate-speak blurb. This sounds to me like more money for YouTube.

YouTube has been doing this for a while. If you’re just starting out and don’t qualify to become a “partner”, you can’t monetize your videos until you reach X amount of subscribers and Y amount of watch hours. This doesn’t mean your videos won’t have ads on them. They most assuredly will have ads on them. It just means that YouTube doesn’t consider you good enough to share the revenue with you. Load of BS of course.…

operating the service isn't free and there's going to be some fixed cost component of introducing a new partner arrangement

as long as the number isn't too high I don't really see a problem with it

Re: YouTube blocks Russell Brand from making money through its platform

#513
post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do any of us know what percentage of his income is from YouTube currently? I think the point stands in the abstract. It doesn't even matter for him specifically, because there are people whose income is primarily/entirely from YouTube. And so we should appreciate what a serious action that is, to turn it off. It's not like it's just play money, that we can pretend it doesn't matter. It's real income.

You can get fired from a job that is 100% of your income. In many places/occupations, for no reason at all.

[in the US]

Re: YouTube blocks Russell Brand from making money through its platform

#514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt YouTube worries about being demonetized by advertisers at this point. Where exactly will this advertisers go to advertise on long form videos otherwise?

> I doubt YouTube worries about being demonetized by advertisers at this point. They've been the target of that twice at least, in 2017 over hate speech [1], in 2019 over pedos[2]. Large brands spend insane amounts of money on advertising, and they do not want their content to appear next to people facing allegations of sexual misconduct or otherwise bad behavior. Hell just look at Twitter and how much advertising in…

[deleted]

Re: YouTube blocks Russell Brand from making money through its platform

#516

> “If a creator’s off-platform behavior harms our users, employees or ecosystem, we take action to protect the community,” the spokeswoman said. Putting aside the validity of the accusations—let's say he did everything he's accused of, for the sake of argument—is Youtube alleging that he assaulted Youtube employees, app developers who use the Youtube ecosystem, or Youtube users? I assume the latter. But the thing is,…

Allegedly. If a bunch of people come forward accusing you of assault, odds are pretty good you did it. However, private businesses punishing people for having charges brought against them but not yet tried? That's judge, jury and executioner, which is incompatible with the set of laws that the US is built on - for which the source material was English Law, and precedent even older than that. So an American company pr…

>is the beginning of another level of dystopia none of us wants

This 'dystopia' is called freedom of association and I can confidentially tell you that I personally support the rights of any business to choose who they enter contracts with and not to do business with a likely sex offender, so I think you ought to speak for yourself.

There is no basis on which to compel a private business to host everyone's content and I would in fact consider that to be quite dystopian.

Re: YouTube blocks Russell Brand from making money through its platform

#517

> “If a creator’s off-platform behavior harms our users, employees or ecosystem, we take action to protect the community,” the spokeswoman said. Putting aside the validity of the accusations—let's say he did everything he's accused of, for the sake of argument—is Youtube alleging that he assaulted Youtube employees, app developers who use the Youtube ecosystem, or Youtube users? I assume the latter. But the thing is,…

>If a creator’s off-platform behavior harms our users, employees or ecosystem

It's just a euphemism for people.

Re: YouTube blocks Russell Brand from making money through its platform

#518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I doubt YouTube worries about being demonetized by advertisers at this point. They've been the target of that twice at least, in 2017 over hate speech [1], in 2019 over pedos[2]. Large brands spend insane amounts of money on advertising, and they do not want their content to appear next to people facing allegations of sexual misconduct or otherwise bad behavior. Hell just look at Twitter and how much advertising in…

Maybe a bit too conspiratorial but I can easily imagine some Google exec asking advertisers: "Give as a casus belli for a crack down on free speech".

It is way too conspiratorial, simply because when it's demonetized it's still shown completely for free with no limits on number of views.

It's as simple as the execs at every fortune 500 company with an advertising budget being religious in some form and being shown "here's your Diet Coke ad next to " by someone with an agenda/some journalist' article. Even if they don't really care, it's enough of a reason to go to Google and get a marketing discount for x years.

Re: YouTube blocks Russell Brand from making money through its platform

#519
post #405

Google is not a monopoly. Youtube is not a monopoly. Google ads is not a monopoly.

I don’t think it’s unreasonable at all to argue that YouTube has an effective monopoly in the video sharing space. Yes, there are certainly other platforms — Vimeo, Rumble, etc. — but purely in terms of reachability, YouTube absolutely holds near-absolute reign here. Trying to effectively monetize video content on other platforms, from what I understand, is extremely unlikely for the vast majority of creators.

And while there’s a valid counter-argument in some of the numbers creators on X have put up (e.g., Tucker Carlson), those are really the exceptional cases.

I could see Brand going straight over to X, but I don’t know if that’s sufficient to really argue that YouTube isn’t effectively a monopoly in the space.

Re: YouTube blocks Russell Brand from making money through its platform

#520

Anonymous allegations from more than a decade ago, procured by a fishing reporter, should not lead to the cancellation of someone's means of supporting themselves. This is absurd, regardless of whether the accusations are ultimately true or not. Beyond the absurdity, this is tyrannical. Even the "testimony" they released was recorded by an actor. There's simply very little of substance here.

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