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YouTube will now show ads on all videos even if creators don’t want them

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Re: YouTube will now show ads on all videos even if creators don’t want them

#711
post #695

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Creators" went for direct monetisation because de-monetisation can happen on youtube for almost any arbitrary reason and there is almost no way to contact a human (as far as I am aware) to remedy such a situation.

So how does this work for content that they decide to demonetize? Does Google just run ads and take the money now?

I don't know. They have already had "not advertiser friendly" caveat which is a way of just disqualifying anyone they like.

There has been several moral panics incited by the conventional media (TV, newspapers etc) about adverts being displayed alongside edgy content a while back. Several rounds of this eventually brought about a TOS change where they could deem you "not advertiser friendly". This of course ignored that Google does targeted advertising.

Some claim it is "political" however I believe it is simpler than that. It gave youtube an excuse to stop paying people without outright removing them from the platform which saves them a fair bit of money and doesn't quite bring the same outrage from the respective fanbases as outright removing people. In addition to that the people that have been demonetised have ranged from progressives, anarcho-communists, people doing ben-shapiro compilation videos and edgy boys and girls that tend to shitpost. So I don't see anything political about it.

They've also made it harder to be monetised on the platform generally, IIRC you can't be monetised at all and cannot receive super chats if you have less than 1000 subscribers. You also can't put custom thumbnails on your videos which makes it harder for your content to get attention.

Re: YouTube will now show ads on all videos even if creators don’t want them

#712
post #609

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple knows that a user with a complaint isn’t necessarily going to stop buying iPhones. Nonsense. People switch to android all the time. Apple’s sales depend wholly on continuing to meet the needs of their customers and providing perceived value. If they fell behind Android in perceived value, or stopped producing what their paying customers want they would lose money. Relatively high switching costs dampens this…

> there’s no magic that keeps Apple customers buying apple products. So then what's the magic that keeps Google users using Google products if they stop producing what their non-paying, but ad-watching customers want? If the answer is "anticompetitive practices", I don't deny that at all, but that has nothing to do with advertising as a revenue model. Just look at Microsoft, they have long been the champions of antic…

> So then what's the magic that keeps Google users using Google products if they stop producing what their non-paying, but ad-watching customers want?

Free is one hell of a competitive advantage. And again, Google does enough to keep the customers coming back as much as the rancher does to help the cow grow. The rubber really hits the road when you consider customer's need for say, privacy.

Or, try and get Google to help you out if your account gets locked. Good luck. Now if you're having issues with your ad account, they'll happily hop on the phone to figure it out with you....

> The needs of the users are the needs of the paying customers, that is what I am saying. Without the users there is no opportunity to have paying customers, period.

An overlap in requirements is not the same thing as being the same thing. For a short while, the rancher meets the cows needs too.

> Users choose to use Google products in exchange for ad impressions.

Unclear. Users choose Google products because they're free, it's not obvious if they fully understand the implications of that, or if they see that they have a meaningful choice.

Re: YouTube will now show ads on all videos even if creators don’t want them

#714
post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly my thought. As much as I hate advertising and Google business practices, I would rather pay to avoid advertisements if that is an option. For $15/month family plan for 6 users, I find it to be a reasonable deal.

Currently in the US, YT Premium (Family) is $17.99/month.

> $17.99/month

That... is quite steep as compared to India, where the family plan for YT Premium (if I recall correctly) costs Rs. 99/month, approximately $1.33/month. PPP is real :|

Re: YouTube will now show ads on all videos even if creators don’t want them

#715

This move is consistent with the hypothesis that Google is dying. I'll admit though that my predictions on the next place they would start to monetize was not these videos. And I expect this action to see some litigation (basically Google restricts who can be a 'partner' and forces you to allow them to monetize your video without compensation if you aren't a partner, that is basically copyright infringement of the co…

“Dying” is quite the stretch. I think a better description would be “trying to squeeze as much revenue from existing products”.

Perhaps. Maybe it is like a plane that is consistently losing altitude. At some point that becomes unsustainable. My reasoning is as follows;

The only business that makes a profit in all of the Alphabet companies is search advertising. Everything else lives off the excess thrown off by search. Which isn't to say that they don't have other large business revenues, just that they don't make any money. Youtube being the poster child. And it consistently skates the line between slight profit and slight loss and never comes close to the margins that Google would need to make it an independent P&L center.

Then, the profits on search ads have been falling, for at least a decade now. Inside Google that was reflected by cutting costs and deleting benefits. Killing projects that weren't profitable and shedding businesses that weren't ever going to be profitable. Then it started showing up by more an more ads on things. The sad truth is that if you are getting less per ad, you can always add additional "inventory" and keep your numbers looking good. The cost has been that search results have suffered.

I worked there 4 years. Got a good look inside the sausage factory as it were, and frankly the huge profitability of search ads in the beginning instilled a culture that literally couldn't see operational efficiency as a thing. I don't think they will be able to shed that culture before it is too late. But what is too late?

Well if you can't find a business to cover the profits that are evaporating from search, you have two choices, cut costs or monetize more. The former makes you not a 'fun place to work' and cuts into recruiting and productivity, the latter cuts into market share as your product is less and less differentiated. Say what you want about Marissa Mayer, she did get that aspect of Google. And if you're old enough to remember Alta Vista, the "premier" web search engine from 1995, you probably watched how. when it lost its edge against Google, it went crazy with advertising to try to pull up from a collision with bankruptcy.

One need only look at two things, the amount of money Google is increasingly paying to people to send search traffic to it, and the growth of "search engines" like Duck Duck Go which use Bing results to populate their SERPs, to see that Google is losing here. Those costs further erode profits and market share.

And when that erosion hits hard enough it becomes self sustaining, like a dam that has a small crack which becomes a torrent.

A number of people I know from the search business, former Googlers, some who are still Googlers, investors, media, and engineers I met while working on building and deploying the Blekko search engine with their founding team, are all following along as well. I don't think one of them thinks Google is "doing well" at this point. Sure lots of people were skeptical back in 2012 when I started saying it, but now pretty much everyone can see the pattern. Tick, tock, tick, tock.

Now don't misunderstand. We would all love for them to pull out of their current trajectory[1], but temper that hope with observations that they are not. I have seen too many "Gorillas" (in the Geoffrey Moore lexicon) go down this path to have any reasonable expectation that they will survive it. If they follow the classical Silicon Valley playbook, they need to finish their masterpiece "Grand Headquarters Vision" so that they leave behind a tomb for others to remember them by. I have some great memories of TGIF meetings at Google which were held in Building 42, which had been the centerpiece of Silicon Graphics view of its rightful place in the world. I tried to tell them to be respectful of the ghosts that walked the halls, but they didn't understand what I was saying.

[1] Well to be honest a couple of them would be happy to see Google die but I'm not one of them.

Re: YouTube will now show ads on all videos even if creators don’t want them

#717

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you even have a few thousand people regularly watching you (whcih is common these days). The bandwidth costs start to add up.

Not really. Good dedicated servers come with multiple TB free = 1000x 1 GB stream. And usually it's only pennies afterwards.

Without a CDN, the streaming experience is going to suck for anyone outside of the geographic proximity of your dedicated server

Re: YouTube will now show ads on all videos even if creators don’t want them

#718

Earlier quoted context omitted.

20 second unskippable ads about cat food (I don't have a cat) to watch a 1 minute video. No thanks YouTube!

It's worse when you are trying to put a soothing music to put your baby to sleep and it starts with a loud ad which wakes her up. Or now that she is a toddler, her nursery rhyme videos have political campaign ads in the middle of the song.

Of course, many of those nursery rhymes were political ads originally.

Little Donny Trumpet went out on a junket, swatting his golf balls away...

Re: YouTube will now show ads on all videos even if creators don’t want them

#720

I know there are several content creators (such as Jim Sterling) that have their videos ad-free as a perk for their supporters (since he's supported enough via Patreon). He's pretty angry about this change. I somewhat understand Google's stance on this, as it's a service that should be allowed to make money even on people who don't want to make money. They don't really have such a way to opt out of pretty much any ot…

Hmm it’s almost as if G/youtube has a monopoly in the internet video space.
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