Technology

More adds and less money for creators.... Where is money going? We all know.

I had a video of a newsworthy event a while back that went viral, and I made over 5 grand on it over the course of about 2-3 years when YouTube changed its monetization policy to require like 10k subscribers or something before the creator could monetize.

The video didn't stop getting views. It had a spike in views just a few weeks ago when something similar happened in the same area. But I haven't made any money from it in like 8 years.

Keep moving the goalposts so YT can just keep more of the ad money for themselves and the line moving up. More enshittification, nothing new is created but the service gets worse in the name of profitability.

I used to display Google ad links on my site, they accumulated value - slowly, but Google would only cut a check when you reach $100 worth of ads shown. My earnings approached $100 like an asymptote, halfway there in the first 6 months, 3/4 in the first year, 7/8 in the second year, 15/16 in the third... never did quite reach $100, and so my payout for all my effort and showing of their ads remains to this day $0.

Don't worry, guys. After creators eat THIS shit sandwich it'll stop getting worse and everything will be great.

You can make money on YouTube without having a monetized account. But you can also make money on PeerTube in exactly the same way.

Then they removed their ads from all channels below 8,000 hours, right?... Right?!

Pichai you fucking banchode.

Reminds me of that woman who made science videos on both YouTube and Pornhub and she makes more money on Pornhub.

I know nothing about how YT works. How is 20 million shorts views in 90 days a viable number? That seems ridiculous.

I guess they'll keep pushing it till the line starts going down.

YouTube became evil the moment we all dislike-bombed their year in review video and they never made another one.

And they will continue to bleed talent for every ounce of value they can, just like the record industry, the movie and tv industry, the book industry, the video game industry, enshitification is an emergent property of a degree of value extraction.

Good luck creating content, shittube

For a second, I thought this required creators to watch 8000 hours of videos, and felt relief.

It would at least throw up an obstacle for bot/spam accounts. They’d have to make the effort of watching a bunch of videos.

…But no.

I watch less YouTube than ever thanks to the sheerly ridiculous amount if ads.

Big corp squeezing more money from people “because share holders want progress”. BS

The end result is that channels will just post twice as much slop to get to those hours and actually human creators give up, meaning YouTube becomes even more sloppified.

I subscribed to YouTube Red back in the day, when that’s what it was called.

Then circa early 2018 they changed the rules for monetisation from the previous 10k lifetime views to 1k subs & 4k watch hours over 12 months. That was when I unsubscribed from Red and installed an ad blocker. I had always been anti ad-blocker because my view was that people creating content deserve to get paid for it. That’s still my view in principle, but the increasing enshittification of the web thanks in no small part to shit like this from Google has meant I weigh the pros & cons differently. YouTube showed me very directly that they don’t care about supporting their creators. So I decided I didn’t want to support them anymore. It’s not like this was the first problem…the whole “where’s the fair use” thing came before that, and many other events besides. But cutting off small creators like that, without even grandfathering in existing creators who had been monetised with that threshold, was the last straw for me.

It was also Google’s fault that I moved from Ad Block Plus, which I chose specifically because of its “acceptable ads” policy (basically: let through ads that aren’t obnoxious), to uBlock Origin, which lacked such a policy, after YouTube tried blocking ad blockers from YouTube, and UBO was quicker to adapt.

That’s twice now that Google’s own actions have directly led to me supporting them less than I used to. This won’t be the third time, but only because I have no more cuts to give.

Today I went on shorts and the first video was tucker carlson dropping antisemtic slurs while he cried about ben shapiro. I'm a lib. I don't watch that garbage. straight up shithole company.

At this point I'm convinced that yt just hates smaller creators.

And they will never stop extracting more value. I just want to prop nebula here, it's great for creators and there's a lot of them already on there.

The only thing 'missing' is the commenting system, but to me that's an upgrade.

YouTube says the changes are being introduced to “keep pace with the growth of YouTube, which now sees over 200 billion daily Shorts views and over a billion hours of watch time on TV” every day.

This reminds me of some past employment positions I had with extremely lucrative companies that, upon several employees having pushed and developed their skills to be able to reach production quotas (despite increasing safety hazards), simply raised production standards to avoid paying what was promised (certainly not meeting the threshold of what workers are worth).

In short, if you are a content creator on YouTube, do it for the love of your hobby and make money with your day job.