The Great Youtube Demonetization Apocalypse

Youtube steps up oversight of Preferred programme

I don’t see how this follows from the issues that Youtube seems to have had in 2017. Namely big ass Youtubers behaving badly. People didn’t go around decrying small time Youtubers paying poor people in India to say Nazi stuff. Or maybe they were, but that wasn’t what made advertisers get skittish…

I think this is more about the automated kid-targeted video stuff.

Jesus McMaster, seriously? For the loss of 8-10 freaking dollars per month you’re gonna throw all your work away, take your damn ball and go home?

Shit man I’ll PayPal you $500 right now. That should cover 50 months of ad loss, so you can keep doing your thing? Consider me your Patreon or something.

Haha, I’m in the same boat. What a pain. But for me, at this rate, I’d still need years to see that 100$ check, so it’s never going to happen anyway.

But it’s the principle damn it!

This of course will beg the question : “How do you get started?”.

I see a new market for You Tube bots rising.

You Tube was not started by Google, hopefully a new site will arise.

I’m guessing they have an issue with arbitragers who steal content and set up random channels to make money and the automated checks they have in place for that rely on making having a certain amount of history to make sure it’s real.

They really need to stop that dreck. Dipped a toe in that ocean of content and it ate the flesh to the marrow. Horrendous.

It is interesting that someone posts content which is either illegal or infringement, and though these things are eventually dealt with by You Tube, I am sure Goog keeps the Ad revenue they generated from the views of said content before it was pulled.

I’ll always take 500 dollars, but the money isn’t the point really. I could make a Patreon, but I doubt I’d get support.

Patreon is great. My podcast is on there and even with the small support of my relatively small audience, I don’t entirely cover costs, but I am getting something back at least.

Unless your kids are starving in the streets it should never be about the money. If something is worth doing, it is worth doing. Or it isn’t.

I’ve only been earning 3-8 bucks a month on mine and haven’t even hit the point of getting my first check and then get the email saying ‘F you, stop trying’. pretty frustrating.

fwiw you should definitely create a Patreon. The more ways you give your fans to get support to you the better, especially when one of the ways folds like this. I’m just hoping twitch doesn’t start changing things too since streaming IS my job and it’s hard enough to stay positive when your job is paying $5 a month. lol. Thankfully the woman of the house is ridiculously supportive of me.

Yeah, I agree. It’s just irritating.

This makes no sense unless Google is cheaping out to maximize their own profits. The biggest problem is not the little guy, it’s the people getting tons views - like those who were abusing their kids. They weren’t under the 1,000 subscriber limit. Google is doing a crap job on this. Maybe they should also demonetize all the crazy alt-right conspiracy theory people too trying to sell backyard sprays to protect themselves from passenger jets and their mind control contrails. <--------- I wish I were kidding.

What’s worse is this is going to do the opposite. People will get more desperate to get attention and subscribers instead of trying to build slowly.

YouTube has never made money.

It makes plenty of sense. It almost assuredly costs YouTube more money to remit payments to these small channels than they earn. Why spend money and resources on small channels? Quality does not tend to happen accidentally. If someone has the drive and passion to make a great channel, they will not be put off by the fact that they did not get $5 this month. Conversely, if someone throws in the towel because they did not get $5 they probably do not have the drive and passion to make a successful channel. This is not intended to be a personal knock on anyone here but is a general truism.

YouTube has a number of problems. Their copyright strike system suck. Their algorithms that result in disqualification of advertising revenue suck. Their lack of removing channels that have rather horrific content (from outright falsehoods to stuff done in incredibly poor taste). But not remitting a couple of bucks a month to channels that frankly do not even cover their costs is not one of them.

No way. That kind of stuff scales easily, and as has been mentioned in this thread they batch up the payments in chunks of at least $100. With the 45/55 revenue split, Google’s cut will have been at least $81 by the time they actually transfer any money.

It seems pretty obvious that advertisers are demanding ads only be shown for channels that have been manually reviewed (or maybe even individual videos that have been reviewed). Humans are expensive; they can’t afford to do the manual work for tiny channels. And presumably there’s not enough advertiser demand for a cheaper tier of non-reviewed channels.

The real costs like disk, compute and bandwidth remain, so they’re going to continue spending resources on those small channels. The only change is that they won’t be getting any revenue from them. Previously the ads would cover at least some of the costs, now the small channels are a pure loss.

That’s not something you do due to greed, wanting to stick it to the small creators, or some of the other suggestions in this threads. It has to be due to some near-existential threat.

I’ll still make my videos and stuff. At the end of the day, I have a good job. I’m an engineer that works on emergency systems for 911/Fire Departments. I like my job. I also like making my little videos and enjoy sharing them. It’s just a bit insulting to be monetized for multiple years, having made content that’s been up for over a decade, and then to be removed because “some nebulous threat” is out there.

It wouldn’t take much to see the channels that have operated in good faith for years not be caught up in this stupid sweep, but they aren’t willing to do that.

Have you considered moving to Hawaii? I hear they need an engineer.