The Great Youtube Demonetization Apocalypse

Yeah seems a bit complex. Apparently cloning youtube is hard functionally? I am not a web programmer so I have no idea but it is odd when you have a market leader who is (maybe?) making mistakes that nobody is willing to come along and just take a cut of the market share by cloning it.

Its just surprising I guess?

The video hosting functionality isn’t all that difficult in a macro sense. What’s difficult is is creating an Advertising ecosystem where advertisers want to spend a lot of money on video content w/o a guarantee on content quality.

Thanks. Interesting!

I guess at a minimum I do wonder why there are not like fifty start ups trying to clone youtube (without advertisers yet just building up users).

I mean, there are start ups on frankly far more crazy businesses right now. Just seems odd to me.

I would guess the macro part actually is rather difficult - think about how much bandwidth YouTube must need every minute, and how much storage the site needs. It’s something Google can do that most other people that aren’t already Amazon probably can’t.

Beyond that, there’s the simple problem that someone trying to break into that space would need to convince investors that they can compete with Google. That seems rather unlikely in 2017.

Is pewdiepie even demonetized? I feel like he is one of those examples of a performer who can do anything without getting hurt.

My problem with the adpocalypse is that it makes no sense and is just stupid.

From what i remember, it started from an unconfirmed report that there was a coke ad on a terrorist recruitment video on youtube. This resulted in videos like political talk shows, news shows, random IRL performers and other silly things being destroyed. To be clear, their algorithm is not smart targeting highly offensive/illegal content, it is blanket targeting a lot of innocents that are significantly less controversial than even stuff you see on local channels.

At the same time, companies like coke are more than happy to buy ads during stuff that is truly not safe for kids/work such as mass shooting coverage, cable series with extreme nudity/violence or basically anything on fox news. They aren’t afraid to be associated with the content, they are afraid of negative coverage from “some random moron” making a stink about how there is a coke ad on hate speech out of millions of videos.

That’s not the only instance - there’s been a lot of videos that have gotten press online over the past year around unsafe Youtuber narrations on safe video content, Nazi slurs being thrown around, etc. that’s gotten Advertisers nervous across the board and have used it as ammo to try to prove to Google that their existing protections aren’t sufficient.

As you can probably tell from this thread I work in the online ads industry and I would say that YT’s hands are more tied than not due to advertiser uproar although there are probably better methods to implement this to give clearer guidance to YT creators.

Leaving aside the fact there are places like Vimeo and DailyMotion, it doesn’t seem that surprising that startups don’t fancy competing with a deeply entrenched incumbent operator that together with Facebook also garners half of all internet advertising revenue worldwide.

Fair points. I guess it just strikes me as weird there is a seemingly endless supply of start ups competing for the limited market of carrying my food from an SF restaurant to my office, I would have thought there would be at least a dozen trying to compete for what is the massive market of online videos.

My company uses youtube to make company profile movies, because its the single best vehicle for companies to embed their videos on social media - its ease of use, really. I imagine its REALLY hard for a start up to get the traction needed to get facebook, linkedin, twitter and what have we to make their videoes easily embeddable.

Remember when it was a big deal that Microsoft was including IE as part of the OS and Netscape was furious and it all went to court? Yeah.

I think you meant to write Micro$haft there.

The unique situation of San Francisco seems to encourage a lot of startups that don’t actually make a whole lot of sense anywhere else, or at least certainly don’t have a strong enough model to support many competitors. Even the food delivery thing, which is relatively sane compared to, say, subscription juice bag squeezing, is not very profitable at scale. The biggest operators in the UK are losing money hand over fist, apart from the one that doesn’t have to pay drivers, and the sector is already consolidating.

I do! I also notice that IE is still built into Windows and they’re pushing their IE replacement to the point where I’ve had to unset it as the default browser after Windows updates a couple of times. meanwhile Netscape isn’t a thing anymore. The times we live in, I guess.

Stuff is changing

I thought this, on big advertisers doing their own algorithmic demonetisation, was interesting.

To be fair deliveroo are keeping delivery prices artifically low and staffing up assuming further expansion in classic internet startup style. I think the business model does make sense, in cities at least.

Deliveroo a) is doing the Uber thing of exploiting its workforce in an arguably illegal and almost certainly unsustainable manner, and b) has zero profitability, even on a gross margin basis. That said, I do think that sector is more likely to work, albeit in a less transformational way than its proponents suggest, than some models. After all, food delivery was a thing before the internet, no reason why it shouldn’t be one after.

Well, YouTube is demonetizing my channel in 30 days because I don’t have 1000 subscribers. So, the hundreds of hours of work I’ve done to make 8-10 dollars a month is now going to stop so that fuckheads like Logan Paul can make a few more bucks!! I’l going to make all my videos private and delete all my stuff.

I hope they enjoy!

Yup. Lots more here:

That’s why starting today, new channels will need to have 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 hours of watch time within the past 12 months to be eligible for ads. We will begin enforcing these new requirements for existing channels in YPP beginning February 20th, 2018.

Moving forward, the channels included in Google Preferred will be manually reviewed and ads will only run on videos that have been verified to meet our ad-friendly guidelines.

This combination of hard-to-game user signals and improved abuse indicators will help us reward the creators who make engaging content while preventing bad actors and spammers from gaming the system in order to monetize unsuitable content. While this new approach will affect a significant number of channels eligible to run ads, the creators who will remain part of YPP represent more than 95% of YouTube’s reach for advertisers.

Basically, small channels get screwed hard.

I guess I shouldn’t take this so hard, but I’ve spent the last year pushing hard for my channel and working hard on content and now this. I had almost hit my first 100 dollar threshold and now I never will. It’s just incredibly disheartening.