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.
They aren’t doing this to screw the small channels or brand-new creative people. In a sense it is to maximize their revenue, but not the way you think-- it isn’t about saving the $0.47/month they paid out to McMaster, and it isn’t about the administrative overhead required to pay him either.
It really is about advertisers. YouTube has a huge problem with offensive content, and their advertisers have had enough of it. Partner adspace is sold differently than non-partner videos. It’s supposed to be premium. YouTube has to effectively police partnered videos, and they’ll hemorrhage money (as opposed to the torrent they’re already losing) if they have to spend the effort to moderate those extremely tiny channels.
They set the bar to monetization really low, too. 1000 subscribers isn’t much. I subscribe to this guy who reviews universally shitty “as seen on TV” products. His channel has been around for just over a year and he has 40k subscribers.
To be clear, it’s only the Preferred channels that are getting manually reviewed. Ordinary Partners have stricter requirements for monetisation, but it’s still automated and based on user policing. So Partners are now the cheaper tier of non-reviewed channels.
I honestly don’t know how they make money. Can anybody here tell me they have seen a youtube video advertisement (15 sec, 30 sec, skipable pre-viewing or a yellow tick pop up box) and made a purchase based on that? Brand awareness value. I remember a Toyota commercial and that’s about it. Mostly because it had some kids kicking a soccer ball and the music was upbeat and catchy. My brain is programmed to skip youtube advertisements at this point.
As an aside, did google adwords disappear at some point. I just noticed that they aren’t there…again probably because my brain auto filtered them out. Does google still make money that way?
Edit nevermind. I guess I just don’t search for things like “socks” anymore. Funny if you type in turn based strategy there are no advertisements. God. The money I wasted on that. LOL
I haven’t seen an advertisement of any kind since late 1999 when I bought a TiVo Series 1. Anywhere. I block everything, comprehensively, at all times. I even run PiHole to block ads inside apps.
The thing that makes me really hate youtube and the advertisers here is how uneven they are about worrying about their brand.
These advertisers have zero problem putting their ads next to violence, sex, nudity, controversial content, political stuff, etc on TV. It is only when it comes to youtube that they start going crazy and don’t want to advertise on a channel about someone destroying fake zombie heads.
I’ve clicked through on a few things, sometimes to support the person who’s channel it is, sometimes because of real interest (upcoming movie I didn’t know about).
I can’t even find his migrated account here though. Looks like he got super-nuked before the migration, all his posts are merged in with anonymous_user which is… not a fun account to look at.
