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Are you there to speak freely or are you there for the ad revenue? They actually disallow very little. But if ad revenue is what you want, be advertiser friend

Are you there to speak freely or are you there for the ad revenue? They actually disallow very little. But if ad revenue is what you want, be advertiser friendly. There's nothing unreasonable about that.

narrator 9y ago
What about monetizing via Patreon? I watch a few channels that do this such as S/V Delos.
- CM30 9y ago
  Patreon is good when it works, but it's got even more of an uneven 'curve' than ad revenue. If you're not a massive celebrity with a huge following, your Patreon will at best pay the equivalent of a minimum wage job and more likely pay far less than that. For example, based on some channels I subscribe to: Boundary Break has 178,000 subscribers, and makes $844 a month on Patreon. A Start Show has 500,000 subscribers, making $429 a month on Patreon. Source Gaming makes $80 a month with 4000 subscribers and Top Hat Gaming Man $120 a month with about 7000. They all make good content, but they certainly wouldn't make enough to live on through Patreon alone if they were required to. And even that's more money than a lot of creators make from it. I know good YouTube creators whose Patreon accounts bring them either literally nothing or between $5 and $15 a month. In other words, Patreon basically never makes as much money for a creator as YouTube ads and monetisation does, and even the best cases (people with millions of fans) make at best a lower middle class income from it. It's just not viable for most YouTubers.
  - prawn 9y ago
    How much time are those individuals putting into their channels? I know quality videos take a lot of effort, but is it consistently 40+ hours a week? It's not dangerous, no longer requires expensive equipment, rarely involves a commute. I think most people would rather play or talk about games than flip burgers.
    - CM30 9y ago
      From what I've seen, a lot of time. These people aren't just discussing anything about games or what not, they're actively researching stories no one else has covered online yet. For example, the Boundary Break channel is all about reverse engineering games to disable camera restrictions and take them outside the game world. That takes a lot of time to set up, especially as each game needs to be treated as its own thing due to how they're coded. Probably dozens of hours with the community on Discord figuring how the camera format works, then even more using it to explore the hell out of the game to find interesting stuff before even making the video. Or in the case of Slopes Game Room/Guru Larry/Top Hat Gaming Man, looking into game series and games either from decades past (which have very little documentation online) or aspects of games people didn't know about. It's only thanks to them that stuff like Drivergate (a scandal where a video game magazine publisher gave artificially inflated reviews to a broken game to get the reviews out early) came to the surface or got added to Wikipedia in the first place. A lot of time goes into these videos, it's just a lot more of it likely goes to research and journalism than editing.
    - manigandham 9y ago
      As described in the article, it takes a ton of time. Often editing the video can easily take twice as long as shooting it, which itself can take much longer than the final video length even for something as simple as a talk show. There's a lot of work that goes into any decent show and it climbs exponentially with quality.
      - corobo 9y ago
        I've found editing video is often anywhere from 4:1 to 8:1 ratio (edit:shooting) depending on how much effort goes into the video. This probably comes down with experience
    - icanhackit 9y ago
      > but is it consistently 40+ hours a week? The problem with creative work is that the fruits of your labour are nonlinear. A single dumb video made in the spirit of the moment might get a million views, while one that you toiled over for days receives only a fraction of that. Of course doing nothing gets you nothing, but using hours-worked as a yardstick probably won't work.
  - jopsen 9y ago
    It's hard but not impossible. My favorite channel thegreatwar seems to pull in 16k/month on patreon.com But, yes the web needs some form of micro payment system to replace ads.
    - narrator 9y ago
      There's Steemit. What's interesting is that the ads take care of themselves since you can buy as many upvotes as you want and all the other creators who get legit upvotes get paid out of that.
  - narrator 9y ago
    I just checked and S/V Delos makes $10,000 a video. They do have something really unusual and unique going on though, sailing around the world and all. I would also imagine that they are watched by an older demographic probably with a lot of disposable income.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - mullen 9y ago
      SV Delos is one of the first "Watch Us Sail Around the World" You Tube Channels. They got in earlier and they do go to some great places and have some great adventures. Most sailing channels are, "Look at us, we're in the Bahamas, drinking beer!" It also helps that Delos has a great crew and they do rotate in a group of good looking women who don't have problems with getting topless or naked and it not have it be sexual.
  - shalmanese 9y ago
    OTOH, Binging with Babish is making $9000 a month with a million subscribers. In general, monetizing off nerds is tough. Once you move outside of nerddom, people tend to be more willing to fork out money for goods.
csallen 9y ago
Au contraire, I think the effect that advertisers have on what can and can't be said via popular channels is something we should all care about. It's easy to say, "Just stop advertising," but producing valuable content is expensive. Advertiser-funded outlets are at a tremendous financial advantage, and that translates directly into higher viewership. Consequently, we get the vast majority of our news, information, and opinions from advertiser-funded institutions. Furthermore, the majority of advertising dollars come from clients who share similar attributes with each other (rich, corporate, favoring the status quo, etc.), so their perspectives and agendas tend to align. The result is that contradictory perspectives are pushed to the sidelines, no matter how correct, logical, popular, or morally superior they may be. The fact that people aren't allowed to discuss war on YouTube is something we should all be concerned about. It's de facto propaganda. This applies to more traditional media, too, not just the internet. There are all sorts of topics that advertisers won't "allow" even the mainstream media to dwell on for too long.
- paulsutter 9y ago
  If there is significant amounts of content that has been overzealously blocked by google, then there are advertisers that want access to that (currently) lower-valued inventory. The value of that inventory should normalize based on the number of advertisers who want access to it. If YouTube doesn't make it available to those advertisers who would accept it, someone else should. That is, if there is (a) enough inventory and (b) enough advertisers (and if not it's an immaterial issue) Keep in mind that what's material to Google is significantly larger than what may be material for a small company. Google is focused on finding their next $10B in revenue.
- endgame 9y ago
  Agreed: http://sealedabstract.com/rants/re-xkcd-1357-free-speech/ http://sealedabstract.com/rants/re-xkcd-1357-free-speech/
- frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
  On the other hand, it also does a good job of removing what I might call accidental propaganda. Most youtube videos are not even skin deep, running off of one article in the news they read, and some youtube person is going to have almost no real understanding when making a video about Syria for example. By removing the people who are only there to drive clicks and revenues, I can probably get better results when I search for a serious topic. Maybe some topics should be left to pure enthusiasts.
majani 9y ago
Advertiser friendly also means having considerable audience numbers. If I could hazard a guess, I'd say most of the big YouTube channels have built their numbers up with edginess as their differentiator and they worry about losing that.
beager 9y ago
This is an excellent justification for something like Patreon, and for all the speech that YouTube must know is a nonstarter for advertisers, they should integrate or replicate Patreon for their creators. Not as a replacement for ads, but as a way to enable all of the content that belongs on the internet.
markdown 9y ago
Currently you're either allowed to host ads, or you're not. The compromise would be to have a separate pool you get assigned to where advertisers can choose to use your videos. That way a gun manufacturer can choose to advertise on a channel that advocates gun violence (an unsavoury example, I know).

narrator 9y ago

What about monetizing via Patreon? I watch a few channels that do this such as S/V Delos.

CM30 9y ago
Patreon is good when it works, but it's got even more of an uneven 'curve' than ad revenue. If you're not a massive celebrity with a huge following, your Patreon will at best pay the equivalent of a minimum wage job and more likely pay far less than that. For example, based on some channels I subscribe to: Boundary Break has 178,000 subscribers, and makes $844 a month on Patreon. A Start Show has 500,000 subscribers, making $429 a month on Patreon. Source Gaming makes $80 a month with 4000 subscribers and Top Hat Gaming Man $120 a month with about 7000. They all make good content, but they certainly wouldn't make enough to live on through Patreon alone if they were required to. And even that's more money than a lot of creators make from it. I know good YouTube creators whose Patreon accounts bring them either literally nothing or between $5 and $15 a month. In other words, Patreon basically never makes as much money for a creator as YouTube ads and monetisation does, and even the best cases (people with millions of fans) make at best a lower middle class income from it. It's just not viable for most YouTubers.
- prawn 9y ago
  How much time are those individuals putting into their channels? I know quality videos take a lot of effort, but is it consistently 40+ hours a week? It's not dangerous, no longer requires expensive equipment, rarely involves a commute. I think most people would rather play or talk about games than flip burgers.
  - CM30 9y ago
    From what I've seen, a lot of time. These people aren't just discussing anything about games or what not, they're actively researching stories no one else has covered online yet. For example, the Boundary Break channel is all about reverse engineering games to disable camera restrictions and take them outside the game world. That takes a lot of time to set up, especially as each game needs to be treated as its own thing due to how they're coded. Probably dozens of hours with the community on Discord figuring how the camera format works, then even more using it to explore the hell out of the game to find interesting stuff before even making the video. Or in the case of Slopes Game Room/Guru Larry/Top Hat Gaming Man, looking into game series and games either from decades past (which have very little documentation online) or aspects of games people didn't know about. It's only thanks to them that stuff like Drivergate (a scandal where a video game magazine publisher gave artificially inflated reviews to a broken game to get the reviews out early) came to the surface or got added to Wikipedia in the first place. A lot of time goes into these videos, it's just a lot more of it likely goes to research and journalism than editing.
  - manigandham 9y ago
    As described in the article, it takes a ton of time. Often editing the video can easily take twice as long as shooting it, which itself can take much longer than the final video length even for something as simple as a talk show. There's a lot of work that goes into any decent show and it climbs exponentially with quality.
    - corobo 9y ago
      I've found editing video is often anywhere from 4:1 to 8:1 ratio (edit:shooting) depending on how much effort goes into the video. This probably comes down with experience
  - icanhackit 9y ago
    > but is it consistently 40+ hours a week? The problem with creative work is that the fruits of your labour are nonlinear. A single dumb video made in the spirit of the moment might get a million views, while one that you toiled over for days receives only a fraction of that. Of course doing nothing gets you nothing, but using hours-worked as a yardstick probably won't work.
- jopsen 9y ago
  It's hard but not impossible. My favorite channel thegreatwar seems to pull in 16k/month on patreon.com But, yes the web needs some form of micro payment system to replace ads.
  - narrator 9y ago
    There's Steemit. What's interesting is that the ads take care of themselves since you can buy as many upvotes as you want and all the other creators who get legit upvotes get paid out of that.
- narrator 9y ago
  I just checked and S/V Delos makes $10,000 a video. They do have something really unusual and unique going on though, sailing around the world and all. I would also imagine that they are watched by an older demographic probably with a lot of disposable income.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - mullen 9y ago
    SV Delos is one of the first "Watch Us Sail Around the World" You Tube Channels. They got in earlier and they do go to some great places and have some great adventures. Most sailing channels are, "Look at us, we're in the Bahamas, drinking beer!" It also helps that Delos has a great crew and they do rotate in a group of good looking women who don't have problems with getting topless or naked and it not have it be sexual.
- shalmanese 9y ago
  OTOH, Binging with Babish is making $9000 a month with a million subscribers. In general, monetizing off nerds is tough. Once you move outside of nerddom, people tend to be more willing to fork out money for goods.

csallen 9y ago

Au contraire, I think the effect that advertisers have on what can and can't be said via popular channels is something we should all care about. It's easy to say, "Just stop advertising," but producing valuable content is expensive. Advertiser-funded outlets are at a tremendous financial advantage, and that translates directly into higher viewership. Consequently, we get the vast majority of our news, information, and opinions from advertiser-funded institutions. Furthermore, the majority of advertising dollars come from clients who share similar attributes with each other (rich, corporate, favoring the status quo, etc.), so their perspectives and agendas tend to align. The result is that contradictory perspectives are pushed to the sidelines, no matter how correct, logical, popular, or morally superior they may be. The fact that people aren't allowed to discuss war on YouTube is something we should all be concerned about. It's de facto propaganda. This applies to more traditional media, too, not just the internet. There are all sorts of topics that advertisers won't "allow" even the mainstream media to dwell on for too long.

paulsutter 9y ago
If there is significant amounts of content that has been overzealously blocked by google, then there are advertisers that want access to that (currently) lower-valued inventory. The value of that inventory should normalize based on the number of advertisers who want access to it. If YouTube doesn't make it available to those advertisers who would accept it, someone else should. That is, if there is (a) enough inventory and (b) enough advertisers (and if not it's an immaterial issue) Keep in mind that what's material to Google is significantly larger than what may be material for a small company. Google is focused on finding their next $10B in revenue.
endgame 9y ago
Agreed: http://sealedabstract.com/rants/re-xkcd-1357-free-speech/ http://sealedabstract.com/rants/re-xkcd-1357-free-speech/
frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
On the other hand, it also does a good job of removing what I might call accidental propaganda. Most youtube videos are not even skin deep, running off of one article in the news they read, and some youtube person is going to have almost no real understanding when making a video about Syria for example. By removing the people who are only there to drive clicks and revenues, I can probably get better results when I search for a serious topic. Maybe some topics should be left to pure enthusiasts.

majani 9y ago

Advertiser friendly also means having considerable audience numbers. If I could hazard a guess, I'd say most of the big YouTube channels have built their numbers up with edginess as their differentiator and they worry about losing that.

beager 9y ago

This is an excellent justification for something like Patreon, and for all the speech that YouTube must know is a nonstarter for advertisers, they should integrate or replicate Patreon for their creators. Not as a replacement for ads, but as a way to enable all of the content that belongs on the internet.

markdown 9y ago

Currently you're either allowed to host ads, or you're not. The compromise would be to have a separate pool you get assigned to where advertisers can choose to use your videos. That way a gun manufacturer can choose to advertise on a channel that advocates gun violence (an unsavoury example, I know).