16 ms·

YouTube monetization analysis

354 points by m0ck 9y ago

r3bl 9y ago
One thing I haven't figured out from the section 2: Those tweets claim that demonetized videos don't reach anyone on the homepage. Do they reach anyone on the Subscriptions page? For me, the Subscriptions page pretty much replaced the homepage, and it would be bad for me as a consumer if the channels I subscribe to don't end up on that page once they upload new content. Also, I'm mildly annoyed by the lack of consistency with spelling of the word "YouTube" in this analysis. It's neither "Youtube" nor "youtube" (both of those spelling are used multiple times), it's YouTube.
eref 9y ago
I think it is right to „soft“-censor in this way (i.e. the information is accessible but not promoted). Reality without sorting and filters would be inhuman because market incentives to grab people’s attention would maximally exploit our tribal instincts and thereby completely destabilize our societies. This is already happening and it needs to stop immediately.
- jakebasile 9y ago
  Who decides what to filter? How are they elected?
  - meebs 9y ago
    A better set of questions might be: who is already deciding what to filter? How are they elected? I think the answer to the latter is "by being wealthy". The former has too many answers. /tinfoil
  - chiaro 9y ago
    Private people appointed by the company in accordance to CSR principles established by the board of directors.
- golemotron 9y ago
  There will always be a problem because people promote for vanity and status as well as economics. You can't get more human than that. The next 5 years will be tech companies panicking and trying to impose social control vs. people becoming more aware of when they are being manipulated by other users (and censored by platforms) and opting out of platforms entirely and/or moving to less controlled platforms. Internet media will be seen like smoking and candy bar consumption are seed today. Some people will eat candy bars every day because they don't care about their health. Others will choose to be healthier and it will happen by increasing awareness rather than heavy handedness.
- JohnStrange 9y ago
  You don't have to go that far to justify demonetization. It's a way to encourage higher quality content in contrast to low quality clickbait and sensationalism. That's good for the users and also in Youtube's long-term interest. On a side note, that's not censorship at all, neither hard nor soft censorship, it's just a kind of automated editorial work.
  - ksk 9y ago
    >It's a way to encourage higher quality content in contrast to low quality clickbait and sensationalism. Maybe its higher quality, but you will essentially get the same type of content you already get on cable. Its content that has the potential to be popular, is bland enough that advertisers don't mind seeing their logo on the content, and is conducive to people buying things that the advertisers are selling. YouTube is going the way of being just another cable provider. They flirted with the "community" aspect for a while, but in the end decided they care much more about advertisers. Which is fair enough, IMO.
- moduspol 9y ago
  Agreed. I mean, Russia already verifiably tried to influence the 2016 election, right? Maybe the algorithm can be adjusted to not promote content that aligns with Russian interests. That way we can ensure people are only seeing the perspectives we want them to.
  - ux4 9y ago
    That puts Youtube as a significant political power though. Interestingly enough, there was thread saying Youtube was censoring searches of "navalnyi" a critic of Putin. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15806393 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15806393
libeclipse 9y ago
> This will in turn lead to censorship of political ideologies, HTBQ+, mental health awareness, suicide awareness and prevention, etc. Sounds like a slippery slope argument.
- carnifexetal 9y ago
  Mate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope#Non-fallacious_usage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope#Non-fallacious_...
- ksk 9y ago
  My Subaru has four wheels just like a Ferrari.
- arkitaip 9y ago
  Mental health awareness channels already have their videos demonetized. Whatever strategy Google is using, it's afflicting every community on youtube regardless of topic covered, whether they are left or right, etc.
dbatten 9y ago
Serious question: what is HTBQ+? Googling doesn't seem to turn anything up.
- naz 9y ago
  It seems to be a variant on LGBTQ. Except I guess with "Homosexual" replacing "Lesbian and Gay".
  - Lifesnoozer 9y ago
    Correct, in Sweden we call it HBTQ+, and "Karlaplan" is a location in Stockholm. Seems likely whoever wrote this is from Sweden.
  - tantalor 9y ago
    The article only uses that term in the abstract, and doesn't mention anything related to LGBT elsewhere. Hard to take that claim seriously.
- adsfqwop 9y ago
  Must be a reference to this: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/HBTQ https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/HBTQ
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- PeachPlum 9y ago
  That's so last year, it now: LGGBTQQIAAPPK more coming soon https://definithing.com/lggbtqqiaappk/ https://definithing.com/lggbtqqiaappk/
  - sctb 9y ago
    We've already asked you not to the guidelines with unsubstantive inflammatory comments. Could you please stop? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
The other day I stumbled upon this project: https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube It's a federated tube that uses ActivityPub and WebTorrent. I think this platform should be invested in and creators should consider moving. The interests of YouTube and its creators will never be entirely aligned.
- kakarot 9y ago
  That's a cool project. However, to make videos with quality content at a reasonable frequency, many of these creators depend on YouTube for income or at least partial income. Any P2P / federated service would have to find an agreeable way to A) send ads in a safe and private way to each viewer B) stop people from manipulating the system to game ads while accurately determining if an ad was viewed.
  - Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
    Tools like Patreon can help fill this gap.
    - nathcd 9y ago
      Also, there's no reason creators couldn't use "dumb ads" where they read ad copy during their videos, and sell the spots themselves. Seems to be the main revenue source in the podcast world. It feels weird to be an advocate for something like dumb advertising (maybe "content-targeted advertising" is a better name?), but dumb ads and Patreon really are a breath of fresh air relative to the status quo of web content.
      - kakarot 9y ago
        Yes, it's one thing for serial content like a podcast or talk show, it's another for more artistic endeavors where it would lesson the artistic credibility to have an ad ingrained into the video. It's also not a suitable format for those who create many small 1-5m videos. Additionally, it prevents you from retroactively changing what ad gets sent with the video, which can lead to conflicts arising over severed business ties, and limit your overall ability to make residual profit from older videos.
polskibus 9y ago
Ironic that they're using Google docs platform to publish the research. Maybe the censorship effect is not advertent?
- Nuzzerino 9y ago
  Perhaps it is a dare for Google to make the incredibly foolish move of deleting the content or taking action. Even if technically against the terms of use to reverse engineer, taking action against the account would bring more negative attention to Google.
- raverbashing 9y ago
  I would still make a backup, just in case
wybiral 9y ago
Every single video, without exception, that I've uploaded in the past few months has been demonetized within a day or two. Then I request manual review and they're monetized again within another day or two. My content is clean and all of it is programming/tech related (programming tutorials and some Raspberry Pi stuff). So if there is an algorithm it's really naive at this stage or it doesn't apply until you request manual review.
- RyanShook 9y ago
  In my experience, Youtube demonetizes based on metadata. So any tags/descriptions with keywords that YT views as “controversial” the system will demonetize regardless of actual content in the video.
  - wybiral 9y ago
    I uploaded a video yesterday that's already demonetized. It's part of a series to write an RSS feed reader in Python (specifically the part about adding static files to the server). Tags: python, rss, feedparser, feed reader, news aggregator, flask, css, static files It doesn't seem "controversial" to me.
    - ocdtrekkie 9y ago
      Try without the word "news", perhaps?
    - TheCoreh 9y ago
      Perhaps "news"?
    - lettergram 9y ago
      I'm wondering if "flask" is getting flagged (as in relation to alcohol. Or news, because you know - "fake news"
      - wybiral 9y ago
        Maybe, but the series before that had nothing to do with flask or news. For instance a video in a series about writing a Go web app had these tags: golang, http, server, redis, gorilla mux, go-redis, web, application, tutorial, howto And it was demonetized. Every single video I've uploaded seems to have been until I request manual review (which takes a couple of days).
adekok 9y ago
I never understood why Youtube didn't have uploaders select various categories for videos. It would do a number of things: * allow them to demonetize / ban / block videos for abuse of categorization * train machine learning on the various categories It's a lot more socially palatable for Youtube to say "Hey guys, we HAVE a blood and violence category, but you didn't use it for this video. So we'll punish you for that." Instead, we get programming videos getting demonetized / blocked for god only knows what reason. That makes people made, and is bad press.
- make3 9y ago
  this would be an extremely dirty dataset, as there is no incentive to not put your videos in as many categories as possible. if you can only have one, people will still put it in the most popular category a large fraction of the times I'm sure, not the correct one
  - adekok 9y ago
    > there is no incentive to not put your videos in as many categories as possible. We are talking about how to incentivize people here... why suddenly decide that there's magically "no incentive" for something? Youtube is free to also de-incentivize people for using the wrong category.
    - pwinnski 9y ago
      Which they would determine using... an automated algorithm which decides which category a video should be in, and comparing it to the category chosen. At which point...
      - make3 9y ago
        it's not a training set anymore, but a machine learning production task
        maksimum 9y ago
ebbv 9y ago
Seems to me content creators who get upset at their treatment by Youtube have made a serious mistake; they believe they are Youtube's customers. They are not. Neither are the people watching the videos. The advertisers are the customers, just like most other Google services. You are the product. If you don't like it, you need to switch to a platform where you are the customer and the provider cares about you on that level. Google never will.
- falcolas 9y ago
  I don't think they're under that misunderstanding. However, they correctly believe that they are the hook which pulls in viewers - the product - to sell to advertisers. Take away those hooks by removing their incentive to post videos, and you pull in fewer viewers, resulting in fewer ad sales to YouTube's customers. Sadly, the most affected are those who cover niche categories, which means YouTube can afford to fuck it up and not feel any significant pain. (Yes, I consider 90% loss in revenue for their bait, err, content creators to be worthy of the phrase "fucking it up").
  - krapp 9y ago
    >Yes, I consider 90% loss in revenue for their bait, err, content creators to be worthy of the phrase "fucking it up" I'm not certain Google are "fucking it up," or at least, that this effect isn't intentional. How much revenue do those niche creators generate for Google? How much first party content do they include, that media companies might object to? Google may consider them to be a risk not worth the reward if their intent is to optimize their algorithm to prefer first-party commercial content, in order to increase the value of their platform to advertisers. The existing system clearly hasn't been working for Google, so to me it seems more likely that the apparent failures of its algorithms are part of an attempt to forcibly pivot the platform while maintaining good PR. I could be wrong, though.
    - falcolas 9y ago
      It comes down to what do you (or what should Google) value more: Varied content covering a broad range of topics, pulling in broad and varied audiences or Google's short-term bottom line. Personally, I value the former, which is why I think that Google is doing it wrong. Focusing exclusively on the bottom line doesn't help society, doesn't even really help companies in the long run. If you fire your entire R&D team, you'll goose the bottom line, at the cost of your company's future. If you (effectively) fire your content creators, you endanger the future of your video platform. Everyone yells "Patreon" as the solution for content creators, but this is a bad thing for Google. It removes their control over the content creators by removing the biggest form of "stickiness" to the platform. Twitch started out as a platform for gaming live streams. Youtube is demonetizing gaming videos. It's creating conditions ripe for an exodus of gamers (creators and viewers) from YouTube.
staltz 9y ago
Who is Karlaplan? And why choose Google Docs to share information which Google may dislike and remove?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- flgr 9y ago
  I was wondering if they might not be baiting Google into doing that. If they start removing content critical of them from Google Docs that's another big story.
  - Theodores 9y ago
    Google should monetize Google Docs in situations like this, i.e. more than a dozen viewing, all with the same referer URL. Regarding the thesis, it seems to me that unless you have read the advertiser guidelines then you are always going to have your viewing manipulated in ways you do not understand. The recommendations are really 'how best to monetize you'. So with music you may end up with mainstream artist recommends, not because the songs are inherently popular, it is just that they can be monetized. Therefore, the best way to explore the back catalogue of an artist is to upload your own video and to then see what tracks by your favourite musicians you can set to it. So even within normal YouTube there is a 'better' search engine, better for you but maybe not so monetizable even though that is what the widget is about.
- Phlarp 9y ago
  Solid game theory on both sides. The Demonitization bot and its shenanigans are well known in the Youtube content creator community. They know they aren't fooling anyone and this data is going to be "out there" along with countless anecdotes from content creators who reliably upload content only to have it get "demonetized" during the most profitable portion of a video's lifespan. (the first 48 hours) If Google pulled the doc they'd likely get a lesson in the Streisand effect, and they likely know not to try. Posting it on Google docs is actually smart bait by the author in my opinion-- intentional or otherwise.
iainmerrick 9y ago
What is "demonetization"? I've never heard of this before. Does it mean YouTube stops inserting ads in your videos? As a viewer, that sounds pretty great to me. It sounds like they also stop suggesting your video to random viewers, which is understandable if they're not making money off it. Surely the real problem is that ads are toxic, the ad-supported content model is toxic, and YouTube's automatic recommendations are horrible (see the recent article on terrifying race-to-the-bottom videos for kids: https://medium.com/@jamesbridle/something-is-wrong-on-the-internet-c39c471271d2 https://medium.com/@jamesbridle/something-is-wrong-on-the-in...) Edit to clarify: yes, of course I realize that content creators need the money. I'm just saying that this is a bad system that often rewards bad content and punishes important-but-uncomfortable content. Unfortunately it's almost the only system in town. I would love to see e.g. Patreon rivaling YouTube in revenue. Edit edit: and ads aside, relying on YouTube (Facebook, etc) to tell us what to watch is terrible. We should instead do our own crowd-sourced curation, aka recommend good things to each other. And we need to defend ourselves against the likes of Facebook and Twitter insinuating their own filters between us and our friends.
- iagovar 9y ago
  The report not only talks about that. It also talks about videos that, because of being demonetized, they also appear less in YT searches and related content. In other words, if you video has ads, then the probability of appearing in searches and related content is higher, thus you, as used, are more exposed to ads.
  - danjoc 9y ago
    >In other words, if you video has ads, then the probability of appearing in searches and related content is higher So users that permit ads on their video get a virtual "fast lane" on the Comcast internet service. You know, I'm sick and tired of these internet service providers violating Net Neutrality principles. Oh, wait. It's YouTube? Oh, that's fine then./s
    - delecti 9y ago
      Youtube not providing extra promotion for content is different from Comcast charging extra to even access that content.
m0ck 9y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3H8D2LrLHc&feature=youtu.be https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3H8D2LrLHc&feature=youtu.be This a video from the author with some commentary.
alva 9y ago
I am almost certain another factor is clickthrough from "undesirable" referral links. ReviewBrah [0] (The Report of The Week) is the most family friendly channel with high subscribers that I can think of. He reviews fast food and has a unique fashion style and personality. Very clean. He has become a popular meme and is regularly linked to from 4chan. I struggle to find a single thing that could warrant demonetisation (having looked through the youtube guidance), yet a large chunk of his videos are automatically demonetised. [0] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCeR0n8d3ShTn_yrMhpwyE1Q https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCeR0n8d3ShTn_yrMhpwyE1Q
- corey_moncure 9y ago
  Of course, this would mean that YT has handed 4chan a laser cannon to demonetize videos at their discretion.
  - IceDane 9y ago
    Someone will read these comments and it will be posted on 4chan within a few minutes, if it hasn't been already.
    - Bromskloss 9y ago
      We might as well start posting suggestions for targets right away.
  - bballard 9y ago
    So you're telling me there's a way we might demonetize "kinder playtime", "hailey's magical playhouse", "funtoys", and "toys unlimited"? THAT is a noble cause! Gimme the sixty-five. I'm on the job!
    - SebastianFrelle 9y ago
      Could you elaborate on what these channels are and why you would want them demonetized? Are their videos actually sponsored by Disney et.al.?
petercooper 9y ago
Does YouTube let sponsors/advertisers opt-in to advertising on "demonetized" videos at all? For example, let's say I really want to advertise on all of a certain channel's videos.. can I do that? Surely if I'm happy to pay money to do so, they should allow that to happen regardless of if big-name brands like it or not.
- delecti 9y ago
  This has been my thought as well. Adding a "sub-par" video level between "any ads" and "no ads" to allow less strict brands to advertise anywhere seems like it would help both supply and demand of ads. Maybe Fischer Price doesn't want to advertise on profanity-laden "let's plays" of gory video games, but beer brands probably don't care as much.
  - polishTar 9y ago
    This exists already. "Demonetized videos" are more accurately described as partially monetized videos. There is a tier of completely demonetized videos, but these are pretty rare to the extent that a lot of creators didn't realize there was this separate distinction.
- zeratax 9y ago
  Somewhat... https://www.polygon.com/2017/10/10/16453306/youtube-monetization-ads-casey-neistat-philip-defranco https://www.polygon.com/2017/10/10/16453306/youtube-monetiza... >A YouTube representative confirmed to Polygon that there are a number of “whitelisted” partners who are allowed to run partner-run ads on the website. >That means they aren’t flagged by YouTube and used external sale forces to sell the advertisement for them.
danjoc 9y ago
Brave browser is a potential way to fight YouTube's censorship. http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2017/11/17/brave-browser-lets-users-fight-youtube-censorship-bitcoin-tech/ http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2017/11/17/brave-browser-lets-...
- nasredin 9y ago
  You are linking to Breitbart? Steve Bannon's yellow rag?
  - ghostbrainalpha 9y ago
    No, he is linking to Steve Bannon's hungry ghost.
DonHopkins 9y ago
I thought this was about the demonization algorithm that youtube comment bots use to cyberbully people.
pwdisswordfish2 9y ago
Original title: "Reverse engineering YouTube demonetization algorithm"
supermdguy 9y ago
Wow, this file is really popular! Some tools might be unavailable until the crowd clears. Even Google Docs is susceptible to the hacker news effect.
- r3bl 9y ago
  That is mostly a Google thing. I've seen small subreddits activating the same thing in Google Drive. I would say that the threshold might be as small as 1000 people trying to access it.
vlunkr 9y ago
On the upside of this, I've seen lots more creators including sponsors in the actual video. (This video brought to you by Blue Apron) seemingly with lots of creative control over how they present it. This seems like a much more sustainable method. Ad blockers can't do anything about it, and they are safe from random de monitization. On the other hand it's more work for the creator, and for people just starting it may be impossible to convince anyone to sponser them.
- tenkabuto 9y ago
  Hm is anyone aware of a third-party marketplace for placing YouTube Creators with advertisers?
- shostack 9y ago
  I'm curious how this will net out. Facebook for example is starting to crack down on 3rd party deals with Instagram influencers[1]. So the official policy now is that you need to run things as branded content (how well it is being enforced is another story). My guess is Youtube will have a similar policy, and provide a toolset for brands to go through to setup these partnerships, and of course give Youtube a cut while probably pushing the advertiser to spend on behalf of the influencer to actually get any reach worth caring about. [1] https://www.facebook.com/policies/brandedcontent/ https://www.facebook.com/policies/brandedcontent/
homero 9y ago
It's true, I no longer see my gun channels in my recommended videos
sdsdsdsdsds 9y ago
>>We used youtube’s official “DATA API v3” to get the top 25 related videos for 100k videos. We then scraped the related videos for information relating to monetisation status, views, etc. The corpus containing information of the scraped videos were then analysed in detail. Anyone knows any such list readily available? I have been wanting to Scrape 100k video URL videos for my own content classification. Any suggestions will be appreciated.
- j_s 9y ago
  Have you considered the Internet Archive? Anyone where to get started with content classification would do well to consider Hands-On Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn and TensorFlow: Concepts, Tools, and Techniques to Build Intelligent Systems written by the former head of video classification at YouTube (https://amzn.com/B06XNKV5TS https://amzn.com/B06XNKV5TS). source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15772174 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15772174
  - sdsdsdsdsds 9y ago
    I brought the book for Black Friday. Its on my december readling list. I will look through internet archive. Thanks!
jxramos 9y ago
I like how upon opening the doc I see for the first time ever "Wow, this file is really popular! Some tools might be unavailable until the crowd clears.Try again Dismiss" HN stressing the internet.
ux4 9y ago
I imagine another flag is the amount of time viewers watch your video, in an attempt to demonetize clickbait videos.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
avivo 9y ago
The script and data used for this analysis is available here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/10gLKGH1fqCp39x_UcEb9f98xTufzfnuZ https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/10gLKGH1fqCp39x_UcEb9... And here is the original video from the creator with all the links: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3H8D2LrLHc&feature=youtu.be https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3H8D2LrLHc&feature=youtu.be
- avivo 9y ago
  If you are interested in replicating this or extensions of this work, get in touch! You can reach via the email in the profile, here, or http://twitter.com/metaviv http://twitter.com/metaviv.
ChuckMcM 9y ago
An interesting read. However, when running a search engine we discovered there is a second order relationship between page traffic and advertising, that is click fraud. There is a 'yuuuuuge' click fraud problem on the Internet where a shady advertising reseller and a botnet collude to put ads on things and do what ever action is needed to get them to pay out (click (CPC) or view (CPI), never execute a transaction (CPA)). It is also disproportionately spread over 'low volume' inventory. As a result if you're page or video is on the bubble (which means its not really that popular or what not) if it gets demonetized you may notice a loss of 'views' because the bots have nothing to click any more. Not saying this is the issue here, just saying it is an issue. That said, early on in the AdSense for Content program it was pretty clear that if you were not ranking on Google's index and then added AbC ads to your page suddenly boom! you had a much better rank. I don't know if that is still the case but it was a scheme we saw people using to try to get their pages to rank higher. The temptation is always there if your both the supplier of the recommendation and you're able to benefit from recommending some things and not other things. All things being equal you go with the ones the might make you money.

354 points by m0ck 9y ago

r3bl 9y ago

One thing I haven't figured out from the section 2: Those tweets claim that demonetized videos don't reach anyone on the homepage. Do they reach anyone on the Subscriptions page? For me, the Subscriptions page pretty much replaced the homepage, and it would be bad for me as a consumer if the channels I subscribe to don't end up on that page once they upload new content. Also, I'm mildly annoyed by the lack of consistency with spelling of the word "YouTube" in this analysis. It's neither "Youtube" nor "youtube" (both of those spelling are used multiple times), it's YouTube.

eref 9y ago

I think it is right to „soft“-censor in this way (i.e. the information is accessible but not promoted). Reality without sorting and filters would be inhuman because market incentives to grab people’s attention would maximally exploit our tribal instincts and thereby completely destabilize our societies. This is already happening and it needs to stop immediately.

jakebasile 9y ago
Who decides what to filter? How are they elected?
- meebs 9y ago
  A better set of questions might be: who is already deciding what to filter? How are they elected? I think the answer to the latter is "by being wealthy". The former has too many answers. /tinfoil
- chiaro 9y ago
  Private people appointed by the company in accordance to CSR principles established by the board of directors.
golemotron 9y ago
There will always be a problem because people promote for vanity and status as well as economics. You can't get more human than that. The next 5 years will be tech companies panicking and trying to impose social control vs. people becoming more aware of when they are being manipulated by other users (and censored by platforms) and opting out of platforms entirely and/or moving to less controlled platforms. Internet media will be seen like smoking and candy bar consumption are seed today. Some people will eat candy bars every day because they don't care about their health. Others will choose to be healthier and it will happen by increasing awareness rather than heavy handedness.
JohnStrange 9y ago
You don't have to go that far to justify demonetization. It's a way to encourage higher quality content in contrast to low quality clickbait and sensationalism. That's good for the users and also in Youtube's long-term interest. On a side note, that's not censorship at all, neither hard nor soft censorship, it's just a kind of automated editorial work.
- ksk 9y ago
  >It's a way to encourage higher quality content in contrast to low quality clickbait and sensationalism. Maybe its higher quality, but you will essentially get the same type of content you already get on cable. Its content that has the potential to be popular, is bland enough that advertisers don't mind seeing their logo on the content, and is conducive to people buying things that the advertisers are selling. YouTube is going the way of being just another cable provider. They flirted with the "community" aspect for a while, but in the end decided they care much more about advertisers. Which is fair enough, IMO.
moduspol 9y ago
Agreed. I mean, Russia already verifiably tried to influence the 2016 election, right? Maybe the algorithm can be adjusted to not promote content that aligns with Russian interests. That way we can ensure people are only seeing the perspectives we want them to.
- ux4 9y ago
  That puts Youtube as a significant political power though. Interestingly enough, there was thread saying Youtube was censoring searches of "navalnyi" a critic of Putin. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15806393 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15806393

libeclipse 9y ago

> This will in turn lead to censorship of political ideologies, HTBQ+, mental health awareness, suicide awareness and prevention, etc. Sounds like a slippery slope argument.

carnifexetal 9y ago
Mate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope#Non-fallacious_usage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope#Non-fallacious_...
ksk 9y ago
My Subaru has four wheels just like a Ferrari.
arkitaip 9y ago
Mental health awareness channels already have their videos demonetized. Whatever strategy Google is using, it's afflicting every community on youtube regardless of topic covered, whether they are left or right, etc.

dbatten 9y ago

Serious question: what is HTBQ+? Googling doesn't seem to turn anything up.

naz 9y ago
It seems to be a variant on LGBTQ. Except I guess with "Homosexual" replacing "Lesbian and Gay".
- Lifesnoozer 9y ago
  Correct, in Sweden we call it HBTQ+, and "Karlaplan" is a location in Stockholm. Seems likely whoever wrote this is from Sweden.
- tantalor 9y ago
  The article only uses that term in the abstract, and doesn't mention anything related to LGBT elsewhere. Hard to take that claim seriously.
adsfqwop 9y ago
Must be a reference to this: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/HBTQ https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/HBTQ
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
PeachPlum 9y ago
That's so last year, it now: LGGBTQQIAAPPK more coming soon https://definithing.com/lggbtqqiaappk/ https://definithing.com/lggbtqqiaappk/
- sctb 9y ago
  We've already asked you not to the guidelines with unsubstantive inflammatory comments. Could you please stop? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago

The other day I stumbled upon this project: https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube It's a federated tube that uses ActivityPub and WebTorrent. I think this platform should be invested in and creators should consider moving. The interests of YouTube and its creators will never be entirely aligned.

kakarot 9y ago
That's a cool project. However, to make videos with quality content at a reasonable frequency, many of these creators depend on YouTube for income or at least partial income. Any P2P / federated service would have to find an agreeable way to A) send ads in a safe and private way to each viewer B) stop people from manipulating the system to game ads while accurately determining if an ad was viewed.
- Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
  Tools like Patreon can help fill this gap.
  - nathcd 9y ago
    Also, there's no reason creators couldn't use "dumb ads" where they read ad copy during their videos, and sell the spots themselves. Seems to be the main revenue source in the podcast world. It feels weird to be an advocate for something like dumb advertising (maybe "content-targeted advertising" is a better name?), but dumb ads and Patreon really are a breath of fresh air relative to the status quo of web content.
    - kakarot 9y ago
      Yes, it's one thing for serial content like a podcast or talk show, it's another for more artistic endeavors where it would lesson the artistic credibility to have an ad ingrained into the video. It's also not a suitable format for those who create many small 1-5m videos. Additionally, it prevents you from retroactively changing what ad gets sent with the video, which can lead to conflicts arising over severed business ties, and limit your overall ability to make residual profit from older videos.

polskibus 9y ago

Ironic that they're using Google docs platform to publish the research. Maybe the censorship effect is not advertent?

Nuzzerino 9y ago
Perhaps it is a dare for Google to make the incredibly foolish move of deleting the content or taking action. Even if technically against the terms of use to reverse engineer, taking action against the account would bring more negative attention to Google.
raverbashing 9y ago
I would still make a backup, just in case

wybiral 9y ago

Every single video, without exception, that I've uploaded in the past few months has been demonetized within a day or two. Then I request manual review and they're monetized again within another day or two. My content is clean and all of it is programming/tech related (programming tutorials and some Raspberry Pi stuff). So if there is an algorithm it's really naive at this stage or it doesn't apply until you request manual review.

RyanShook 9y ago
In my experience, Youtube demonetizes based on metadata. So any tags/descriptions with keywords that YT views as “controversial” the system will demonetize regardless of actual content in the video.
- wybiral 9y ago
  I uploaded a video yesterday that's already demonetized. It's part of a series to write an RSS feed reader in Python (specifically the part about adding static files to the server). Tags: python, rss, feedparser, feed reader, news aggregator, flask, css, static files It doesn't seem "controversial" to me.
  - ocdtrekkie 9y ago
    Try without the word "news", perhaps?
  - TheCoreh 9y ago
    Perhaps "news"?
  - lettergram 9y ago
    I'm wondering if "flask" is getting flagged (as in relation to alcohol. Or news, because you know - "fake news"
    - wybiral 9y ago
      Maybe, but the series before that had nothing to do with flask or news. For instance a video in a series about writing a Go web app had these tags: golang, http, server, redis, gorilla mux, go-redis, web, application, tutorial, howto And it was demonetized. Every single video I've uploaded seems to have been until I request manual review (which takes a couple of days).

adekok 9y ago

I never understood why Youtube didn't have uploaders select various categories for videos. It would do a number of things: * allow them to demonetize / ban / block videos for abuse of categorization * train machine learning on the various categories It's a lot more socially palatable for Youtube to say "Hey guys, we HAVE a blood and violence category, but you didn't use it for this video. So we'll punish you for that." Instead, we get programming videos getting demonetized / blocked for god only knows what reason. That makes people made, and is bad press.

make3 9y ago
this would be an extremely dirty dataset, as there is no incentive to not put your videos in as many categories as possible. if you can only have one, people will still put it in the most popular category a large fraction of the times I'm sure, not the correct one
- adekok 9y ago
  > there is no incentive to not put your videos in as many categories as possible. We are talking about how to incentivize people here... why suddenly decide that there's magically "no incentive" for something? Youtube is free to also de-incentivize people for using the wrong category.
  - pwinnski 9y ago
    Which they would determine using... an automated algorithm which decides which category a video should be in, and comparing it to the category chosen. At which point...
    - make3 9y ago
      it's not a training set anymore, but a machine learning production task
      - maksimum 9y ago

ebbv 9y ago

Seems to me content creators who get upset at their treatment by Youtube have made a serious mistake; they believe they are Youtube's customers. They are not. Neither are the people watching the videos. The advertisers are the customers, just like most other Google services. You are the product. If you don't like it, you need to switch to a platform where you are the customer and the provider cares about you on that level. Google never will.

falcolas 9y ago
I don't think they're under that misunderstanding. However, they correctly believe that they are the hook which pulls in viewers - the product - to sell to advertisers. Take away those hooks by removing their incentive to post videos, and you pull in fewer viewers, resulting in fewer ad sales to YouTube's customers. Sadly, the most affected are those who cover niche categories, which means YouTube can afford to fuck it up and not feel any significant pain. (Yes, I consider 90% loss in revenue for their bait, err, content creators to be worthy of the phrase "fucking it up").
- krapp 9y ago
  >Yes, I consider 90% loss in revenue for their bait, err, content creators to be worthy of the phrase "fucking it up" I'm not certain Google are "fucking it up," or at least, that this effect isn't intentional. How much revenue do those niche creators generate for Google? How much first party content do they include, that media companies might object to? Google may consider them to be a risk not worth the reward if their intent is to optimize their algorithm to prefer first-party commercial content, in order to increase the value of their platform to advertisers. The existing system clearly hasn't been working for Google, so to me it seems more likely that the apparent failures of its algorithms are part of an attempt to forcibly pivot the platform while maintaining good PR. I could be wrong, though.
  - falcolas 9y ago
    It comes down to what do you (or what should Google) value more: Varied content covering a broad range of topics, pulling in broad and varied audiences or Google's short-term bottom line. Personally, I value the former, which is why I think that Google is doing it wrong. Focusing exclusively on the bottom line doesn't help society, doesn't even really help companies in the long run. If you fire your entire R&D team, you'll goose the bottom line, at the cost of your company's future. If you (effectively) fire your content creators, you endanger the future of your video platform. Everyone yells "Patreon" as the solution for content creators, but this is a bad thing for Google. It removes their control over the content creators by removing the biggest form of "stickiness" to the platform. Twitch started out as a platform for gaming live streams. Youtube is demonetizing gaming videos. It's creating conditions ripe for an exodus of gamers (creators and viewers) from YouTube.

staltz 9y ago

Who is Karlaplan? And why choose Google Docs to share information which Google may dislike and remove?

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
flgr 9y ago
I was wondering if they might not be baiting Google into doing that. If they start removing content critical of them from Google Docs that's another big story.
- Theodores 9y ago
  Google should monetize Google Docs in situations like this, i.e. more than a dozen viewing, all with the same referer URL. Regarding the thesis, it seems to me that unless you have read the advertiser guidelines then you are always going to have your viewing manipulated in ways you do not understand. The recommendations are really 'how best to monetize you'. So with music you may end up with mainstream artist recommends, not because the songs are inherently popular, it is just that they can be monetized. Therefore, the best way to explore the back catalogue of an artist is to upload your own video and to then see what tracks by your favourite musicians you can set to it. So even within normal YouTube there is a 'better' search engine, better for you but maybe not so monetizable even though that is what the widget is about.
Phlarp 9y ago
Solid game theory on both sides. The Demonitization bot and its shenanigans are well known in the Youtube content creator community. They know they aren't fooling anyone and this data is going to be "out there" along with countless anecdotes from content creators who reliably upload content only to have it get "demonetized" during the most profitable portion of a video's lifespan. (the first 48 hours) If Google pulled the doc they'd likely get a lesson in the Streisand effect, and they likely know not to try. Posting it on Google docs is actually smart bait by the author in my opinion-- intentional or otherwise.

iainmerrick 9y ago

What is "demonetization"? I've never heard of this before. Does it mean YouTube stops inserting ads in your videos? As a viewer, that sounds pretty great to me. It sounds like they also stop suggesting your video to random viewers, which is understandable if they're not making money off it. Surely the real problem is that ads are toxic, the ad-supported content model is toxic, and YouTube's automatic recommendations are horrible (see the recent article on terrifying race-to-the-bottom videos for kids: https://medium.com/@jamesbridle/something-is-wrong-on-the-internet-c39c471271d2 https://medium.com/@jamesbridle/something-is-wrong-on-the-in...) Edit to clarify: yes, of course I realize that content creators need the money. I'm just saying that this is a bad system that often rewards bad content and punishes important-but-uncomfortable content. Unfortunately it's almost the only system in town. I would love to see e.g. Patreon rivaling YouTube in revenue. Edit edit: and ads aside, relying on YouTube (Facebook, etc) to tell us what to watch is terrible. We should instead do our own crowd-sourced curation, aka recommend good things to each other. And we need to defend ourselves against the likes of Facebook and Twitter insinuating their own filters between us and our friends.

iagovar 9y ago
The report not only talks about that. It also talks about videos that, because of being demonetized, they also appear less in YT searches and related content. In other words, if you video has ads, then the probability of appearing in searches and related content is higher, thus you, as used, are more exposed to ads.
- danjoc 9y ago
  >In other words, if you video has ads, then the probability of appearing in searches and related content is higher So users that permit ads on their video get a virtual "fast lane" on the Comcast internet service. You know, I'm sick and tired of these internet service providers violating Net Neutrality principles. Oh, wait. It's YouTube? Oh, that's fine then./s
  - delecti 9y ago
    Youtube not providing extra promotion for content is different from Comcast charging extra to even access that content.

m0ck 9y ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3H8D2LrLHc&feature=youtu.be https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3H8D2LrLHc&feature=youtu.be This a video from the author with some commentary.

alva 9y ago

I am almost certain another factor is clickthrough from "undesirable" referral links. ReviewBrah [0] (The Report of The Week) is the most family friendly channel with high subscribers that I can think of. He reviews fast food and has a unique fashion style and personality. Very clean. He has become a popular meme and is regularly linked to from 4chan. I struggle to find a single thing that could warrant demonetisation (having looked through the youtube guidance), yet a large chunk of his videos are automatically demonetised. [0] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCeR0n8d3ShTn_yrMhpwyE1Q https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCeR0n8d3ShTn_yrMhpwyE1Q

corey_moncure 9y ago
Of course, this would mean that YT has handed 4chan a laser cannon to demonetize videos at their discretion.
- IceDane 9y ago
  Someone will read these comments and it will be posted on 4chan within a few minutes, if it hasn't been already.
  - Bromskloss 9y ago
    We might as well start posting suggestions for targets right away.
- bballard 9y ago
  So you're telling me there's a way we might demonetize "kinder playtime", "hailey's magical playhouse", "funtoys", and "toys unlimited"? THAT is a noble cause! Gimme the sixty-five. I'm on the job!
  - SebastianFrelle 9y ago
    Could you elaborate on what these channels are and why you would want them demonetized? Are their videos actually sponsored by Disney et.al.?

petercooper 9y ago

Does YouTube let sponsors/advertisers opt-in to advertising on "demonetized" videos at all? For example, let's say I really want to advertise on all of a certain channel's videos.. can I do that? Surely if I'm happy to pay money to do so, they should allow that to happen regardless of if big-name brands like it or not.

delecti 9y ago
This has been my thought as well. Adding a "sub-par" video level between "any ads" and "no ads" to allow less strict brands to advertise anywhere seems like it would help both supply and demand of ads. Maybe Fischer Price doesn't want to advertise on profanity-laden "let's plays" of gory video games, but beer brands probably don't care as much.
- polishTar 9y ago
  This exists already. "Demonetized videos" are more accurately described as partially monetized videos. There is a tier of completely demonetized videos, but these are pretty rare to the extent that a lot of creators didn't realize there was this separate distinction.
zeratax 9y ago
Somewhat... https://www.polygon.com/2017/10/10/16453306/youtube-monetization-ads-casey-neistat-philip-defranco https://www.polygon.com/2017/10/10/16453306/youtube-monetiza... >A YouTube representative confirmed to Polygon that there are a number of “whitelisted” partners who are allowed to run partner-run ads on the website. >That means they aren’t flagged by YouTube and used external sale forces to sell the advertisement for them.

danjoc 9y ago

Brave browser is a potential way to fight YouTube's censorship. http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2017/11/17/brave-browser-lets-users-fight-youtube-censorship-bitcoin-tech/ http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2017/11/17/brave-browser-lets-...

nasredin 9y ago
You are linking to Breitbart? Steve Bannon's yellow rag?
- ghostbrainalpha 9y ago
  No, he is linking to Steve Bannon's hungry ghost.

DonHopkins 9y ago

I thought this was about the demonization algorithm that youtube comment bots use to cyberbully people.

pwdisswordfish2 9y ago

Original title: "Reverse engineering YouTube demonetization algorithm"

supermdguy 9y ago

Wow, this file is really popular! Some tools might be unavailable until the crowd clears. Even Google Docs is susceptible to the hacker news effect.

r3bl 9y ago
That is mostly a Google thing. I've seen small subreddits activating the same thing in Google Drive. I would say that the threshold might be as small as 1000 people trying to access it.

vlunkr 9y ago

On the upside of this, I've seen lots more creators including sponsors in the actual video. (This video brought to you by Blue Apron) seemingly with lots of creative control over how they present it. This seems like a much more sustainable method. Ad blockers can't do anything about it, and they are safe from random de monitization. On the other hand it's more work for the creator, and for people just starting it may be impossible to convince anyone to sponser them.

tenkabuto 9y ago
Hm is anyone aware of a third-party marketplace for placing YouTube Creators with advertisers?
shostack 9y ago
I'm curious how this will net out. Facebook for example is starting to crack down on 3rd party deals with Instagram influencers[1]. So the official policy now is that you need to run things as branded content (how well it is being enforced is another story). My guess is Youtube will have a similar policy, and provide a toolset for brands to go through to setup these partnerships, and of course give Youtube a cut while probably pushing the advertiser to spend on behalf of the influencer to actually get any reach worth caring about. [1] https://www.facebook.com/policies/brandedcontent/ https://www.facebook.com/policies/brandedcontent/

homero 9y ago

It's true, I no longer see my gun channels in my recommended videos

sdsdsdsdsds 9y ago

>>We used youtube’s official “DATA API v3” to get the top 25 related videos for 100k videos. We then scraped the related videos for information relating to monetisation status, views, etc. The corpus containing information of the scraped videos were then analysed in detail. Anyone knows any such list readily available? I have been wanting to Scrape 100k video URL videos for my own content classification. Any suggestions will be appreciated.

j_s 9y ago
Have you considered the Internet Archive? Anyone where to get started with content classification would do well to consider Hands-On Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn and TensorFlow: Concepts, Tools, and Techniques to Build Intelligent Systems written by the former head of video classification at YouTube (https://amzn.com/B06XNKV5TS https://amzn.com/B06XNKV5TS). source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15772174 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15772174
- sdsdsdsdsds 9y ago
  I brought the book for Black Friday. Its on my december readling list. I will look through internet archive. Thanks!

jxramos 9y ago

I like how upon opening the doc I see for the first time ever "Wow, this file is really popular! Some tools might be unavailable until the crowd clears.Try again Dismiss" HN stressing the internet.

ux4 9y ago

I imagine another flag is the amount of time viewers watch your video, in an attempt to demonetize clickbait videos.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

avivo 9y ago

The script and data used for this analysis is available here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/10gLKGH1fqCp39x_UcEb9f98xTufzfnuZ https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/10gLKGH1fqCp39x_UcEb9... And here is the original video from the creator with all the links: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3H8D2LrLHc&feature=youtu.be https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3H8D2LrLHc&feature=youtu.be

avivo 9y ago
If you are interested in replicating this or extensions of this work, get in touch! You can reach via the email in the profile, here, or http://twitter.com/metaviv http://twitter.com/metaviv.

ChuckMcM 9y ago

An interesting read. However, when running a search engine we discovered there is a second order relationship between page traffic and advertising, that is click fraud. There is a 'yuuuuuge' click fraud problem on the Internet where a shady advertising reseller and a botnet collude to put ads on things and do what ever action is needed to get them to pay out (click (CPC) or view (CPI), never execute a transaction (CPA)). It is also disproportionately spread over 'low volume' inventory. As a result if you're page or video is on the bubble (which means its not really that popular or what not) if it gets demonetized you may notice a loss of 'views' because the bots have nothing to click any more. Not saying this is the issue here, just saying it is an issue. That said, early on in the AdSense for Content program it was pretty clear that if you were not ranking on Google's index and then added AbC ads to your page suddenly boom! you had a much better rank. I don't know if that is still the case but it was a scheme we saw people using to try to get their pages to rank higher. The temptation is always there if your both the supplier of the recommendation and you're able to benefit from recommending some things and not other things. All things being equal you go with the ones the might make you money.