7 ms·

YouTube demonetized my tuba videos

61 points by DEFCON28 8y ago

spartas 8y ago
*demonetized
- dang 8y ago
  Fixed now.
digi_owl 8y ago
I can't help wonder if Google discovered that the banking and legal fees involved with paying channels that are below said threshold were eating their profits.
- thaumasiotes 8y ago
  Wouldn't it be more sensible to have a minimum withdrawal amount in that case?
  - digi_owl 8y ago
    Perhaps, though it may be related more to the number of payments than the amount pr payment.
    - KMag 8y ago
      That's partially the point. Increasing the minimum withdrawal amount will reduce the number of payments, absent any increases in revenues.
  - developer2 8y ago
    I can't remember the proper accounting term for the practice, but businesses do not like to postpone/buffer payments like this. These legally count as on-the-books debts, and no business wants to track millions of dollars of tiny debts, each of which may one day need to be paid out. Particularly when these debts roll over year-after-year across tax years. I previously worked for a business where both the marketing and customer service departments handed out promotional credits to users like candy, without accounting for them. One day we got a new CFO, and a report on these credits was one of the first things he asked for. He sure wasn't happy to discover over $2.5 million dollars worth of credits idling in users' accounts with no expiration. While it's unlikely any significant percentage of them would have ever been cashed in, there is no guarantee and legally the business is on the hook to cover them.
    - thaumasiotes 8y ago
      > I can't remember the proper accounting term for the practice, but businesses do not like to postpone/buffer payments like this. These legally count as on-the-books debts, and no business wants to track millions of dollars of tiny debts, each of which may one day need to be paid out. Is the term "banking", by any chance? This is the entire business practice of banks.
- tenpies 8y ago
  I suspect it has to do more with human moderation. As much as Google hates using humans for anything, moderation still has a human element. As low as the minimum wage is in countries with a workforce educated enough to do this unpleasant work, it still costs something. Drawing a line in the sand and saying "your videos are so unlikely to generate views that we won't even spend a couple of cents making sure it doesn't violate our policies" probably saves them several millions per year.
  - amelius 8y ago
    I don't get it. Why doesn't YT just rephrase it as "you earned $1, but reviewing and administration costs are $10, so you get $0"?
    - majewsky 8y ago
      Because then it wouldn't be "you get $0", but "you pay $9".
Trisell 8y ago
There is a massive chance to disrupt this market right now. But bandwidth costs alone make it difficult to challenge google in this space.
- creato 8y ago
  I don't think it's bandwidth costs that are the big problem here. People want a competitor that offers what YouTube offers: a way to get paid for uploading videos. I think this service is fundamentally very hard to produce. For all its faults with monetization, it's not clear it can be done better (beyond toy scale). It's clearly not profitable to have humans match videos with advertisers, and computers are inevitably going to screw up, like in this instance. edit: it seems this case is just a basic policy issue, though that policy is a consequence of trying to avoid attempting to solve this problem for the long tail of small time uploaders. I just assumed it was another false positive based on the title. Keeping advertisers and uploaders happy seems like an almost impossible task. Google may not be doing very well at it, but that doesn't mean it's easy to do better.
  - Trisell 8y ago
    I think the key is to take the advertisers out of the loop, removing them removes almost all of the issues that YT has experienced. I have some ideas how to do that, it’s the costs of storage and bandwidth that I can’t figure out right now.
  - rhizome 8y ago
    These sound like the words of a time-traveler from the CBS board room 75 years ago!
  - DenisM 8y ago
    Do we have to have distribution tied to ads / monetization? It’s not true for the text content, yet here we are with the video, YouTube havving consumed it all. I imagine a world where creators pay someone for video distribution, but also plug-in advertising from third party ad agencies that have learned to match ads to content due to advantages in machine learning. Same as text today.
firasd 8y ago
I think Youtube creators aren't drawing the connection between media criticism of YT and the collateral damage to their earnings. It's easy to get mad at Youtube execs making policies, but Youtube is just reacting to bad PR. Youtube has faced a series of controversies that led to the 'AdPocalypse', and now the demonetization of people with not enough active subscribers. The media has gleefully gone after Youtube in these stories (the latest being inappropriate videos from Logan Paul and the proliferation of algorithmically-generated videos that show disturbing cartoon content to children.) YT creators should start pushing back---by saying wait, the algorithms and ads help small creators putting out good content as well, not just nefarious actors---if they don't want the scope of monetized content to get narrower and narrower. Otherwise it's easy for the public to align behind criticism of 'big tech' while overlooking that these are platforms which people depend on to express themselves and even to earn income.
- themodelplumber 8y ago
  Here's a pretty solid example of one YT creator pushing back, though I'm not sure it meets your criteria: https://youtu.be/q7RfYt_p2mk https://youtu.be/q7RfYt_p2mk
- rcthompson 8y ago
  I know at least some creators are well aware of the connection. Many have switched to other monetization platforms (Patreon and Twitch subscriptions being two big ones) and written off YouTube entirely as a reliable income stream. (That is, they continue posting on YouTube, but mainly to grow their viewer base, not to make money.) But I think you're right that a majority are probably only aware of the Adpocalypse in the abstract, if that.
- haZard_OS 8y ago
  One example of a relatively popular YT personality pushing back is Philip DeFranco: https://youtu.be/Gbph5or0NuM https://youtu.be/Gbph5or0NuM The linked video is about 1 year old but he has made several comments about the demonitization process since then as well. I linked to the older one because the issues with YT accounts and income has been going on for quite some time.
Jabbles 8y ago
Of all the possible complaints about YouTube demonetization, complaining that you don't meet the objective criteria for how popular your channel must be is surely the least important.
- kombucha2 8y ago
  Yeah seems like an odd criticism. What about 2000 hours or 1000....or 50 hours? I'm not sure why the author thinks he deserves monetization. At the very least I concede it seems arbitrary but it's Youtube's prerogative what they do with their platform.
- TheRealPomax 8y ago
  It's hard to argue "objective" when those criteria were unilaterally changed overnight from "objectively meeting the criteria" to "oh look, objectively not meeting the criteria because we pulled the rug from under you". If you have a financial arrangement with any company, and that company decides to change their policy arbitrarily so that they can justify not paying hundreds of thousands of people like you "because our policy excludes them", when a day ago they didn't, normally that would be various immediate court cases and no way for that company to win on any reasonable ground. This is surely not the least important reason.
  - kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
    YouTubers don't have a financial arrangement. Nobody can produce a paper contract.
    - jnbiche 8y ago
      > YouTubers don't have a financial arrangement. Nobody can produce a paper contract. This is false. If money is being exchanged for services or (digital) goods, then there is a financial arrangement, in the form of an informal contract. But it's still a contract. In the case of YouTube, it would probably even be considered a formal contract since there are the written "Monetization Criteria", "Partner Program Policies", and YouTube "Terms and Conditions" that the creator agrees to. This agreement to written requirements is a "meeting of the minds" and thus constitutes a contract.
c3534l 8y ago
Edit: later on in the article, it was stated that that wasn't the reason. Sorry.
- mikeash 8y ago
  But, oddly, that copyright issue is not why they demonetized the videos.
- vortico 8y ago
  Agreed, nothing to see here. He uploaded infringing property, tried to make profit, Youtube disabled his profit (for a different reason), he complains to ArsTechnica. I mean, if it'd make him happier, Youtube can disable his channel completely for infringement.
  - DEFCON28 8y ago
    YouTube only will go after "covers" if there's a copyright holder complaint, and allows many cover bands to exist.
- eps 8y ago
  FtA - As of today, your channel, TubaPeter.com, will no longer have access to monetization tools associated with YPP because it doesn’t meet the new threshold of 4,000 hours of watch time within the past 12 months and 1,000 subscribers.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
braderhart 8y ago
Let's not forget that YouTube is sponsoring and enabling unethical government psyops against American citizens: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/stop-citizen-psychological-warfare-brad-erhart/ https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/stop-citizen-psychological-wa...
return1 8y ago
why isn't the US breaking Youtube from Google already? Not only is it dangerous concentration of mass media power, but youtube is wasting away its potential while also wasting the creator's time and energy
- ThatPlayer 8y ago
  Why should they? Google itself doesn't make any media, it just provides the platform. And why shouldn't they be allowed to waste their own potential?
  - return1 8y ago
    a monopoly on the internet's gates is still a monopoly even if you dont own what goes through it. They cant be broken up for wasting their own potential but it is possible they are using googles superior bandwidth infrastructure and ad market domination to stifle competition.

61 points by DEFCON28 8y ago

spartas 8y ago

*demonetized

dang 8y ago
Fixed now.

digi_owl 8y ago

I can't help wonder if Google discovered that the banking and legal fees involved with paying channels that are below said threshold were eating their profits.

thaumasiotes 8y ago
Wouldn't it be more sensible to have a minimum withdrawal amount in that case?
- digi_owl 8y ago
  Perhaps, though it may be related more to the number of payments than the amount pr payment.
  - KMag 8y ago
    That's partially the point. Increasing the minimum withdrawal amount will reduce the number of payments, absent any increases in revenues.
- developer2 8y ago
  I can't remember the proper accounting term for the practice, but businesses do not like to postpone/buffer payments like this. These legally count as on-the-books debts, and no business wants to track millions of dollars of tiny debts, each of which may one day need to be paid out. Particularly when these debts roll over year-after-year across tax years. I previously worked for a business where both the marketing and customer service departments handed out promotional credits to users like candy, without accounting for them. One day we got a new CFO, and a report on these credits was one of the first things he asked for. He sure wasn't happy to discover over $2.5 million dollars worth of credits idling in users' accounts with no expiration. While it's unlikely any significant percentage of them would have ever been cashed in, there is no guarantee and legally the business is on the hook to cover them.
  - thaumasiotes 8y ago
    > I can't remember the proper accounting term for the practice, but businesses do not like to postpone/buffer payments like this. These legally count as on-the-books debts, and no business wants to track millions of dollars of tiny debts, each of which may one day need to be paid out. Is the term "banking", by any chance? This is the entire business practice of banks.
tenpies 8y ago
I suspect it has to do more with human moderation. As much as Google hates using humans for anything, moderation still has a human element. As low as the minimum wage is in countries with a workforce educated enough to do this unpleasant work, it still costs something. Drawing a line in the sand and saying "your videos are so unlikely to generate views that we won't even spend a couple of cents making sure it doesn't violate our policies" probably saves them several millions per year.
- amelius 8y ago
  I don't get it. Why doesn't YT just rephrase it as "you earned $1, but reviewing and administration costs are $10, so you get $0"?
  - majewsky 8y ago
    Because then it wouldn't be "you get $0", but "you pay $9".

Trisell 8y ago

There is a massive chance to disrupt this market right now. But bandwidth costs alone make it difficult to challenge google in this space.

creato 8y ago
I don't think it's bandwidth costs that are the big problem here. People want a competitor that offers what YouTube offers: a way to get paid for uploading videos. I think this service is fundamentally very hard to produce. For all its faults with monetization, it's not clear it can be done better (beyond toy scale). It's clearly not profitable to have humans match videos with advertisers, and computers are inevitably going to screw up, like in this instance. edit: it seems this case is just a basic policy issue, though that policy is a consequence of trying to avoid attempting to solve this problem for the long tail of small time uploaders. I just assumed it was another false positive based on the title. Keeping advertisers and uploaders happy seems like an almost impossible task. Google may not be doing very well at it, but that doesn't mean it's easy to do better.
- Trisell 8y ago
  I think the key is to take the advertisers out of the loop, removing them removes almost all of the issues that YT has experienced. I have some ideas how to do that, it’s the costs of storage and bandwidth that I can’t figure out right now.
- rhizome 8y ago
  These sound like the words of a time-traveler from the CBS board room 75 years ago!
- DenisM 8y ago
  Do we have to have distribution tied to ads / monetization? It’s not true for the text content, yet here we are with the video, YouTube havving consumed it all. I imagine a world where creators pay someone for video distribution, but also plug-in advertising from third party ad agencies that have learned to match ads to content due to advantages in machine learning. Same as text today.

firasd 8y ago

I think Youtube creators aren't drawing the connection between media criticism of YT and the collateral damage to their earnings. It's easy to get mad at Youtube execs making policies, but Youtube is just reacting to bad PR. Youtube has faced a series of controversies that led to the 'AdPocalypse', and now the demonetization of people with not enough active subscribers. The media has gleefully gone after Youtube in these stories (the latest being inappropriate videos from Logan Paul and the proliferation of algorithmically-generated videos that show disturbing cartoon content to children.) YT creators should start pushing back---by saying wait, the algorithms and ads help small creators putting out good content as well, not just nefarious actors---if they don't want the scope of monetized content to get narrower and narrower. Otherwise it's easy for the public to align behind criticism of 'big tech' while overlooking that these are platforms which people depend on to express themselves and even to earn income.

themodelplumber 8y ago
Here's a pretty solid example of one YT creator pushing back, though I'm not sure it meets your criteria: https://youtu.be/q7RfYt_p2mk https://youtu.be/q7RfYt_p2mk
rcthompson 8y ago
I know at least some creators are well aware of the connection. Many have switched to other monetization platforms (Patreon and Twitch subscriptions being two big ones) and written off YouTube entirely as a reliable income stream. (That is, they continue posting on YouTube, but mainly to grow their viewer base, not to make money.) But I think you're right that a majority are probably only aware of the Adpocalypse in the abstract, if that.
haZard_OS 8y ago
One example of a relatively popular YT personality pushing back is Philip DeFranco: https://youtu.be/Gbph5or0NuM https://youtu.be/Gbph5or0NuM The linked video is about 1 year old but he has made several comments about the demonitization process since then as well. I linked to the older one because the issues with YT accounts and income has been going on for quite some time.

Jabbles 8y ago

Of all the possible complaints about YouTube demonetization, complaining that you don't meet the objective criteria for how popular your channel must be is surely the least important.

kombucha2 8y ago
Yeah seems like an odd criticism. What about 2000 hours or 1000....or 50 hours? I'm not sure why the author thinks he deserves monetization. At the very least I concede it seems arbitrary but it's Youtube's prerogative what they do with their platform.
TheRealPomax 8y ago
It's hard to argue "objective" when those criteria were unilaterally changed overnight from "objectively meeting the criteria" to "oh look, objectively not meeting the criteria because we pulled the rug from under you". If you have a financial arrangement with any company, and that company decides to change their policy arbitrarily so that they can justify not paying hundreds of thousands of people like you "because our policy excludes them", when a day ago they didn't, normally that would be various immediate court cases and no way for that company to win on any reasonable ground. This is surely not the least important reason.
- kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
  YouTubers don't have a financial arrangement. Nobody can produce a paper contract.
  - jnbiche 8y ago
    > YouTubers don't have a financial arrangement. Nobody can produce a paper contract. This is false. If money is being exchanged for services or (digital) goods, then there is a financial arrangement, in the form of an informal contract. But it's still a contract. In the case of YouTube, it would probably even be considered a formal contract since there are the written "Monetization Criteria", "Partner Program Policies", and YouTube "Terms and Conditions" that the creator agrees to. This agreement to written requirements is a "meeting of the minds" and thus constitutes a contract.

c3534l 8y ago

Edit: later on in the article, it was stated that that wasn't the reason. Sorry.

mikeash 8y ago
But, oddly, that copyright issue is not why they demonetized the videos.
vortico 8y ago
Agreed, nothing to see here. He uploaded infringing property, tried to make profit, Youtube disabled his profit (for a different reason), he complains to ArsTechnica. I mean, if it'd make him happier, Youtube can disable his channel completely for infringement.
- DEFCON28 8y ago
  YouTube only will go after "covers" if there's a copyright holder complaint, and allows many cover bands to exist.
eps 8y ago
FtA - As of today, your channel, TubaPeter.com, will no longer have access to monetization tools associated with YPP because it doesn’t meet the new threshold of 4,000 hours of watch time within the past 12 months and 1,000 subscribers.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

braderhart 8y ago

Let's not forget that YouTube is sponsoring and enabling unethical government psyops against American citizens: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/stop-citizen-psychological-warfare-brad-erhart/ https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/stop-citizen-psychological-wa...

return1 8y ago

why isn't the US breaking Youtube from Google already? Not only is it dangerous concentration of mass media power, but youtube is wasting away its potential while also wasting the creator's time and energy

ThatPlayer 8y ago
Why should they? Google itself doesn't make any media, it just provides the platform. And why shouldn't they be allowed to waste their own potential?
- return1 8y ago
  a monopoly on the internet's gates is still a monopoly even if you dont own what goes through it. They cant be broken up for wasting their own potential but it is possible they are using googles superior bandwidth infrastructure and ad market domination to stifle competition.