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My channel is now demonetized because I cover the war [video]

100 points by tomohawk 4y ago

T3RMINATED 4y ago
[dead]
ethotool 4y ago
I hate hearing about this. I’d be angry too if I invested all those hours and was banned by a bot. The risks involved investing your time into building out your project on a 3rd party platform make it not worth it. I hear about Google and Apple Apps being banned on the regular. Even a few weeks ago the Google Stadia platform being shutdown after a gaming developer spent several months building out their game. When will people learn? I also hear about way too many of the younger generation who invest much of their time on social media aspiring to become an influencer on YouTube/Instagram/TikTok. It’s not sustainable long term and it never will be. It’s important that the message gets delivered that these platforms are not sustainable. Sure there’s a small minority out there making it work for them but for the 99% you’re better off investing in higher education and working a lucrative career starting in your late 20s - early 30s.
- ghaff 4y ago
  >Sure there’s a small minority out there making it work for them but for the 99% you’re better off investing in higher education and working a lucrative career starting in your late 20s - early 30s. While you're at it you should probably deliver the same message to all the would-be actors waiting tables in LA, the mid-level college athletes with dreams of the NFL, etc. Most of these endeavors aren't going to pan out. I'm not sure how different YouTube, Instagram, or TikTok are.
  - ethotool 4y ago
    Everyone should be encouraged to pursue higher education. But that comparison is wrong. My account doesn’t get banned by a bot and I can’t get in touch with a human behind the platform working as a waiter or trying to become an NFL player.. social media is not normal. It’s Zuck and others creation along with their paid team of nerds who are having their way and harvesting data on their users. It’s unethical in every way and brings no good to society.
    - ghaff 4y ago
      You don't get banned from working as a waiter but there's a great deal of capriciousness and randomness with gatekeeping humans and their mental heuristics whether directors at auditions, talent and casting agents, scouts, studios, publishers, etc. I don't really see social media as a particularly stringent or even especially random gatekeeper--and of course there's always the option of self-hosting and asking for donations or subscriptions.
BiteCode_dev 4y ago
It's 2022, if you haven't realized by now that google is not your friend and based all your revenue on the company, what do you expect people to say?
- Maxburn 4y ago
  One of the best things of the past couple years; we have never had a clearer view of where everyone’s motives are. The real question; what are we doing now that we know these things?
  - ThrowawayR2 4y ago
    Nothing. The old school "information wants to be free" nerds and the tech companies they founded have irreversibly conditioned the public not to pay for anything on the Internet so now everybody and everything dances to the tune of ad brokers/advertisers to make their living. Until a new revenue model comes along to replace ad dollars, nothing is going to change no matter how many people grumble abut it.
    - BiteCode_dev 4y ago
      And that's why netlix and itunes were never popular since you could download that all for free. Oh, wait.
      - ghaff 4y ago
        While I'm sure there's some overlap, the information wants to be free crowd isn't necessarily the same as the crowd that mostly cares about convenience. The other factor here is that selling creative content/getting people to pay to see you has pretty much always been a long odds crapshoot as far as earning a living wage is concerned and there have likewise pretty much always been random gatekeepers standing in your way for all sorts of arbitrary reasons.
      - ThrowawayR2 4y ago
        Rather ironic you should mention Netflix since they're just about to implement a new partially-ad supported tier to their plans.
aolo2 4y ago
This channel has thumbnails of people getting killed by bombs with big red circles around them and a reaction face.
- gruez 4y ago
  Mind linking to some examples? The closest I was able to find were a few videos of explosions (but unclear as to whether someone actually died) with a reaction face.
  - owlninja 4y ago
    I mean if you pull up his channel and see his tiles of thumbnails, he's making the stereotypical exaggerated reaction face in all of them. It's not egregious but its right there.
    - gruez 4y ago
      >he's making the stereotypical exaggerated reaction face in all of them That's not the part in dispute. The part I couldn't find was "getting killed by bombs".
      - goatsi 4y ago
        Here is a video that he specifically titled as "drone kills". NSFW obviously: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQ4HxpQQ3Sg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQ4HxpQQ3Sg
- saxonww 4y ago
  This is kind of an aggressive take on it. It's circles around targets and often shows a bomb or grenade. When I read your comment I thought you meant there was gore; there was not. It's true that this guy is essentially profiting off tragedy, though. It's war porn. Not upset at all if he's lost his funding.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
sandworm101 4y ago
Cat vids. Minecraft. Makup tutorials. Girls in bikinis falling down. This is the way of youtube. Everything else is on thin ice 24/7.
- seydor 4y ago
  If you are just looking to grow to million subscribers, youtube makes it easy: just copy and upload videos from tiktok, they ll push them hard to the 'shorts' section. Don't worry, youtube will not complain at all, if anything they ll be happy about it (because copyrights matter only when you re the leader). And tiktokers wont really care
  - Scoundreller 4y ago
    I think the blackberry App Store effectively functioned like this. Take Google Play store apk, upload to blackberry store. Voilà.
  - xnx 4y ago
    Same goes for TikTok. A lot of the most liked videos are poorly cropped snippets of years-old YouTube videos.
- Scoundreller 4y ago
  I got demonetized when YouTube moves the goalpost and required 1000 subscribers. Sorry that my content only managed to gets views, but was more useful than entertaining. Google is a search engine. Subscribing to a channel is what you do when search sucks/doesn’t exist. I guess I’ll work on an “ow, my balls” channel.
- bryanlarsen 4y ago
  OTOH Perun seems to do very well doing hour-long powerpoint presentations on Youtube.
porridges 4y ago
Oh well. Looks like this guy will have to get a proper job now that jabbering on and on while other people's war footage plays in the background is no longer profitable. Big shrug from me.
hindsightbias 4y ago
Filed under “I want to monetize other peoples videos for my war pr0n channel and YT won’t let me.”
- seydor 4y ago
  Yeah he should get a TV show instead
  - MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
    Though he'll have to compete with FoxNews and CNN for monetizing peoples' suffering.
    - ranger_danger 4y ago
      Scott the Woz's TV show makes me suffer more than watching Fox News.
MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
How expensive is it to self-host videos nowadays? And are there any display ads providers that buy video advertising spots? Is it feasible to cobble together a page that has your content and splices a few ads into the videos? Kind of like a modernized version of the WordPress+AdSense blogs everyone used to have.
- phantomathkg 4y ago
  Self hosted video vs self host streaming is two different things. You might have cheap S3 storage to tons tons of MP4 video, but to transcode it, add CDN and everything added up. Cloudflare pricing example is a good guide here. 6 dollar for storage, but egress fee is 72. https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/products/cloudflare-stream/ https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/products/cloudflare-stream/
  - MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
    That seems surprisingly reasonable? It's saying $78/month for: >Streaming a library of 500 GB of HD videos over the course of one month with approximately 72,000 minutes of viewing time to a global market. And below is: >Streaming costs at a rate of $1 per 1,000 minutes delivered. So if you have tiktok style short videos of ~1 min, you only need a $1 CPM to break even.
- iLoveOncall 4y ago
  > How expensive is it to self-host videos nowadays? Insanely. If you take MrBeast's last video which is 200MB when downloaded in 1080p and has been viewed 40M times, we have 0.2GB * 40,000,000 = 20M GB of data transferred just for this one video. If you look at the price of AWS's CloudFront (a CDN) transfer out to the internet, it would cost $200,000 just to serve that video to the internet. This is just for pure data transfer. It's not viable even a second.
  - dewey 4y ago
    I don't think "blowing up like MrBeast" is the scenario you should optimize for. If you would suddenly have traffic like MrBeast you'd also have sponsorships like MrBeast to pay for the traffic. On a regular scale fine to host videos if you are with a regular hoster and not pay AWS/GCP network prices. The problem is that you won't get traffic, you won't be discovered, you'd have to do a lot of things that you'll get for free on dedicated video platforms (transcoding, keeping a lot of different formats available to work with all devices,...)
dawnerd 4y ago
I’d try reaching out to nebula to see if you’d be a match for their platform. Will it be profitable? Maybe not but they currently have the best alternative to YouTube so far.
mkl95 4y ago
All this guy does is upload other people's videos with some random comments like "Russia has taken the lead in donating tanks to Ukraine". I don't think it should be demonetized but it's not a big loss for the world either.
dewey 4y ago
Looking at the "Popular uploads" of said person I have to say that I'm not that shocked it happened. It's classic low quality YouTube clickbait videos with a "shocked face" on the thumbnail: "Analyzing 5 new combat videos from Ukraine war", "Estonian soldier reacts to M1 Abrams Tank",... - Maybe not worth demonitizing for, but also not something of worth being lost.
aaron695 4y ago
bryanlarsen 4y ago
It's also impacting the substantive bloggers, like Perun. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCC3ehuUksTyQ7bbjGntmx3Q/community https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCC3ehuUksTyQ7bbjGntmx3Q/com...
- modriano 4y ago
  I was wondering why he hadn't posted yet today, and honestly I think this should have been the main post. Artur Rehi's videos are essentially just mashups of no-context war-gore and he offers no insights, and I'm fine with him being demonetized (also, I watched two of his videos a while back and IIRC he ran ads saying that YouTube demonetizes his content so he needs ads and donations). But if there's an issue that would keep Perun demonetized (despite the fact that Perun just presents a word-heavy, gore-free powerpoint each week), that's a much bigger issue. I hope this gets sorted soon. I'd hate for Perun to have to depend on ads (I know he's run some VPN and Ground News ads, but those are appropriate for his content, and he claims to donate the money (and I believe he does)). Update: It looks like Denys Davydov's channel [0] (which is just maps overlaid with arrows and troop boundaries) is also demonetized. How odd. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6HBaIRPhClw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6HBaIRPhClw
  - doktrin 4y ago
    Apparently Vlad Vexler has also been demonetized. Which, if true, is as confusing as Perun.
causi 4y ago
Youtube are of course a pack of jerks but I don't know where this idea you have some kind of entitlement to the Youtube Partner Program came from. Youtube is already hosting your video content for free. The partner program is another free service where they do the work of an entire ad agency for you. Losing monetization doesn't stop you from getting paid, it stops you from getting paid automatically for no effort. You're still completely free to get sponsorships and run ad placements to make money exactly the way you had to before Youtube started handing out careers on a silver platter.
jasode 4y ago
>demonetized because I cover the war I understand his instinct to self-title his video as "I cover the war" which implies a noble journalistic service for viewers but in comparing other youtube channels talking about Ukraine that did not get de-monetized, I'm guessing his type of content crosses the line. E.g. one of his videos shows a grenade being dropped on a soldier while he has his pants down taking a dump. His commentary is to joke about it and vocalize a "boom" sound effect. The video is not blurred out and he did not set the "age restricted" flag. I won't link the video directly but you can easily find it. Another perspective to look at the above scenario... if Google Youtube splits ad revenue 55% creator + 45% to Google.... Is the public ok with Google getting 45% of ad money from someone cheerleading a war death? That's not a rhetorical question. I didn't do a survey so I really don't know what the answer is. I noticed that several other Youtube channels cover Ukraine topics without getting demonetized: https://www.youtube.com/c/RealLifeLore/search?query=ukraine https://www.youtube.com/c/RealLifeLore/search?query=ukraine https://www.youtube.com/c/Taskandpurpose/search?query=ukraine https://www.youtube.com/c/Taskandpurpose/search?query=ukrain... https://www.youtube.com/c/CaspianReport/search?query=ukraine https://www.youtube.com/c/CaspianReport/search?query=ukraine I'm guessing those channels will be fine because they don't show raw war footage while jeering at human suffering. I don't know if Youtube automatically demonetizes because of an algorithm sweeping through the channels or there was a human that decided his particular channel.
- topynate 4y ago
  The term 'demonetization' can be misleading. It's the creator who is demonetized on a demonetized video or channel. YouTube still often shows ads on such videos, it just keeps all the money instead of 45% of it.
  - londons_explore 4y ago
    Is this true? I don't think they show any pre-roll ads, mid roll ads or post roll ads on demonetizrd content. The only ad they show is a regular display and on the right hand side out of the video frame, and as far as I know revenue from that ad is never given to the creator anyway.
Crosseye_Jack 4y ago
Ignoring the content of this channel (as I have not watched it, so dunno if it breaks YT monetization rules or not), pretty much the "fastest" way of getting a channel "re-reviewed" is twitter. But you also need some high profile, "high engagement" account tweeting @teamyoutube about your cause. This method is often quicker than and/or more favorable than YT own appeal tools. YouTube's own human appeals process is often done by a low paid contractor who often won't view the video as a whole to gain context and only watch the section flagged by the AI, may have the language of the video as a second language, so may miss certain idioms of your speech. These contractors want to process as many reviews as quick as possible so they aint got time to look more closely / get another opinion of what was actually said or not actually be reviewed by a human at all and an AI takes a stab at trying to figure out if you "heavly reuse content". One of the current "tricks" to getting a video monetized is to upload multiple copies of it with very slight changes (a perfect hash match triggers a "you already uploaded this" error iirc) and playing the numbers game, waiting for the bot to review them all, if none are "green" for ads, request review on all the uploads, chances are they will be reviewed by differnt people and hope of them sees that your content follows the guidelines and approves it, delete the ones that don't get approved, if you get multiple approvals pick one to make public and delete the rest. The Twitter path (if you can get enough engagement) usually gets it infront of a YT employee to have a closer more indepth look and may come to another decision, if you can't get the engagement then with a whole channel demonetization then your next best thing if to still pump out the content as best as you can to YT's specs and re-apply in 30 days. But the Twitter method can also "backfire", we have seen on multiple occasion when one channel got a video agegated or demonetized, complaigned on Twitter that other channels covered the same thing and were fine, got the restriction removed and then got the restriction reapplied and also getting the other channels videos restricted/demonetized. I understand why YT don't publish a CLEAR set of guidelines (much like why game dev's don't publish extactly what they use to detect cheats) because someone will always game the system, however I know more and more YT creators getting highly frustrated with YT because they follow the guidlines, get struck/restricted/demonetized and on follow up get told they broke a rule YT have never publicly published. So they feel its a bit like playing football blindfolded, you know roughly where the goal posts are but you can never be sure when you kick the ball if you are going to hit the goal esp if you feel that YT are moving the posts and changing the size of the goal without telling anyone.
macinjosh 4y ago
This guy is a war profiteer not a journalist.
jmyeet 4y ago
This a teachable moment for media literacy. Generally speaking, companies don't publicly state why one of their users was punished, banned or whatever. That leaves the user with the ability to claim whatever they want. They may believe what they're saying. It might be putting a spin on it. It may well be outright lies and they know it. No one is going to correct them. But even if what they believe what they're saying, they've tried to present the situation fairly and all of their facts are, in fact, facts, you still only half the story. People do this because there's an audience for this. There are a lot of people who will believe you because it confirms and validates their own feelings about something. rather than their being any kind of objective principle in play. So for the claim "demonetized for covering the war [in Ukraine]", first it doesn't even pass the smell test. Youtube has way worse stuff than that. There's a legitimate interest in the subject. A cursory look will find plenty of other channels covering Ukraine without being demonetized just fine. So already the claim falls apart and you can move on what really happened. Other commenters note low-quality clickbait-y videos with questionable material included. That may or may not be the reason but it strikes me as a whole lot more likely that there are issues with this creeator's content more than a general issue with Ukraine content being demonetized.
fareesh 4y ago
Is it true that according to the latest Facebook/other platform policies a user can make a post advocating for the death of Putin but not the same type of post for Zelensky, George W Bush, Barack Obama, or any other world leader?
- mkl95 4y ago
  There's no formal rule, but Facebook allow it semi officially
tmaly 4y ago
You might want to consider diversifying your distribution of content. You are at the mercy of one companies political biases if you put all your eggs in one bias.
chimen 4y ago
I hope they do. Stupid click-baits with childish reaction faces on someone else's videos to begin with. This whole monetisation thing lowered the quality of content down to nothing. People create stuff just for the algorithms not for other people. It's on par with "SEO content", not content for an audience. Putting "funny" reactions, sounds and faces on videos where people are dying literally on camera from bombardments is something that should not be supported in any way. Nothing of value is lost here.
- NicolasL-S 4y ago
  Thousands of channels were demonetized at once. Did you (or Google) checked them before passing judgement? Among those demonetized is Perun who makes neutral hour-long PowerPoint presentations on war logistics with text, graphs and the occasional harmless picture. His content is higher quality than most news outlet by a margin. This is what he wrote today: "I am extremely disappointed given that this week's video includes an interview with the former commander of the US Army in Europe, Lieutenant General Ben Hodges (Ret.), on the topic of Ukrainian force generation over the winter and into 2023."
  - MrFoof 4y ago
    Looks like Perun may have had things sorted out. This week's presentation went live about an hour ago.
- kelseyfrog 4y ago
  Value is only possible to attribute to things through market mediated exchange. Sorry, but that's how reality works. Anything that is not possible to purchase by definition does not have value.
rossdavidh 4y ago
I follow two individual YouTube channels with a lot of Ukraine war coverage: Reporting From Ukraine https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBEoIbDZFpw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBEoIbDZFpw Denys Davydov https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6HBaIRPhClw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6HBaIRPhClw Both were mostly maps and discussion of news, occasional video from the war but never actual killing, that I saw. Both definitely journalistic in tone. Both are demonetized today. I think this is not just about this person's channel.
rboes2 4y ago
This isn't just this youtuber, it's all of them
zackees 4y ago
NicolasL-S 4y ago
I'm guessing the choice made by Google went like: Option 1) Hire more staff to do a proper monitoring job on a per-video or per-channel basis. Option 2) Just demonetize every small youtuber who talks about the Ukraine war right now, no matter the guidelines. 1) costs money. 2) some mild reputation impact for us, but who cares about the livelihood of innocent bystanders who trusted our platform and actually respected our guidelines.
exabrial 4y ago
What a tasteless move by Google.
Krisjohn 4y ago
"Person whose YouTube channel should have been shut down years ago surprised it's finally happening"
mtlchk 4y ago

100 points by tomohawk 4y ago

[dead]

I hate hearing about this. I’d be angry too if I invested all those hours and was banned by a bot. The risks involved investing your time into building out your project on a 3rd party platform make it not worth it. I hear about Google and Apple Apps being banned on the regular. Even a few weeks ago the Google Stadia platform being shutdown after a gaming developer spent several months building out their game. When will people learn? I also hear about way too many of the younger generation who invest much of their time on social media aspiring to become an influencer on YouTube/Instagram/TikTok. It’s not sustainable long term and it never will be. It’s important that the message gets delivered that these platforms are not sustainable. Sure there’s a small minority out there making it work for them but for the 99% you’re better off investing in higher education and working a lucrative career starting in your late 20s - early 30s.

ghaff 4y ago
>Sure there’s a small minority out there making it work for them but for the 99% you’re better off investing in higher education and working a lucrative career starting in your late 20s - early 30s. While you're at it you should probably deliver the same message to all the would-be actors waiting tables in LA, the mid-level college athletes with dreams of the NFL, etc. Most of these endeavors aren't going to pan out. I'm not sure how different YouTube, Instagram, or TikTok are.
- ethotool 4y ago
  Everyone should be encouraged to pursue higher education. But that comparison is wrong. My account doesn’t get banned by a bot and I can’t get in touch with a human behind the platform working as a waiter or trying to become an NFL player.. social media is not normal. It’s Zuck and others creation along with their paid team of nerds who are having their way and harvesting data on their users. It’s unethical in every way and brings no good to society.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    You don't get banned from working as a waiter but there's a great deal of capriciousness and randomness with gatekeeping humans and their mental heuristics whether directors at auditions, talent and casting agents, scouts, studios, publishers, etc. I don't really see social media as a particularly stringent or even especially random gatekeeper--and of course there's always the option of self-hosting and asking for donations or subscriptions.

BiteCode_dev 4y ago

It's 2022, if you haven't realized by now that google is not your friend and based all your revenue on the company, what do you expect people to say?

Maxburn 4y ago
One of the best things of the past couple years; we have never had a clearer view of where everyone’s motives are. The real question; what are we doing now that we know these things?
- ThrowawayR2 4y ago
  Nothing. The old school "information wants to be free" nerds and the tech companies they founded have irreversibly conditioned the public not to pay for anything on the Internet so now everybody and everything dances to the tune of ad brokers/advertisers to make their living. Until a new revenue model comes along to replace ad dollars, nothing is going to change no matter how many people grumble abut it.
  - BiteCode_dev 4y ago
    And that's why netlix and itunes were never popular since you could download that all for free. Oh, wait.
    - ghaff 4y ago
      While I'm sure there's some overlap, the information wants to be free crowd isn't necessarily the same as the crowd that mostly cares about convenience. The other factor here is that selling creative content/getting people to pay to see you has pretty much always been a long odds crapshoot as far as earning a living wage is concerned and there have likewise pretty much always been random gatekeepers standing in your way for all sorts of arbitrary reasons.
    - ThrowawayR2 4y ago
      Rather ironic you should mention Netflix since they're just about to implement a new partially-ad supported tier to their plans.

aolo2 4y ago

This channel has thumbnails of people getting killed by bombs with big red circles around them and a reaction face.

gruez 4y ago
Mind linking to some examples? The closest I was able to find were a few videos of explosions (but unclear as to whether someone actually died) with a reaction face.
- owlninja 4y ago
  I mean if you pull up his channel and see his tiles of thumbnails, he's making the stereotypical exaggerated reaction face in all of them. It's not egregious but its right there.
  - gruez 4y ago
    >he's making the stereotypical exaggerated reaction face in all of them That's not the part in dispute. The part I couldn't find was "getting killed by bombs".
    - goatsi 4y ago
      Here is a video that he specifically titled as "drone kills". NSFW obviously: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQ4HxpQQ3Sg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQ4HxpQQ3Sg
saxonww 4y ago
This is kind of an aggressive take on it. It's circles around targets and often shows a bomb or grenade. When I read your comment I thought you meant there was gore; there was not. It's true that this guy is essentially profiting off tragedy, though. It's war porn. Not upset at all if he's lost his funding.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

sandworm101 4y ago

Cat vids. Minecraft. Makup tutorials. Girls in bikinis falling down. This is the way of youtube. Everything else is on thin ice 24/7.

seydor 4y ago
If you are just looking to grow to million subscribers, youtube makes it easy: just copy and upload videos from tiktok, they ll push them hard to the 'shorts' section. Don't worry, youtube will not complain at all, if anything they ll be happy about it (because copyrights matter only when you re the leader). And tiktokers wont really care
- Scoundreller 4y ago
  I think the blackberry App Store effectively functioned like this. Take Google Play store apk, upload to blackberry store. Voilà.
- xnx 4y ago
  Same goes for TikTok. A lot of the most liked videos are poorly cropped snippets of years-old YouTube videos.
Scoundreller 4y ago
I got demonetized when YouTube moves the goalpost and required 1000 subscribers. Sorry that my content only managed to gets views, but was more useful than entertaining. Google is a search engine. Subscribing to a channel is what you do when search sucks/doesn’t exist. I guess I’ll work on an “ow, my balls” channel.
bryanlarsen 4y ago
OTOH Perun seems to do very well doing hour-long powerpoint presentations on Youtube.

porridges 4y ago

Oh well. Looks like this guy will have to get a proper job now that jabbering on and on while other people's war footage plays in the background is no longer profitable. Big shrug from me.

hindsightbias 4y ago

Filed under “I want to monetize other peoples videos for my war pr0n channel and YT won’t let me.”

seydor 4y ago
Yeah he should get a TV show instead
- MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
  Though he'll have to compete with FoxNews and CNN for monetizing peoples' suffering.
  - ranger_danger 4y ago
    Scott the Woz's TV show makes me suffer more than watching Fox News.

MonkeyMalarky 4y ago

How expensive is it to self-host videos nowadays? And are there any display ads providers that buy video advertising spots? Is it feasible to cobble together a page that has your content and splices a few ads into the videos? Kind of like a modernized version of the WordPress+AdSense blogs everyone used to have.

phantomathkg 4y ago
Self hosted video vs self host streaming is two different things. You might have cheap S3 storage to tons tons of MP4 video, but to transcode it, add CDN and everything added up. Cloudflare pricing example is a good guide here. 6 dollar for storage, but egress fee is 72. https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/products/cloudflare-stream/ https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/products/cloudflare-stream/
- MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
  That seems surprisingly reasonable? It's saying $78/month for: >Streaming a library of 500 GB of HD videos over the course of one month with approximately 72,000 minutes of viewing time to a global market. And below is: >Streaming costs at a rate of $1 per 1,000 minutes delivered. So if you have tiktok style short videos of ~1 min, you only need a $1 CPM to break even.
iLoveOncall 4y ago
> How expensive is it to self-host videos nowadays? Insanely. If you take MrBeast's last video which is 200MB when downloaded in 1080p and has been viewed 40M times, we have 0.2GB * 40,000,000 = 20M GB of data transferred just for this one video. If you look at the price of AWS's CloudFront (a CDN) transfer out to the internet, it would cost $200,000 just to serve that video to the internet. This is just for pure data transfer. It's not viable even a second.
- dewey 4y ago
  I don't think "blowing up like MrBeast" is the scenario you should optimize for. If you would suddenly have traffic like MrBeast you'd also have sponsorships like MrBeast to pay for the traffic. On a regular scale fine to host videos if you are with a regular hoster and not pay AWS/GCP network prices. The problem is that you won't get traffic, you won't be discovered, you'd have to do a lot of things that you'll get for free on dedicated video platforms (transcoding, keeping a lot of different formats available to work with all devices,...)

dawnerd 4y ago

I’d try reaching out to nebula to see if you’d be a match for their platform. Will it be profitable? Maybe not but they currently have the best alternative to YouTube so far.

mkl95 4y ago

All this guy does is upload other people's videos with some random comments like "Russia has taken the lead in donating tanks to Ukraine". I don't think it should be demonetized but it's not a big loss for the world either.

dewey 4y ago

Looking at the "Popular uploads" of said person I have to say that I'm not that shocked it happened. It's classic low quality YouTube clickbait videos with a "shocked face" on the thumbnail: "Analyzing 5 new combat videos from Ukraine war", "Estonian soldier reacts to M1 Abrams Tank",... - Maybe not worth demonitizing for, but also not something of worth being lost.

aaron695 4y ago

bryanlarsen 4y ago

It's also impacting the substantive bloggers, like Perun. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCC3ehuUksTyQ7bbjGntmx3Q/community https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCC3ehuUksTyQ7bbjGntmx3Q/com...

modriano 4y ago
I was wondering why he hadn't posted yet today, and honestly I think this should have been the main post. Artur Rehi's videos are essentially just mashups of no-context war-gore and he offers no insights, and I'm fine with him being demonetized (also, I watched two of his videos a while back and IIRC he ran ads saying that YouTube demonetizes his content so he needs ads and donations). But if there's an issue that would keep Perun demonetized (despite the fact that Perun just presents a word-heavy, gore-free powerpoint each week), that's a much bigger issue. I hope this gets sorted soon. I'd hate for Perun to have to depend on ads (I know he's run some VPN and Ground News ads, but those are appropriate for his content, and he claims to donate the money (and I believe he does)). Update: It looks like Denys Davydov's channel [0] (which is just maps overlaid with arrows and troop boundaries) is also demonetized. How odd. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6HBaIRPhClw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6HBaIRPhClw
- doktrin 4y ago
  Apparently Vlad Vexler has also been demonetized. Which, if true, is as confusing as Perun.

causi 4y ago

Youtube are of course a pack of jerks but I don't know where this idea you have some kind of entitlement to the Youtube Partner Program came from. Youtube is already hosting your video content for free. The partner program is another free service where they do the work of an entire ad agency for you. Losing monetization doesn't stop you from getting paid, it stops you from getting paid automatically for no effort. You're still completely free to get sponsorships and run ad placements to make money exactly the way you had to before Youtube started handing out careers on a silver platter.

jasode 4y ago

>demonetized because I cover the war I understand his instinct to self-title his video as "I cover the war" which implies a noble journalistic service for viewers but in comparing other youtube channels talking about Ukraine that did not get de-monetized, I'm guessing his type of content crosses the line. E.g. one of his videos shows a grenade being dropped on a soldier while he has his pants down taking a dump. His commentary is to joke about it and vocalize a "boom" sound effect. The video is not blurred out and he did not set the "age restricted" flag. I won't link the video directly but you can easily find it. Another perspective to look at the above scenario... if Google Youtube splits ad revenue 55% creator + 45% to Google.... Is the public ok with Google getting 45% of ad money from someone cheerleading a war death? That's not a rhetorical question. I didn't do a survey so I really don't know what the answer is. I noticed that several other Youtube channels cover Ukraine topics without getting demonetized: https://www.youtube.com/c/RealLifeLore/search?query=ukraine https://www.youtube.com/c/RealLifeLore/search?query=ukraine https://www.youtube.com/c/Taskandpurpose/search?query=ukraine https://www.youtube.com/c/Taskandpurpose/search?query=ukrain... https://www.youtube.com/c/CaspianReport/search?query=ukraine https://www.youtube.com/c/CaspianReport/search?query=ukraine I'm guessing those channels will be fine because they don't show raw war footage while jeering at human suffering. I don't know if Youtube automatically demonetizes because of an algorithm sweeping through the channels or there was a human that decided his particular channel.

topynate 4y ago
The term 'demonetization' can be misleading. It's the creator who is demonetized on a demonetized video or channel. YouTube still often shows ads on such videos, it just keeps all the money instead of 45% of it.
- londons_explore 4y ago
  Is this true? I don't think they show any pre-roll ads, mid roll ads or post roll ads on demonetizrd content. The only ad they show is a regular display and on the right hand side out of the video frame, and as far as I know revenue from that ad is never given to the creator anyway.

Crosseye_Jack 4y ago

Ignoring the content of this channel (as I have not watched it, so dunno if it breaks YT monetization rules or not), pretty much the "fastest" way of getting a channel "re-reviewed" is twitter. But you also need some high profile, "high engagement" account tweeting @teamyoutube about your cause. This method is often quicker than and/or more favorable than YT own appeal tools. YouTube's own human appeals process is often done by a low paid contractor who often won't view the video as a whole to gain context and only watch the section flagged by the AI, may have the language of the video as a second language, so may miss certain idioms of your speech. These contractors want to process as many reviews as quick as possible so they aint got time to look more closely / get another opinion of what was actually said or not actually be reviewed by a human at all and an AI takes a stab at trying to figure out if you "heavly reuse content". One of the current "tricks" to getting a video monetized is to upload multiple copies of it with very slight changes (a perfect hash match triggers a "you already uploaded this" error iirc) and playing the numbers game, waiting for the bot to review them all, if none are "green" for ads, request review on all the uploads, chances are they will be reviewed by differnt people and hope of them sees that your content follows the guidelines and approves it, delete the ones that don't get approved, if you get multiple approvals pick one to make public and delete the rest. The Twitter path (if you can get enough engagement) usually gets it infront of a YT employee to have a closer more indepth look and may come to another decision, if you can't get the engagement then with a whole channel demonetization then your next best thing if to still pump out the content as best as you can to YT's specs and re-apply in 30 days. But the Twitter method can also "backfire", we have seen on multiple occasion when one channel got a video agegated or demonetized, complaigned on Twitter that other channels covered the same thing and were fine, got the restriction removed and then got the restriction reapplied and also getting the other channels videos restricted/demonetized. I understand why YT don't publish a CLEAR set of guidelines (much like why game dev's don't publish extactly what they use to detect cheats) because someone will always game the system, however I know more and more YT creators getting highly frustrated with YT because they follow the guidlines, get struck/restricted/demonetized and on follow up get told they broke a rule YT have never publicly published. So they feel its a bit like playing football blindfolded, you know roughly where the goal posts are but you can never be sure when you kick the ball if you are going to hit the goal esp if you feel that YT are moving the posts and changing the size of the goal without telling anyone.

macinjosh 4y ago

This guy is a war profiteer not a journalist.

jmyeet 4y ago

This a teachable moment for media literacy. Generally speaking, companies don't publicly state why one of their users was punished, banned or whatever. That leaves the user with the ability to claim whatever they want. They may believe what they're saying. It might be putting a spin on it. It may well be outright lies and they know it. No one is going to correct them. But even if what they believe what they're saying, they've tried to present the situation fairly and all of their facts are, in fact, facts, you still only half the story. People do this because there's an audience for this. There are a lot of people who will believe you because it confirms and validates their own feelings about something. rather than their being any kind of objective principle in play. So for the claim "demonetized for covering the war [in Ukraine]", first it doesn't even pass the smell test. Youtube has way worse stuff than that. There's a legitimate interest in the subject. A cursory look will find plenty of other channels covering Ukraine without being demonetized just fine. So already the claim falls apart and you can move on what really happened. Other commenters note low-quality clickbait-y videos with questionable material included. That may or may not be the reason but it strikes me as a whole lot more likely that there are issues with this creeator's content more than a general issue with Ukraine content being demonetized.

fareesh 4y ago

Is it true that according to the latest Facebook/other platform policies a user can make a post advocating for the death of Putin but not the same type of post for Zelensky, George W Bush, Barack Obama, or any other world leader?

mkl95 4y ago
There's no formal rule, but Facebook allow it semi officially

tmaly 4y ago

You might want to consider diversifying your distribution of content. You are at the mercy of one companies political biases if you put all your eggs in one bias.

chimen 4y ago

I hope they do. Stupid click-baits with childish reaction faces on someone else's videos to begin with. This whole monetisation thing lowered the quality of content down to nothing. People create stuff just for the algorithms not for other people. It's on par with "SEO content", not content for an audience. Putting "funny" reactions, sounds and faces on videos where people are dying literally on camera from bombardments is something that should not be supported in any way. Nothing of value is lost here.

NicolasL-S 4y ago
Thousands of channels were demonetized at once. Did you (or Google) checked them before passing judgement? Among those demonetized is Perun who makes neutral hour-long PowerPoint presentations on war logistics with text, graphs and the occasional harmless picture. His content is higher quality than most news outlet by a margin. This is what he wrote today: "I am extremely disappointed given that this week's video includes an interview with the former commander of the US Army in Europe, Lieutenant General Ben Hodges (Ret.), on the topic of Ukrainian force generation over the winter and into 2023."
- MrFoof 4y ago
  Looks like Perun may have had things sorted out. This week's presentation went live about an hour ago.
kelseyfrog 4y ago
Value is only possible to attribute to things through market mediated exchange. Sorry, but that's how reality works. Anything that is not possible to purchase by definition does not have value.

rossdavidh 4y ago

I follow two individual YouTube channels with a lot of Ukraine war coverage: Reporting From Ukraine https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBEoIbDZFpw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBEoIbDZFpw Denys Davydov https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6HBaIRPhClw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6HBaIRPhClw Both were mostly maps and discussion of news, occasional video from the war but never actual killing, that I saw. Both definitely journalistic in tone. Both are demonetized today. I think this is not just about this person's channel.

rboes2 4y ago

This isn't just this youtuber, it's all of them

zackees 4y ago

NicolasL-S 4y ago

I'm guessing the choice made by Google went like: Option 1) Hire more staff to do a proper monitoring job on a per-video or per-channel basis. Option 2) Just demonetize every small youtuber who talks about the Ukraine war right now, no matter the guidelines. 1) costs money. 2) some mild reputation impact for us, but who cares about the livelihood of innocent bystanders who trusted our platform and actually respected our guidelines.

exabrial 4y ago

What a tasteless move by Google.

Krisjohn 4y ago

"Person whose YouTube channel should have been shut down years ago surprised it's finally happening"

mtlchk 4y ago