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I personally dislike the “channelization” of YouTube. The whole point of the internet is that it doesn’t have the restrictions of linear media. Search solves th

I personally dislike the “channelization” of YouTube. The whole point of the internet is that it doesn’t have the restrictions of linear media. Search solves that problem of content discovery. Now YouTube won’t pay you unless you have 1000 subscribers. But a lot of content just isn’t subscribeable and that’s ok. Pre-1000 sub requirement, I put up a video for a niche MacBook Air microphone issue and repair that wasn’t covered in any video. Made $3-4/month, then cut to zero. Of course, that means I’m not going to go through the effort of other useful-to-a-few and more-useful-than-entertaining videos that I found no video on. Like how the same issue and resolution applies on MacBook speakers. Or how I fixed my toilet (it wasn’t the flapper!!!). How I fixed my washing machine (don’t spend $100 replacing the mixing valve, here’s how I cleaned mine out). But no, not going to waste my time unless YT cuts me in on the revenue. I feel bad for the excellent video I saw last night to repair my Neato vacuum cleaner, but the guy had 45 subs. Or the one and done massively useful video to repair my garage door opener, but few subs. Meanwhile when I wrote disparate blog articles, I went from $2/month, to $20, to $200 to $2000 through adsense, and it’s because Google search sent you to me. Not because you bookmarked my topics that can be about banking one day, to renewing your passport in my city because the viewership groups don’t overlap.

realusername 4y ago
> Meanwhile when I wrote disparate blog articles, I went from $2/month, to $20, to $200 to $2000, and it’s because Google search sent you to me. Not because you bookmarked me. What methods did you use to monetize your blog?
- Scoundreller 4y ago
  I made an edit: just Adsense. Largely, specialized sites that provides objectively better info+experience largely dropped that revenue a lot, but also Google search favours corporate content a lot more nowadays, to put a nail in the personal blog coffin.
- anileated 4y ago
  > Meanwhile when I wrote disparate blog articles, I went from $2/month, to $20, to $200 to $2000, and it’s because Google search sent you to me. Imagine if Google trained an LLM on its index and started providing answers without ever sending users your way… Actually, we have a suitable example of just that being done. /s I bookmarked this as a vivid illustration of my gripe with LLMs, and more specifically their creator/operators’ meticulous avoidance of the topic of attribution. You’d think it’s fairly feasible: if training data had attribution, I can’t see how LLM would not be able to separate substance from style and some reflection on the former, so that if most of topical substance is found to come from only 1–2 sources it would just note those sources for the user. If you provide actually niche content, when ChatGPT answers relevant questions the substance may well come from your body of work alone. Yet the asker pays LLM operator and is never informed you exist: you, in turn, stand to lose not only your ad revenue but also the potential ability to upsell something, engage with your audience, learn who that audience even is and how your work is sought, and just generally feel useful and valued. Give it time and sufficient popularity of LLMs and no one will even be inclined to believe that you did the original work in the first place—since from anyone’s perspective you might as well have asked LLM. The cynic in me says operators are particularly interested in public not asking the question whether it’s feasible to attribute LLM output because it may make them liable to pass to countless volunteer writers, turned involuntary training data providers, part of the profits made from running the model. Another reason might be that researching original authorship requires manual human labour proportionate to the size of training data, and who would ever want to pay for that? Definitely not a startup with millions in funding from Silicon Valley investors. It is just me or all incentives to openly share useful information (as opposed to pure entertainment) are in jeopardy now? /thread hijack
  - RyanHamilton 4y ago
    Your prediction seems depressing but I can't think of a solid argument against it. Already there are sites that pay people to copy content from other sites or scrape & paste it. They rank higher than the original site by combining relevant data from multiple sites. AI that can copy-paste articles will make that business infinitely scalable and harder to detect.
makeitdouble 4y ago
You have a point, and of course not everything should live and die by its channel. In particular the incentives to have regular uploads and consistent videos should be fought back, it's crushing so much creativity, brings burnout and I'm sure we're missing on otherwise good videos that are nver made because to long to take, or shelved because it doesn't match the channel. Then I also follow channels from which I want to see every single videos in priority, whatever they are, and it irks me that they don't pop up more prominently (or at all) in my main view. I kinda want it both ways to be honest.
Gigachad 4y ago
It’s probably because advertisers demand that their ads are not placed on “bad” content. By limiting ads to 1000+ subscriber channels, it’s much more likely the content isn’t in violation of the YouTube rules.
- stephen_g 4y ago
  I think YouTube now puts ads on basically everything though... (I don't know for sure, I have had Premium for a little more than a year now, and before that uBlock Origin took care of things).
  - bagels 4y ago
    If your channel covers certain taboo topics it can be "demonetized" which means no revenue from Google. Those channels often have other sponsors.
    - SpelingBeeChamp 4y ago
      > If your channel covers certain taboo topics it can be "demonetized" which means no revenue from Google. That almost never happens. Rather, individual videos are demonetized- or deemed unsuitable for all advertisers. In fairness, that can easily happen to an overwhelming majority of a channel’s videos, but it is important, IMO, to speak accurately about what is going on. Source: I have been a full-time YouTuber for the last seven years. I publish content that often toes the line between suitable for advertisers and not.)
    - stephen_g 4y ago
      They do demonetise videos, yes, but I believe they still put ads on them (just they take the money, not the creator).
      - tsimionescu 4y ago
        I believe they don't put ads on most demonetised videos, since they are typically demonetised because (YT's algorithms think that) advertisers don't want their ads associated with the content.
jve 4y ago
> repair my Neato vacuum cleaner Hey, any chance your robot went from base, turns on, then turns off? Then cycles on/off again... I have mine D75 here which I started to fix by cleaning but no luck.
- Scoundreller 4y ago
  Nope, mine was persistently saying it’s stuck. The brush was jammed. Turned out you can pull off the non-drive side of the brush, dis-assemble with a pick and clean out the disk of internalized gunk that has starting to roll over itself.
autoexec 4y ago
> Of course, that means I’m not going to go through the effort of other useful-to-a-few and more-useful-than-entertaining videos that I found no video on...But no, not going to waste my time unless YT cuts me in on the revenue. Why wouldn't you post something just because you won't make a bunch of money off of it? Was that your entire goal with the video you made about the mic issue you had? What's the reason you post comments here? Is someone paying you to do that? A lot of my favorite things online were put there by people who were just creating and sharing useful things with others because they were passionate and helpful. A few dollars a month would be a nice bonus, but most people will continue to contribute to the internet without any expectation of getting anything in their bank accounts for their time. Production values might suffer for it, but for most people uploading a video to youtube does not require a huge investment in time money and effort. I love that people are able to create content and make money on youtube, but the idea that people should/have/will stop sharing with each other unless they're getting paid is strange. It's the people who most concern themselves with how much money they can make on youtube that end up flooding the internet with the worst output. That's how we got things like clickbait, homogenized content, algorithm gaming, the nightmarish videos on Youtube Kids etc.
- RHSeeger 4y ago
  To some extent, it may be the messaging, not the amount. The limit being in place is labeling those creators as "value-less" (vs others, who do have value). In theory, I see it much like the idea that putting a price of $0.01 on something makes it "appear" much more valuable to people than making it free in the first place. It's not about the actual amount, just the messaging of "this has value" vs "this has no value".
- nhooyr 4y ago
  > Why wouldn't you post something just because you won't make a bunch of money off of it? Why does anyone do anything? There needs to be an incentive.
  - Gene_Parmesan 4y ago
    Guess we should shut down open source then.
MisterBastahrd 4y ago
Since when has the internet not been channelized? Gopher was channelized. IRC was channelized. Usenet was channelized. Early websites even tried to channelize via webrings and blogrolls. The entire "search" thing sans channels is a fairly new phenomenon.
adolph 4y ago
> Now YouTube won’t pay you unless you have 1000 subscribers. I wonder if there is an opportunity for a syndication cooperative. Let's say you find relatively related content, like niche MacBook fixes that get views but not subscriptions. The content owners combine their videos into one channel to get over the 1k revenue hump. The back catalog is used as the start of a funnel to gain subscriptions.
- FanaHOVA 4y ago
  We're just going back in time. Back in the days when I was making YT content, you wouldn't make any money until you reached certain views / subs thresholds. You could then apply for partner, setup an AdSense account, and monetize videos. Before I had the numbers, I became a partner with Maker Studios and monetized videos through them. They ended up getting bought by Disney for $500M. The current problem + your proposed solutions are literally what we had ~10 years ago :)
  - adolph 4y ago
    Hearing that an off the cuff idea has been proven out before is such a pleasant feeling, thank you! I suspect that coordination also occurs on the in-video ad placement side as so much of the content I enjoy pimps rapid PCB services or online learning. If a cooperative works on the YT money-side, it could also work from the opposite side for videos with great SEO but where the author's content isn't right for "Subscribe Now!"

realusername 4y ago

> Meanwhile when I wrote disparate blog articles, I went from $2/month, to $20, to $200 to $2000, and it’s because Google search sent you to me. Not because you bookmarked me. What methods did you use to monetize your blog?

Scoundreller 4y ago
I made an edit: just Adsense. Largely, specialized sites that provides objectively better info+experience largely dropped that revenue a lot, but also Google search favours corporate content a lot more nowadays, to put a nail in the personal blog coffin.
anileated 4y ago
> Meanwhile when I wrote disparate blog articles, I went from $2/month, to $20, to $200 to $2000, and it’s because Google search sent you to me. Imagine if Google trained an LLM on its index and started providing answers without ever sending users your way… Actually, we have a suitable example of just that being done. /s I bookmarked this as a vivid illustration of my gripe with LLMs, and more specifically their creator/operators’ meticulous avoidance of the topic of attribution. You’d think it’s fairly feasible: if training data had attribution, I can’t see how LLM would not be able to separate substance from style and some reflection on the former, so that if most of topical substance is found to come from only 1–2 sources it would just note those sources for the user. If you provide actually niche content, when ChatGPT answers relevant questions the substance may well come from your body of work alone. Yet the asker pays LLM operator and is never informed you exist: you, in turn, stand to lose not only your ad revenue but also the potential ability to upsell something, engage with your audience, learn who that audience even is and how your work is sought, and just generally feel useful and valued. Give it time and sufficient popularity of LLMs and no one will even be inclined to believe that you did the original work in the first place—since from anyone’s perspective you might as well have asked LLM. The cynic in me says operators are particularly interested in public not asking the question whether it’s feasible to attribute LLM output because it may make them liable to pass to countless volunteer writers, turned involuntary training data providers, part of the profits made from running the model. Another reason might be that researching original authorship requires manual human labour proportionate to the size of training data, and who would ever want to pay for that? Definitely not a startup with millions in funding from Silicon Valley investors. It is just me or all incentives to openly share useful information (as opposed to pure entertainment) are in jeopardy now? /thread hijack
- RyanHamilton 4y ago
  Your prediction seems depressing but I can't think of a solid argument against it. Already there are sites that pay people to copy content from other sites or scrape & paste it. They rank higher than the original site by combining relevant data from multiple sites. AI that can copy-paste articles will make that business infinitely scalable and harder to detect.

makeitdouble 4y ago

You have a point, and of course not everything should live and die by its channel. In particular the incentives to have regular uploads and consistent videos should be fought back, it's crushing so much creativity, brings burnout and I'm sure we're missing on otherwise good videos that are nver made because to long to take, or shelved because it doesn't match the channel. Then I also follow channels from which I want to see every single videos in priority, whatever they are, and it irks me that they don't pop up more prominently (or at all) in my main view. I kinda want it both ways to be honest.

Gigachad 4y ago

It’s probably because advertisers demand that their ads are not placed on “bad” content. By limiting ads to 1000+ subscriber channels, it’s much more likely the content isn’t in violation of the YouTube rules.

stephen_g 4y ago
I think YouTube now puts ads on basically everything though... (I don't know for sure, I have had Premium for a little more than a year now, and before that uBlock Origin took care of things).
- bagels 4y ago
  If your channel covers certain taboo topics it can be "demonetized" which means no revenue from Google. Those channels often have other sponsors.
  - SpelingBeeChamp 4y ago
    > If your channel covers certain taboo topics it can be "demonetized" which means no revenue from Google. That almost never happens. Rather, individual videos are demonetized- or deemed unsuitable for all advertisers. In fairness, that can easily happen to an overwhelming majority of a channel’s videos, but it is important, IMO, to speak accurately about what is going on. Source: I have been a full-time YouTuber for the last seven years. I publish content that often toes the line between suitable for advertisers and not.)
  - stephen_g 4y ago
    They do demonetise videos, yes, but I believe they still put ads on them (just they take the money, not the creator).
    - tsimionescu 4y ago
      I believe they don't put ads on most demonetised videos, since they are typically demonetised because (YT's algorithms think that) advertisers don't want their ads associated with the content.

jve 4y ago

> repair my Neato vacuum cleaner Hey, any chance your robot went from base, turns on, then turns off? Then cycles on/off again... I have mine D75 here which I started to fix by cleaning but no luck.

Scoundreller 4y ago
Nope, mine was persistently saying it’s stuck. The brush was jammed. Turned out you can pull off the non-drive side of the brush, dis-assemble with a pick and clean out the disk of internalized gunk that has starting to roll over itself.

autoexec 4y ago

> Of course, that means I’m not going to go through the effort of other useful-to-a-few and more-useful-than-entertaining videos that I found no video on...But no, not going to waste my time unless YT cuts me in on the revenue. Why wouldn't you post something just because you won't make a bunch of money off of it? Was that your entire goal with the video you made about the mic issue you had? What's the reason you post comments here? Is someone paying you to do that? A lot of my favorite things online were put there by people who were just creating and sharing useful things with others because they were passionate and helpful. A few dollars a month would be a nice bonus, but most people will continue to contribute to the internet without any expectation of getting anything in their bank accounts for their time. Production values might suffer for it, but for most people uploading a video to youtube does not require a huge investment in time money and effort. I love that people are able to create content and make money on youtube, but the idea that people should/have/will stop sharing with each other unless they're getting paid is strange. It's the people who most concern themselves with how much money they can make on youtube that end up flooding the internet with the worst output. That's how we got things like clickbait, homogenized content, algorithm gaming, the nightmarish videos on Youtube Kids etc.

RHSeeger 4y ago
To some extent, it may be the messaging, not the amount. The limit being in place is labeling those creators as "value-less" (vs others, who do have value). In theory, I see it much like the idea that putting a price of $0.01 on something makes it "appear" much more valuable to people than making it free in the first place. It's not about the actual amount, just the messaging of "this has value" vs "this has no value".
nhooyr 4y ago
> Why wouldn't you post something just because you won't make a bunch of money off of it? Why does anyone do anything? There needs to be an incentive.
- Gene_Parmesan 4y ago
  Guess we should shut down open source then.

MisterBastahrd 4y ago

Since when has the internet not been channelized? Gopher was channelized. IRC was channelized. Usenet was channelized. Early websites even tried to channelize via webrings and blogrolls. The entire "search" thing sans channels is a fairly new phenomenon.

adolph 4y ago

> Now YouTube won’t pay you unless you have 1000 subscribers. I wonder if there is an opportunity for a syndication cooperative. Let's say you find relatively related content, like niche MacBook fixes that get views but not subscriptions. The content owners combine their videos into one channel to get over the 1k revenue hump. The back catalog is used as the start of a funnel to gain subscriptions.

FanaHOVA 4y ago
We're just going back in time. Back in the days when I was making YT content, you wouldn't make any money until you reached certain views / subs thresholds. You could then apply for partner, setup an AdSense account, and monetize videos. Before I had the numbers, I became a partner with Maker Studios and monetized videos through them. They ended up getting bought by Disney for $500M. The current problem + your proposed solutions are literally what we had ~10 years ago :)
- adolph 4y ago
  Hearing that an off the cuff idea has been proven out before is such a pleasant feeling, thank you! I suspect that coordination also occurs on the in-video ad placement side as so much of the content I enjoy pimps rapid PCB services or online learning. If a cooperative works on the YT money-side, it could also work from the opposite side for videos with great SEO but where the author's content isn't right for "Subscribe Now!"