4 ms·

The idea that "stealing" from google is somehow morally wrong is hilarious to me. Nobody owes them anything if they cant afford to host youtube then first of al

The idea that "stealing" from google is somehow morally wrong is hilarious to me. Nobody owes them anything if they cant afford to host youtube then first of all its odd that its been around for so many years in the state it has, and second of all, if they cant afford to host it that their problem. Not mine.

nmat 3y ago
And YouTubers should make content for free?
- I_Am_Nous 3y ago
  They do until the algorithm thinks they are worth monetizing. Google doesn't give everyone who makes an account and uploads videos ad revenue.
  - rtkwe 3y ago
    The threshold for starting monetization isn't very high though. * 500 Subscriber * 3 'valid' uploads in the past 90 days and either of * 3k public watch hours or 3m shorts views https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/more-ways-for-creators-to-earn-on-youtube/ https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/more-ways-for-creators-...
    - I_Am_Nous 3y ago
      Doing any of those things without the algorithm showing your videos to people is hard though. They also require 3k watch hours in the past year so they expect you to grind for at least a year to "prove" you are worth monetizing. That or go viral somehow and bootstrap yourself (which is likely why the shorts views are so high). Obvious not impossible as people still do it but the math seems suspect to me. YouTube gets thousands of hours of video uploaded every second. I'm not sure what the ratio of monetized accounts to non-monetized accounts is, but if YouTube can run a channel "for free" for a year because they aren't monetizing it yet, it seems there's a threshold they are willing to accept to serve videos "nobody wants to see" until enough people do want to see it and they advertise on it. So the high profile creators are costing YouTube money to serve their videos and YouTube wants help paying that cost. But they only extract it from channels they know are profitable because there are a lot of eyeballs on those videos. Almost like they are promising X ad views to advertisers and want to keep that numbers game rolling. I feel like ad based spending is going to go through a correction in the next decade.
      - Jensson 3y ago
        > They also require 3k watch hours in the past year so they expect you to grind for at least a year to "prove" you are worth monetizing. No, if you get 3k watch hours on a video you are good to go, you don't have to wait a year. I've seen plenty of channels get monetized within weeks since they already had an audience.
        I_Am_Nous 3y ago
        I remember when Game Grumps made "The Grumps" channel and before they even uploaded a single video to it, they were already at Diamond(I believe) subscriber count. I don't remember if they were immediately monetized or not, though.
      - rtkwe 3y ago
        There are other places you can post to jumpstart your channel like Reddit or social media you're only reliant on the grace of YT if you allow yourself to be. There's also still plenty of niche blogs/news sites that can send plenty of audience to your new channel if you're producing good content. You're also misreading the hours metric it's just a rolling window not a wait period. If you hit those metrics in a week you can monetize basically immediately.
- grishka 3y ago
  It is not my responsibility to make sure people can make money off of me by means of "implied contracts" and other similar bullshittery. It is those people's choice to make those videos, and it's their choice of which platform they publish them on. But then it's MY choice of how I use the internet on a device I own.
  - _gabe_ 3y ago
    Exactly. Which is why I feel no sympathy for the entitled complainers when google says enough and blocks the ad-blockers. As somebody that makes videos and makes a decent amount of money from it, I could care less about people that are so adamantly demanding free content getting cut off by Google. These people clearly don’t care about paying the subscription Google offers if they want to avoid ads, they clearly don’t want to watch ads to even support the creator, why would I care about having these people watch my videos? It’s especially funny to see this sentiment on hacker news. “Those stupid content creators, clearly if they want to make money, just don’t use YT!”. I’m curious, what’s the alternative? Cable? Good luck. Udemy? What if I’m trying to make entertainment videos? Oh, I guess I could just build my own low latency highly efficient video hosting site and get a paid subscriber base that manages to cover hosting costs and make a profit! Yea, because that’s completely realistic…
    - grishka 3y ago
      The alternative? A job. Don't make vlogging your entire full-time occupation. That simple. If you do want to make videos that reliably earn you money, charge money for them! Make it explicit. Don't rely on implied contracts that other people may or may not honor at their discretion.
    - InCityDreams 3y ago
      The alternative? Not my problem.
- bloaf 3y ago
  Back in my day, when the Internet was good, we did.
type_Ben_struct 3y ago
Would you use the same justification for pirating movies? Or for stealing from large supermarkets? Not a pointed question, I just find it genuinely interesting where people draw the line. Ultimately in all scenarios you are consuming resources from a third party, and avoiding paying for them.
- rebeccaskinner 3y ago
  > Or for stealing from large supermarkets? This isn’t the right analogy. It’s more like someone opens up a shop where you can walk to the counter and ask for some food, and they stick a sample of some product in the bag when they give you the food. It’s not immoral to throw away the sample if you don’t want it, just like it’s not immoral to not play back the ad you get served along side a video you request if you don’t want to watch it.
  - Jensson 3y ago
    If you made a robot that automatically goes there and takes the food and throws away all the samples I bet they would stop serving that robot very quickly.
    - jack1243star 3y ago
      Well they also have robots serving the food if we go by this analogy. Doesn't seem too unfair to streamline the process.
- raincole 3y ago
  It's HN. People's time and effort are not valued unless it's to make rust compiler run on gameboy. Remember the whole "news" part of HN works because people are allowed to link to "unpaywalled" version of paywalled content. It's what HN is about -- stealing premium content. If these kinds of links are banned HN will lose a lot of traffic.
- cde-v 3y ago
  The social contract has broken down so yes all of that is now okay.
rtkwe 3y ago
It's not just Google here though. Creators also rely on ad revenue to make money.
- ulimn 3y ago
  Recently, there was a post on reddit where people posted the amount of money content creators are getting from views with ads. I don’t remember the numbers well enough to quote it but it’s barely anything. I recommend to look it up. And the biggest surprise for me was that older videos get even less.
  - kyrra 3y ago
    It could be because people are blocking too many ads?
  - rtkwe 3y ago
    The money can also vary a lot depending on what advertisers are trying to advertise on your account. Dan Olsen talks about there being a minor bidding war for his Line Goes Up video because it was attracting crypto advertisers during a frenzy so they were bidding up placement on anything related to crypto. The money isn't great by itself but it's still money coming in too.
- constantly 3y ago
  Just so the lede isn’t buried: a creator in this sense creates content for money.
shadowgovt 3y ago
> if they cant afford to host it that their problem. Not mine. There goes all the useful tutorials for graphics software. And home maintenance.
- kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 3y ago
  Nobody was able to learn anything prior to YouTube.
  - shadowgovt 3y ago
    It got way, way, way easier after YouTube. https://advancetitan.com/news/2020/12/09/how-youtube-is-changing-education https://advancetitan.com/news/2020/12/09/how-youtube-is-chan... And there's no guarantee anything will actually come along to replace it if it goes away. Hosting video is very, very expensive.
    - fragmede 3y ago
      Is it that expensive these days? Specifically, Cloudflare R2 has free egress, so you pay a fraction of what you'd pay most other places for the underlying "serve video" part of a platform.
      - Jensson 3y ago
        > Cloudflare R2 has free egress The Cloudflare TOS does not allow you to serve video from a Cloudflare address unless you’re using a Cloudflare product that is meant for video. So no, you can't make a youtube clone and make Cloudflare pay that bill for you. Cloudflare makes their money by making users overpay for other things than egress. Video hosting is one of the exceptions where they can't make up that on other costs which is why they have another service for it.
        fragmede 3y ago
        https://imgur.com/a/nC4dHxq https://imgur.com/a/nC4dHxq Cloudflare says it's fine to serve video from R2.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
adrr 3y ago
You’re also stealing from the content creators who rev share with Google. No one seems to mention that a majority of the ad revenue Google gives to content creators. If you makes you feel better, you can keep thinking it’s Google.
- TillE 3y ago
  I'm really happy to support the tiny YouTubers I like on ko-fi or Patreon. It's way more than the pennies per year they might make from my ad views.
  - CaptainFever 3y ago
    I feel like after the adpocolypse, creators have learnt to stop relying on ads and rely on Patreon instead. It's pretty great, actually.
- matheusmoreira 3y ago
  No one is stealing a damn thing. We're not obligated to watch ads. Our attention is not currency to pay for services with. If anyone's stealing anything, it's them. As far as I'm concerned uBlock Origin is legitimate self-defense against their ceaseless attempts to grab my attention without my consent. They send people videos for free. They do so hoping you'll watch the ads. At exactly no point does this ever turn into an obligation to "pay" by watching the ads. They only have themselves to blame if their business model isn't working out.
doublepg23 3y ago
I don't think it needs to be a moral argument, I just don't think you should be indignant if they don't cater to people not making them money.

nmat 3y ago

And YouTubers should make content for free?

I_Am_Nous 3y ago
They do until the algorithm thinks they are worth monetizing. Google doesn't give everyone who makes an account and uploads videos ad revenue.
- rtkwe 3y ago
  The threshold for starting monetization isn't very high though. * 500 Subscriber * 3 'valid' uploads in the past 90 days and either of * 3k public watch hours or 3m shorts views https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/more-ways-for-creators-to-earn-on-youtube/ https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/more-ways-for-creators-...
  - I_Am_Nous 3y ago
    Doing any of those things without the algorithm showing your videos to people is hard though. They also require 3k watch hours in the past year so they expect you to grind for at least a year to "prove" you are worth monetizing. That or go viral somehow and bootstrap yourself (which is likely why the shorts views are so high). Obvious not impossible as people still do it but the math seems suspect to me. YouTube gets thousands of hours of video uploaded every second. I'm not sure what the ratio of monetized accounts to non-monetized accounts is, but if YouTube can run a channel "for free" for a year because they aren't monetizing it yet, it seems there's a threshold they are willing to accept to serve videos "nobody wants to see" until enough people do want to see it and they advertise on it. So the high profile creators are costing YouTube money to serve their videos and YouTube wants help paying that cost. But they only extract it from channels they know are profitable because there are a lot of eyeballs on those videos. Almost like they are promising X ad views to advertisers and want to keep that numbers game rolling. I feel like ad based spending is going to go through a correction in the next decade.
    - Jensson 3y ago
      > They also require 3k watch hours in the past year so they expect you to grind for at least a year to "prove" you are worth monetizing. No, if you get 3k watch hours on a video you are good to go, you don't have to wait a year. I've seen plenty of channels get monetized within weeks since they already had an audience.
      - I_Am_Nous 3y ago
        I remember when Game Grumps made "The Grumps" channel and before they even uploaded a single video to it, they were already at Diamond(I believe) subscriber count. I don't remember if they were immediately monetized or not, though.
    - rtkwe 3y ago
      There are other places you can post to jumpstart your channel like Reddit or social media you're only reliant on the grace of YT if you allow yourself to be. There's also still plenty of niche blogs/news sites that can send plenty of audience to your new channel if you're producing good content. You're also misreading the hours metric it's just a rolling window not a wait period. If you hit those metrics in a week you can monetize basically immediately.
grishka 3y ago
It is not my responsibility to make sure people can make money off of me by means of "implied contracts" and other similar bullshittery. It is those people's choice to make those videos, and it's their choice of which platform they publish them on. But then it's MY choice of how I use the internet on a device I own.
- _gabe_ 3y ago
  Exactly. Which is why I feel no sympathy for the entitled complainers when google says enough and blocks the ad-blockers. As somebody that makes videos and makes a decent amount of money from it, I could care less about people that are so adamantly demanding free content getting cut off by Google. These people clearly don’t care about paying the subscription Google offers if they want to avoid ads, they clearly don’t want to watch ads to even support the creator, why would I care about having these people watch my videos? It’s especially funny to see this sentiment on hacker news. “Those stupid content creators, clearly if they want to make money, just don’t use YT!”. I’m curious, what’s the alternative? Cable? Good luck. Udemy? What if I’m trying to make entertainment videos? Oh, I guess I could just build my own low latency highly efficient video hosting site and get a paid subscriber base that manages to cover hosting costs and make a profit! Yea, because that’s completely realistic…
  - grishka 3y ago
    The alternative? A job. Don't make vlogging your entire full-time occupation. That simple. If you do want to make videos that reliably earn you money, charge money for them! Make it explicit. Don't rely on implied contracts that other people may or may not honor at their discretion.
  - InCityDreams 3y ago
    The alternative? Not my problem.
bloaf 3y ago
Back in my day, when the Internet was good, we did.

type_Ben_struct 3y ago

Would you use the same justification for pirating movies? Or for stealing from large supermarkets? Not a pointed question, I just find it genuinely interesting where people draw the line. Ultimately in all scenarios you are consuming resources from a third party, and avoiding paying for them.

rebeccaskinner 3y ago
> Or for stealing from large supermarkets? This isn’t the right analogy. It’s more like someone opens up a shop where you can walk to the counter and ask for some food, and they stick a sample of some product in the bag when they give you the food. It’s not immoral to throw away the sample if you don’t want it, just like it’s not immoral to not play back the ad you get served along side a video you request if you don’t want to watch it.
- Jensson 3y ago
  If you made a robot that automatically goes there and takes the food and throws away all the samples I bet they would stop serving that robot very quickly.
  - jack1243star 3y ago
    Well they also have robots serving the food if we go by this analogy. Doesn't seem too unfair to streamline the process.
raincole 3y ago
It's HN. People's time and effort are not valued unless it's to make rust compiler run on gameboy. Remember the whole "news" part of HN works because people are allowed to link to "unpaywalled" version of paywalled content. It's what HN is about -- stealing premium content. If these kinds of links are banned HN will lose a lot of traffic.
cde-v 3y ago
The social contract has broken down so yes all of that is now okay.

rtkwe 3y ago

It's not just Google here though. Creators also rely on ad revenue to make money.

ulimn 3y ago
Recently, there was a post on reddit where people posted the amount of money content creators are getting from views with ads. I don’t remember the numbers well enough to quote it but it’s barely anything. I recommend to look it up. And the biggest surprise for me was that older videos get even less.
- kyrra 3y ago
  It could be because people are blocking too many ads?
- rtkwe 3y ago
  The money can also vary a lot depending on what advertisers are trying to advertise on your account. Dan Olsen talks about there being a minor bidding war for his Line Goes Up video because it was attracting crypto advertisers during a frenzy so they were bidding up placement on anything related to crypto. The money isn't great by itself but it's still money coming in too.
constantly 3y ago
Just so the lede isn’t buried: a creator in this sense creates content for money.

shadowgovt 3y ago

> if they cant afford to host it that their problem. Not mine. There goes all the useful tutorials for graphics software. And home maintenance.

kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 3y ago
Nobody was able to learn anything prior to YouTube.
- shadowgovt 3y ago
  It got way, way, way easier after YouTube. https://advancetitan.com/news/2020/12/09/how-youtube-is-changing-education https://advancetitan.com/news/2020/12/09/how-youtube-is-chan... And there's no guarantee anything will actually come along to replace it if it goes away. Hosting video is very, very expensive.
  - fragmede 3y ago
    Is it that expensive these days? Specifically, Cloudflare R2 has free egress, so you pay a fraction of what you'd pay most other places for the underlying "serve video" part of a platform.
    - Jensson 3y ago
      > Cloudflare R2 has free egress The Cloudflare TOS does not allow you to serve video from a Cloudflare address unless you’re using a Cloudflare product that is meant for video. So no, you can't make a youtube clone and make Cloudflare pay that bill for you. Cloudflare makes their money by making users overpay for other things than egress. Video hosting is one of the exceptions where they can't make up that on other costs which is why they have another service for it.
      - fragmede 3y ago
        https://imgur.com/a/nC4dHxq https://imgur.com/a/nC4dHxq Cloudflare says it's fine to serve video from R2.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

adrr 3y ago

You’re also stealing from the content creators who rev share with Google. No one seems to mention that a majority of the ad revenue Google gives to content creators. If you makes you feel better, you can keep thinking it’s Google.

TillE 3y ago
I'm really happy to support the tiny YouTubers I like on ko-fi or Patreon. It's way more than the pennies per year they might make from my ad views.
- CaptainFever 3y ago
  I feel like after the adpocolypse, creators have learnt to stop relying on ads and rely on Patreon instead. It's pretty great, actually.
matheusmoreira 3y ago
No one is stealing a damn thing. We're not obligated to watch ads. Our attention is not currency to pay for services with. If anyone's stealing anything, it's them. As far as I'm concerned uBlock Origin is legitimate self-defense against their ceaseless attempts to grab my attention without my consent. They send people videos for free. They do so hoping you'll watch the ads. At exactly no point does this ever turn into an obligation to "pay" by watching the ads. They only have themselves to blame if their business model isn't working out.

doublepg23 3y ago

I don't think it needs to be a moral argument, I just don't think you should be indignant if they don't cater to people not making them money.