The poor stay poor: rambling about YouTube and the upcoming small-channel demonetization. · 7:17pm Jan 17th, 2018
Perhaps there's an argument to be made, one which says the system was never sustainable. The concept of paying everyone, regardless of what they were producing... that couldn't possibly last. And to a large degree, the concept has been falling apart since the moment it was introduced, one piece at a time. But still, YouTube started by saying everyone who posted content on the site was their partner. They threw that term around a lot. They still do. It was in the update to terms and conditions bulk Email which went out today and started everything.
Some time ago, "Ad-friendly" became a barrier: your video couldn't collect revenue unless someone decided it was a good match for whatever commercial was airing that day. Unfortunately, 'someone' was usually a scanning algorithm which lived in binary dread of minor cursing, and so the Adpocalypse began. Creator after creator turned to Patreon and other sponsor-funding sites, with some outright refusing to allow YouTube the placement of any commercials on their work -- but to make that function, you needed a pretty large subscriber count to start with.
And even if you're "ad-friendly," if your content is pure enough to have a Disney trailer leading it off... it's hard to make money on Youtube. Ultimately, you're paid for views. That's it. How many people are watching your videos and how long they stay engaged for. However, the money climbs as your subscriber base does: you can become a millionaire from YouTube's payments, and people have.
(And now a few side words. Logan Paul will always be better-known than I am. More famous. More popular. More imitated and idolized. Wealthier by seemingly infinite magnitudes. And I will always be a better person than him.)
But if you want to be a YouTube millionaire, you'd better have a million subscribers. And every last one of them had better watch every video you produce, start to finish.
Still... everyone began at the bottom. Every channel entered the algae death pit arena tiny and afraid. But even those channels made money, if their videos were suitable to YouTube's needs. Not much money: a channel with a dozen subscribers might only see a penny if someone was rather generously rounding up. But the core idea was there: you were getting paid for your work. And... when you're on the creative side of the workforce... when all you want is for someone to tell you that your dreams were worth sharing...
A little channel, something with less than a thousand subscribers, might be lucky to earn $2.50 a month in ad revenue. You can't improve your filming equipment on that, buy materials and props, justify that the time you're spending could work out in the end. All you can do is know someone cared enough to watch. There are few feelings like that first payment, the knowledge that any degree of audience accepted your work. It's your first story view with a check attached.
No more.
Starting in late February, YouTube is setting a floor level on payments. It can still place ads on your channel if it so chooses. But you only get paid for those future viewings if you've crossed their threshold numbers. Those figures are:
At least 1000 subscribers, plus 4000 hours of view time for your work. (It appears that both conditions must be met in order to qualify.) In monetary terms, this means you must have earned at least $100 off YouTube in your channel's lifetime. You have until the changes are instituted to meet those numbers.
And the little channels hung their heads, and knew it would take a miracle to become anything more.
So much of this is about algorithms. YouTube wants people to watch videos, because that's how they get paid. But there's a rubbernecking mentality in play. Log in to the front page, check out the Recently Uploaded or Trending rows, and you'll typically see that what the coding wants people to watch is whatever everyone else is watching. The meme of the day from the channel with 49,000,000,000 subscribers already has eight digits in views? Let's make it nine! Everyone crowd to the one screen, everyone talk about the same thing, everyone pay no attention to anything that's happening somewhere else because The Man On Top has done something. The programming favors those who already climbed to the summit.
Small channels have a hard time getting noticed. Building a following is nearly impossible. You have to post content regularly. You have to meet the ad standards, and then you have to pray that you show up in the Recommendations column for someone who's viewing a related, geometrically more popular video. It's not impossible to catch someone's notice with a fine piece of work, have your reputation bloom overnight -- but it's always been nightmarishly difficult.
And now? Why does the algorithm need to suggest your channel for watching? Why should you appear in the Recommended column? That's for winners. We're sending people where the ads are going to be viewed, and clearly the best sites for that are the channels who've already made it. YouTube wants to make money, so YouTube sends people to where the money has been made before, will be made in the future, and your future is to sit back and watch.
$2.50 a month wasn't getting paid. It was the number of dream. The bottom rung of the ladder: I have a foothold, and maybe I can find a way to climb.
Some ceilings are made of glass. Others are woven from code.
When 'ad-friendly' came into play, the type of content started to matter, at least when it came to that vicious sort by coding. With the viewing hours threshold in place, another barrier has sprung up. I've seen comments sections quickly work out who arguably gets hit hardest: the amateur animator. Think about the hundreds of hours required for one person to construct a three-minute short. By YouTube's standards, they're not posting content frequently enough, and whatever they do put up had better be viewed thousands upon thousands of times.
Right behind them? Probably composers. It may only take four minutes to play your song, but how much time did you need to write it? Work out the instrumental arrangements? Adjust the sound? Balance here, add a little treble there... And again, in the end, you've got a four-minute video. Hope you've got a lot of them.
Who else gets shafted by this arrangement? Everyone coming in. Everyone starting out. Everyone who just needs that first little bit of encouragement. The first view. The first comment. The first penny.
The poor stay poor, and their demographics increase by the day.
Let's be fair. If YouTube pays you a penny, then YouTube probably lost money in doing so. Think about the servers which host all those videos. The electricity required to run them. Transfer fees for payments. Imagine the stamp cost for a physical check. For the smallest end of the scale, you could argue that operating in the regional red was inevitable. Is YouTube saving money through these changes? I don't have much doubt about that.
But the old My Coke Rewards sense is tingling, sensing words which YouTube didn't quite say: the sustainability of the program.
We're going to give people less because we've surveyed ourselves and found that's what we believe you want.
We're going to take away your incentive to participate because that way, we don't have to spend on you.
We're the only game in town, so where else are you going to go?
And we're doing this for your own good.
For the sustainability of the program.
Recently, Walmart announced an increase to their minimum wage. They were very public about it: they had to be. Walmart is notorious for giving a new hire two things: a blue vest and a pamphlet informing them how to get on the food stamp program, because you couldn't live on what Walmart paid you and therefore you'd better start looking for government assistance. So when their base salary went up at last, they were very public about it. Press conferences! Fanfares and lights! Plus some employees would receive a one-time $1000 bonus, although they said the part about a decade or two of service being required rather softly.
On the same day, Walmart closed sixty-three of its warehouse club stores: about 9% of what existed in that category. Eleven thousand people were put out of work. None of them received any advance notice. There wasn't so much as a bulk Email or robocall. You showed up in your vest and found the doors were locked forever. Also that you'd just lost money to transportation for a job you no longer had, while the corporation had saved a penny's worth of electricity through not telling you.
Walmart didn't advertise that. They didn't really respond when journalists asked them about it. But they couldn't stop people from doing math. And someone figured out that the increase in minimum wage just about worked out to what Walmart saved by shutting down all those stores. It looked as if it might have been done to keep the new salaries from cutting into the overall profit margin.
By some estimates, Walmart makes, in profit, about a billion dollars per day.
Can't cut into that.
Eleven thousand people lost their jobs. But the rich stayed just as rich as they had been. Isn't that what's really important?
How much does YouTube make per day? Hard to say. But they're just about a monopoly. They set the terms and if you don't like them, you can go -- well, nowhere else, but that's not their problem. And could they afford to lose a little money on the small channels? It's possible: I can't say for sure without seeing their finances, but they were doing it up until now.
Not that they have any obligation to keep doing so.
Here's your new channel page. You can find the food stamp application videos on your own.
FIMFic has its flaws. But when it comes to content creators, it also has something very simple, extremely basic, a balancing point and saving grace. It has the New column.
Is this your first day on the site? The first story you've ever posted? Then you have zero followers. No one knows, or very likely cares, who you are. It's so very easy to get lost in the crowd around here. But guess what? You're in the New column.
You are guaranteed, at a minimum, seventy-five minutes, top of the column to bottom. It could be longer if it's a slow day for new story submissions. You have your short description, possibly some art, and you're on the front page. You have a chance to be noticed -- the same chance everyone else got. And so some people catch fire on their first day because they had just the right story to be noticed with, and they never look back. To that degree, the site can at least pretend towards being a meritocracy, and there are days when it even reaches that status. (Most of the rest centers around memes, and I'm sure u know that weh.)
YouTube... can't work that way. They may deal with a million new videos a day, on thousands of subjects. Programs do most of the sorting because getting enough humans would cost money. A true New column, even broken down by a viewer's favorite subjects, would never get it all. Even Recently Uploaded tends to show those channels you've been to before, and it's so hard to find a new channel worth watching. There's just too much to sort through. A recommendation needs to catch your eye. Searching by topic? That brings up the most popular videos first, thus guaranteeing they'll stay popular. Trending? That's what was popular in the first place.
The small channel can hope to be first to a subject -- and still, the instant the eight-digit subscriber base registers their opinion, it's over. But maybe you can still make it if you specialize in hot takes. And even then -- with that and for everything else -- you have to get noticed. And how do you become noticed, one more desperately waving arm in a sea of the drowning? Millions of bodies bobbing in the water, and you're going to be the one who sees the life preserver? How do you like your odds?
But it was always like that.
Yes, the algorithms have steadily make it worse. Those who made it onto a yacht are followed by spotlights. And a penny wasn't much, $2.50 a month remained a joke... but it said you'd advanced. You'd made it all the way to $2.50 now. Maybe you could go further. It was a reason to keep treading water, to try and swim. It was a tiny number -- but it was still incentive. Give them that first hit and they'll chase the high forever.
Give them nothing...
Imagine, just for a moment, FIMFic's front page. Put in the Popular Stories on the right, Feature box goes toward the top center. Considering including Recently Updated, but only if you absolutely must.
Now. Remove the New column.
You're the site's next writer. You can post stories normally. You have a userpage and a blog. You can join Groups and try to talk about your work. But you only show up on a potential reading list under the following circumstances: someone's directly looking for what you wrote about or the algorithm picks you out for the Also Liked or Similar results on another story's page. Even then, the code is going to put the most popular stories first.
Do you think you'll ever be noticed?
How long would it take you to collect your first page view? Get one comment? A single upvote encouraging you to keep going?
That's every day of a new YouTube channel's life. That's just about what it was like before this change, and it takes so much to keep your morale up in that kind of environment. But even a little appreciation can help. A single penny...
One thousand subscribers, four thousand hours of viewing time.
Good luck -- partner.
Wow
This is really well said. Props to you on showing us what YouTube is really doing
Are you familiar with the term "late stage capitalism"?
The YouTube thing happening right now is really disheartening to me. While our channel does meet the views, it does not have the subscribers. And it's... infuriating that they'd do this to us. You're right that fimfic at least has that new column, and it can be so valuable. People check that new section daily for stuff they'll find interesting. YouTube doesn't seem to give a damn about the smaller folks, by comparison.
This isn't entirely Google's fault. In response to complete nonsense, the old mainstream of media, the news conglomerates, did a MASSIVE defunding program against Youtube. They got dozens of companies to stop giving any ad revenue to Youtube.
Youtube wasn't profitable even BEFORE then, Google's being pushed into a corner.
Still a dick move? Yeah, it is. But it's not all on Google.
There's plenty of else to peg them with anyway.
4775743
The argument there might be "YouTube isn't profitable, but Google can probably afford it." They take in at least nine digits per day on ad revenue. How much of a drain does YouTube need to be to justify cuts?
Ask Walmart. I'm sure they have an opinion.
The sad part is that it has such a stranglehold, that nothing can grow either. It can buy them up, or the startup for something like this is so very unlikely, that you can't make a go of a different version. Folks wont switch, what have you.
Look at twitch, theres been 4-5 other attempts, and nothing has managed to meet its popularity and access.
4775749
Youtube has... a lot of loss.
Tens of millions of dollars net loss.
4775750
Jim Sterling (whose video informed me about the changes), in noting the mild irony of his bashing YouTube via YouTube, directly said that the only other place he could potentially go was PornHub. He also felt that his work just barely qualified.
(I'm guessing there are people out there who feel sexual attraction to the Cornflakes Homunculus. I'm completely certain I don't want to know about any of them.)
The governments position is basically "People who run businesses are such wonderful human beings that they would never hurt anyone or be unfair in any way. Since this is never going to happen, there is no need to give anyone any legal protection in case, say, a miracle occurs & someone does get hurt. This way the companies will have lots of $ to invest in infrastructure because the bad old government won't stop them anymore"
God bless the -ING Republicans
It's an untenable monopoly of a system. The algorithms are more sinister than most think or are aware of. Think about those off-putting procedurally generated kids videos and how the autoplay recommended videos gradually descend into obscenity. The copyright strike system is laughable.
Youtube has basically done everything they can to screw over people trying to make money on it since the start. Then once lightning struck enough times for there to be a corp of elite obscenely rich 'stars' the platform has done everything to cater to them exclusively. Look at that bullshit with Logan Paul. His apology video was monetized! To get ad money off of! How that was even allowed, never mind that he hasn't even gotten any punishment for the original incident, is beyond me.
It's just a mess, and makes me glad i never monetized anything I put on there back in the day.
4775760
Well, so does the government, but you don't see anyone calling for shutting that --
-- nevermind.
At any rate, I tend to view YouTube as being close to Amazon in the early years: you know it's going to operate at a loss for a while, but the cost of stopping before profit comes is worse than the price of going on. The difference is that I don't know if YouTube can turn a profit. The quality of its original productions is all over the place, and serving as a cable/satellite substitute is hard to sell when so many people lack the reliable connection speed to make it truly work.
But I do know this: the price of stopping would be incredibly high -- and doing so would reverberate for a long time.
It's the Sunk Cost Fallacy website. You go forward until the engine gives out.
Much as I maybe had a tiny bit of hope that my gaming videos would garner some notice (they have not), I'm glad I never put any stake in Youtube paying me for things. I had my reasons for it, and nowadays, I stay out with some sense of "told you so".
That said, I put probably a solid workday's worth of hours in every week making content for Youtube, for more or less nothing. My 400 subscribers seem to be mostly asleep. :/
4775774
...Youtube is as old as, if not older than, Amazon. Google only bought it as a sign of good will, the original owner knew all too well it would never be profitable.
I've watched a video by someone I thought seemed to be on the ball that worked out that Youtube, overall, was bringing in about half as much money as Google was spending on it. So it'll last as long as Google can afford it. Which on one hand makes the constant cost-cutting make logical sense, but also kind of stupid since I doubt any tweaks like that is going to magically either double their revenue or half their costs. About the only thing useful would be to put some barrier to entry, but that would destroy what youtube wants people to believe they are doing even more effectively.
4775743 That's a good point. If we're going to discuss how profitable YouTube is for Google and how much revenue they made off of Logan Paul's videos, we should talk about how much money all the blogs and news sites made in in page views, comments and clicks from telling us about Logan Paul with breathless outrage. They're responsible for the consequences of their journalism.
4775894
Thank you for your interest! If nothing else, there's ponies. :B
Queries:
Does this mean FiMfic's New column works because it has less content to sort through? Would the new column cease to work if it had a number of daily new things equal to Youtube's?
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At this point, the only way to "beat" internet monopolies would be to create an entirely separate internet that doesn't have those companies. This might not be entirely improbable, if the whole "free internet" thing finally goes kaput in a spectacular way, creating demand for another, better internet with blackjack and hookers. But it'd have to cost literally nothing to maintain, so you'd probably be limited to something like Usenet. In this case, you'd want to go right out the gate and pre-package a video player software directly into the browser itself (or a universal media player, if you want to go all the way with it and make things exceptionally hard on yourself), though that'd only make it slightly harder for them to move in if they were really determined. There's something to be said for brand familiarity, I suppose, and there's technically nothing stopping Google from setting up shop on the second internet and doing the whole process all over again. Because that would probably happen.
Nevermind, I guess.
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Maybe I'm just an arse, but I found this kind of funny. It's as if it's saying, Walmart overextended. They grew to a point where they couldn't sustain their own growth. Like, you can only operate at the minimum expense for so long before it's no longer able to fuel your expansion.
You ever see a Zerg rush peter out? That's the kind of schadenfreude I got from this.