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Youtube Businesses Google The Almighty Buck

YouTube Toughens Advert Payment Rules (bbc.com) 142

YouTube is introducing tougher requirements for video publishers who want to make money from its platform. From a report: In addition, it has said staff will manually review all clips before they are added to a premium service that pairs big brand advertisers with popular content. The moves follow a series of advertiser boycotts and a controversial vlog that featured an apparent suicide victim. One expert said that the Google-owned service had been slow to react. "Google presents the impression of acting reactively rather than proactively," said Mark Mulligan, from the consultancy Midia Research.

[...] The first part of the new strategy involves a stricter requirement that publishers must fulfil before they can make money from their uploads. Clips will no longer have adverts attached unless the publisher meets two criteria -- that they have: at least 1,000 subscribers; and more than 4,000 hours of their content viewed by others within the past 12 months.

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YouTube Toughens Advert Payment Rules

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  • by sanf780 ( 4055211 ) on Wednesday January 17, 2018 @02:40PM (#55948179)
    Patreon tried the same trick a few months ago. Jim Sterling tells in his latest video that other companies prefer to have fewer people to pay to considerable amounts of money. There has to be something, a fee or a law, that makes small payments a chore. Does anyone know any better?
  • by RedK ( 112790 ) on Wednesday January 17, 2018 @02:41PM (#55948189)

    ... of Logan Paul, yet wouldn't affect Logan Paul.

    Great plan.

    • Nothing to do with that. Youtube doesn't have enough ad revenue to pay everyone so they're having to be pickier about who gets it. A fuss over nothing.

  • I guess I'll stop... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Skuld-Chan ( 302449 ) on Wednesday January 17, 2018 @02:42PM (#55948197)

    Making repair and electronic instructional videos on youtube ;).

    Not that I ever made much money on it, but I gain about a 10-100 subs a month and the hope was that it would get a bit bigger and be a decent secondary income for me.

    • by slazzy ( 864185 )
      Same here, I have some growing channels with mountain biking and nature videos. Not worth bothering if Google is going to keep eating my lunch on it.
    • by Anonymous Coward

      Do you plan on going somewhere else? I'm curious because if useful videos are leaving YouTube, I would like to know where I can find them.

      I'm actually OK with YouTube keeping the cat videos and slime videos and all of the non-useful stuff if some other website picks up the useful videos.

    • Go to d.tube. Decentralized, block-chain based... Not sure if it will get much traction but if you take some viewers, and slazzy takes some viewers...

      • DTube [d.tube] relies on the Steem blockchain for authentication, and according to that blockchain's FAQ [steemit.com]: "To create an account on the blockchain, it costs STEEM tokens. When you create an account through Steemit.com, Steemit Inc. is supplying the tokens to pay the account creation fee. [...] The only way to have an account created via Steemit.com is to supply your email and phone number." If the previous holder of your email address or phone number was a Steem user, or if your phone is in an unsupported country or

        • Didn't know that, thanks! I just heard about d.tube for they first time ever yesterday so I wasn't at all familiar with an of the pertinent details you brought up.... It sounds like I could get a free account still.

      • by G00F ( 241765 )

        went to check out d.tube, and ewww, need to start enabling not just their scripts, but also 3rd party scripts just for a page to not be blank.

        list of scripts at first pass are ..d.tube
        â¦asksteem.com
        https://api.asksteem.com/ [asksteem.com]
        â¦coinmarketcap.com
        https://api.coinmarketcap.com/ [coinmarketcap.com]
        â¦gstatic.com
        â¦steemit.com
        https://api.steemit.com/ [steemit.com]

        See in that list, they still depend on google for stuff. Also when I have to enable a buch of 3rd party scripts, I move on.

        btw, youtube only has 4, k

    • Making repair and electronic instructional videos on youtube ;).

      Out of curiosity, did you start doing it before or after YouTube started doing advertising? And if after, was making money your original goal, or did you do it for fun?

      People get funny when money is involved. I suspect that a fair number of small-time YouTubers started doing it as a hobby... and would have been happy to continue doing it that way without any pay, just the fun of making the videos and knowing that people are watching them. BUT the instant they started making any money, even a pittance, the

      • It looks to me that Google is providing hosting services and possible financial compensation for content on their service and accepting near zero liability for issues arising from the abuse of their system. They have people essentially working for them as entertainers who they will stop paying at the drop of a hat at the first sign of possible trouble. (Issues like demonetizing on false/frivolous CC claims with little recourse for the content creator. Not to say it isn't used legitimately, but people are ma
      • I did it before the partner program - because I like helping people and I love retro game machines and computers. For a long time my videos were not "monetized" - I turned it on just to see how much money I could make. For a video that was 20 minutes long and got 20,000 views - it was worth about 30 dollars.

        I'll probably still make videos tbh, but - honestly that email they sent was REALLY demoralizing.

    • Making repair and electronic instructional videos on youtube ;).

      Not that I ever made much money on it, but I gain about a 10-100 subs a month and the hope was that it would get a bit bigger and be a decent secondary income for me.

      two criteria: at least 1,000 subscribers; and more than 4,000 hours of their content viewed by others within the past 12 months.

      Why? If you are growing at the rate you state (and are as interesting as that rate implies) then you should qualify for advertising revenue in a matter of months.

      • utube was about your 15 minutes of fame now its not enough. Though it was about sharing your hobby and interest because its free/easy to share. Utubes fault for making people expect money instead of being happy to share...My whole life i had to pay for how too books or buy porn and im very happy they share today but sad what im reading here too. greed is greed no matter how you dress it up
    • What's your channel? Or at least something I can search to find your channel.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    A lot of indie musicians post good content on Youtube and monetize their videos. No doubt, it's a useful source of income to further their careers. The quality can be quite good, but I see a lot of subscriber counts in the hundreds. They will lose the income, even though they've done nothing wrong. This punishes a lot of people who haven't done anything wrong, because of the actions of a relatively small number of creeps and hate-filled people.

    • by mysidia ( 191772 )

      Last I check; you always needed 1000 subscribers, before you get access to make monetized videos. The new requirement is the 4000 view-hours, which seems insane.... It seems Google is trying to shut small creators out of the platform; no longer can you monetize a small YT channel because of the 4000 hours a month requirement.

      • by dodged ( 5040717 )

        Last I check; you always needed 1000 subscribers, before you get access to make monetized videos. The new requirement is the 4000 view-hours, which seems insane.... It seems Google is trying to shut small creators out of the platform; no longer can you monetize a small YT channel because of the 4000 hours a month requirement.

        Wrong. All you needed to turn on monetization was to reach 10000 lifetime views on your channel.

  • by Maxo-Texas ( 864189 ) on Wednesday January 17, 2018 @03:08PM (#55948421)

    If it means fewer advertisements before minor videos, great.

    If they continue to have advertisements but refuse to pay the content creators, then this is just a massive greed move on their parts.

    I really do look forward to Patreon and Youtube being replaced now.

    • by jetkust ( 596906 )
      What YouTubers are complaining about is that YouTube has stopped running ads on their videos. You can't really say they are making money off your content if they aren't even running ads on your content.
      • by Mandrel ( 765308 )
        Does anyone know whether video creators earn shares of YouTube Red subscription revenue, even if those creators can't or don't run ads? I've been wanting an answer to this ever since Red was launched, and it's an even more important question now that channels with fewer than 1000 subscribers can't run ads. Although I never want ads on my videos, I would like to receive income from Red subscribers.
        • by mysidia ( 191772 )

          Does anyone know whether video creators earn shares of YouTube Red subscription revenue

          Only if you already qualify to monetize your videos via advertising.

          Youtube shares a portion of the revenue from Red memberships with Youtube partners based on the amount of Watch-Time on the partners' videos by Red members.

          • by Mandrel ( 765308 )
            Right, but (a), can you turn off ads but keep on Red revenue, and (b), can channels who no longer qualify for ads still get Red revenue?
            • by mysidia ( 191772 )

              I believe the answer [fullscreenmedia.co] to that one is NO.

              Your revenue share (with both YouTube and Fullscreen) is exactly the same for YouTube Red income as it is for AdSense

              (If you turn off Ads, then your share of AdSense will be zero, so I expect your share of Red would be identical, in other words, zero.)


              * Update: If a YouTube Red user views one of your videos during his/her free trial period, you will not earn income from that video view.

              • by Mandrel ( 765308 )

                Thanks for finding this. That answer's not definitively saying that if you don't want ads you lose access to any subscription revenue. There's further discussion here [google.com].

                It sucks if true, because I never want to embed ads on anything I create, but I'm all for rewarding creators via direct payments, while limiting any donation/patron mechanism that rewards both begging and freeloading.

                With the recent demonetization of many worthwhile YouTube videos that weren't regarded ad-friendly due to their subject mat

                • by mysidia ( 191772 )

                  it's more important than ever that these creators can still be supported by subscription revenue. Otherwise we're allowing advertising to restrict us to anodyne content, like what happened with the broadcast/cable divide.

                  It's become fairly common for small but informative, interesting, or useful channels to solicit support from their viewers through services such as Patreon; the major alternative is sponsorships, product placements, or advertising embedded in the video file itself that may be supplem

                  • by Mandrel ( 765308 )
                    Both alternatives to subscriptions have their problems: The non-donating majority exploit the generosity of donors, and ads placed by creators themselves can be just as annoying, and actually compromise creators' independence more than programmatic ads because they mean that creators sometimes have direct contact with companies about whom their material deals.
                    • by mysidia ( 191772 )

                      The non-donating majority exploit the generosity of donors, and ads placed by creators themselves can be just as annoying, and actually compromise creators' independence

                      That's the case in general that the few pay the way for the many.... even with Ads, many users will utilize Ad blocking software. Often there will also be some content or some perks that are donor-exclusive; or can be distributed to donors similar to a subscription, so they're not entirely being exploited, and optional to others by

                    • by Mandrel ( 765308 )

                      Right, advertising has the same freeloader problem as donations. And I don't blame these freeloaders for getting rid of the toxic interlopers on the content for which they've come. Currently, only direct payment by subscription or one-off charge prevents freeloading, but, unless there is some thumb-down discount, still lets creators overcharge for poor content.

                      So it looks like, at the moment, YouTube creators who want only subscription revenue have to recommend that viewers install an ad-blocker to remov

      • by zabbey ( 985424 )
        That's not true. If I make a video and someone discovers it outside of youtube (via search or share), now that person who might not normally have been attracted to youtube at that moment is now there. Once there they could watch endless amounts of YouTube Suggested videos from other creators that do have ads enabled. My content could easily bring in new customers for google to monetize in other ways and I get nothing.
      • by Pyramid ( 57001 )

        You should double check that. Everything I've read is that they will continue to run ads, but the channel creator will no longer get any cut of that.

        Seem legit to you?

      • Actually, I'm still seeing ads on tiny channels. It looks like they run the ads but don't pay the content creators.
        On longer videos, I'm seeing two ads and the second ad is just dropped in at random- mid sentence.

    • They're cashing in. They'd rather have a few big accounts than thousands of little ones. It's also part of Youtube's war on independent journalism which produced such undesirable results in the last election. Keep the power concentrated where it can be trusted: in the hands of powerful media corporations. Starve the independent creators who get out there and report inconvenient stories.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • by stooo ( 2202012 )

      >> If it means fewer advertisements before minor videos, great.

      There are no ads before videos.

  • by Jarwulf ( 530523 ) on Wednesday January 17, 2018 @03:12PM (#55948455)
    over the little ones and turning YT more into online television. Which is the direction they've been wanting to go anyway.
  • by jetkust ( 596906 ) on Wednesday January 17, 2018 @03:49PM (#55948743)
    They aren't stopping anyone from posting videos. They are still hosting videos for people for free. That isn't changing. When YouTube started there were no ads, and nobody was getting paid, yet people still made videos. What's happening now is Youtube is transitioning to whitelisting and away from blacklisting so it's easier to control what videos to run ads on. If I had to guess, there is way more to it than just making sure the video is "appropriate.". Obviously this has a negative effect on a large amount of people and maybe changes the quality of YouTube as a whole. But people forget, YouTube changed a lot initially when people started making money from videos in the first place. Whatever dropoff in quality of content has already happened. It became less and less about what YOU want to post, and more about getting clicks. But from YouTube's standpoint, they are still providing the same general service they provided from the beginning. People are still going to upload videos, paid or not. The biggest concern is will YouTube start making non monetized videos harder and harder to find.
    • I have a number of videos on YouTube going back years. My monetized videos get views regularly and their analytics shows that they are the result of searches and/or recommendations by YouTube. My non-monetized videos, just as old, have not had a view in years from YouTube's promotion or searches. If I search for them they are many pages deep whereas the monetized ones rank near the top when I look for them. I may as well put them on my web sites directly using html5 tags, it's easier.
  • For my new, raw tech channel: http://youtube.com/renerebe [youtube.com] anyone? ;-)
  • This is not good for people hoping to monetize a viral video, or a video they hope will go viral. This is because a lot of videos with millions of views actually have far fewer followers on the creator's channel. For example, a cute cat/animal video that was shared millions of times, or something that went viral on social media, a 4k demo clip, whatever. The creator got lucky and caught a viral moment on video but chances are low that such moments can be captured reliably again, or the creator targeted sear

  • The more YouTube tightens its rules, the more people are going to find themselves on the wrong side of those rules through no fault of their own. They may survive that, but only until a competing service provider (or several) takes chunks of the uploaders they refuse to pay, and the influx of new creators dries up. Then they will decline from attrition.

    • only until a competing service provider (or several) takes chunks of the uploaders they refuse to pay

      I don't see "a competing service provider" taking away YouTube's usage share as likely to happen soon, seeing as Vidme has recently gone out of business.

      • by Mal-2 ( 675116 )

        This is unfortunately true at present. If the opportunity seems sufficient and Google hasn't bought laws against it by then, someone will try again.

        • Google is not the one that would buy the laws. The record industry and the movie industry are pushing in multiple countries to require all video hosts to perform proactive scanning of all uploads for possible copyright infringement, as opposed to merely acting on a notice of claimed infringement. A smaller company isn't going to have the resources to build its own counterpart to Content ID.

    • by epine ( 68316 )

      The more YouTube tightens its rules, the more people are going to find themselves on the unprofitable side of those rules through no fault of their own or anyone else's.

      Your entire sentence was built around "wrong" and "fault", but actually makes no solid claim.

      Try again.

      • by Mal-2 ( 675116 )

        "What you like making videos of, our advertisers no longer like. Too bad for you." Whose fault is it when the goalposts move? The party that owns the field!

    • Who's going to fund a rival to Youtube when it doesn't make any money and only brings bad press?

  • After becoming successful and killing the cable companies using the sweat and labor of thousands of small video creators, Susan and her cohorts have decided to slap those same loyal and hardworking creators in the face and shut them out of what they created over many years and BECOME a cable company (the most hated businesses in the country) and only cater to their advertiser's and a few select channel's desires. This is a direction that they have been on for awhile now with their subscription and cable cha
    • Could it be because YouTube has been overrun with shit just like everything else on the internet? If you let all the plebs in and let them do essentially whatever they want, you get the shit that is YouTube today. The fact that they're backpedalling away from "anything goes" just shows that YouTube, as a platform and as a company, is maturing. It's the natural lifecycle of things, and even Facebook can't get around this. In a year or two, we'll have a new range of upstart YouTube-killer services that will t
      • People (not me) on the internet LIKE the shit that has overrun YouTube. That's why Logan whoever was even in a position to cause controversy.

  • I am just at 3000 hours pr year and 450 views pr. day right now(11 hours pr day now).
    I enabled monetization just to see what would happen and with 1000 views pr day which happened at some point, I had seen income from $1 to $4
    With 450 views pr day, it was around $0.3 to $0.5 pr day
    So with only 4000 hours of viewing pr year, it matters little, I am guessing 100-200$ pr year.
    Now I have disabled ads again, no need to bother people with that crap for a few $ that isn't going to make any difference.

    Also, I am ju

    • Overall I do not think that this is such a terrible move. There are enormous numbers of videos about peoples hobbies which appear to be made in the vague hope that this will make money for the creators. These videos are generally a lot less interesting than those made by people who actually want to share something.

      Seeing as it is still free to post videos I do not think that the useful content will go away. Looking at the top videos that YouTube promotes and which most of the population is viewing they are

  • I subscribe to no channels, because I don't want distracting alerts. But there are channels I regularly browse for anything interesting. So I don't think it's fair to judge a channel's worth by its subscriber count.
    • by fleabay ( 876971 )
      I am subscribed to a couple hundred channels and don't get alerts. I know several people that have YouTube accounts that don't have that problem.
      • by Mandrel ( 765308 )
        How do you know that something new is available? What alerts are on by default, and which have you switched off?
        • by fleabay ( 876971 )
          You can get alerts from certain channels by turning on notifications for that channel. Click the bell icon in the top corner of their page.

          To see what all your subscriptions have uploaded, click on the menu at the top left and go to subscriptions. This is also where the trending category is.

          You will have some videos listed on your main page that are from your subscriptions but they are not alerts.
          • by Mandrel ( 765308 )

            Thank you for that clear description. I just tried it out.

            I'd avoided subscribing because I thought I'd be bothered by synchronous alerts on my phone, or even a distracting red bell icon, or have my email cluttered up (async, because I've turned of email notifications).

            I see on the YouTube Settings page there is an option "Subscriptions: Notify me via push and email, push only, email only, or none", with push and email the default. I'll try "push only" to see whether I need to change to "none".

  • I hate advertising so I only watch YouTube videos that advertisers won't touch with a 10-ft pole. I only subscribe to the controversial channels who've been demonetized, and have been known to send them contributions now and then.

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