YouTube Toughens Advert Payment Rules

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.

Re:

[Killall -9 Bash]

This is what YouTube will do to repair it's relationship with advertisers INSTEAD of fixing Elsa-gate.

Sounds Great. Raise The Bar. Thin The Herd.

[RobotRunAmok]

YouTube does not owe you a living. The talented and truly worthwhile will survive.

Re:

[Bob-Bob Hardyoyo]

The smaller channels can always do what Forgotten Weapons did, and make their money via patreon (or hatreon) and merch instead of dealing with youtube's ads and demonitization bullshit.

Re:

[bn-7bc]

Well, changing terms is not a nice thing to do, but then again, Aiphabet provides hosting and cdn at no cost to the content creator, so if the want to maxsimize therir net ad revenue, I cb't realy blame them. Contetnt creators meay need to look at alternative revenue streams or other vido streaming platforms.

Trasaction fees?

[sanf780]

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?

Re:

[Maxo-Texas]

The problem with that logic is this

Patreon says we want to make 4,000 charges.

A hundred people give 40 bucks to patreon. (4000 bucks).
There are 100 charges

Patreon allocates that $4000 to 200 creators (20 bucks total each).

There are 200 more charges.

That's 300 total charges.

Patreon is claiming it needs to make 4,000 charges.

It does not. It's an aggregator.

If youtube still shows the advertisements, then it still has all the overhead- the only step it is "saving" is sharing some profits with the video creato

Re:

[swb]

You would think they would just act as a clearinghouse, "banking" the revenue until it reached some threshold where the transaction fee was less than 1% of the payment vs. making a zillion $1 transactions.

I don't know how you actually get (or used to get...) paid from YT videos. I would have assumed it was fractions of a cent per view and that they already were smart enough not to actually pay out owed ad revenue to a video publisher until it hit some minimum amount necessary to make the transaction worthw

Re:

[Jody Bruchon]

YouTube sends you a check (literally, they mail you a physical check, can't possibly cost more than $0.50 a pop total) at each $100 of revenue earned. Checks are not credit cards, so they don't have credit card transaction fees. Patreon's crap attempt at financial sleight of hand is crappy but has no relation to YouTube's crappy changes except that it's an obvious cash grab. I can almost guarantee that they'll still run some ads on videos that aren't ad-enabled. I've seen it many times. They go "not suitabl

So this is because...

[RedK]

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

Great plan.

Re:

[RedK]

The fact this happens after the Logan Paul suicide vlog, does not mean it is a consequence of that.

Errr.. didn't even read the summary, much less the BBC article did you :

The moves follow a series of advertiser boycotts and a controversial vlog that featured an apparent suicide victim.

Also the article mentions Logan Paul often. He was still part of the Youtube Preferred programe and was only suspended AFTER the event took place. This will just make it harder for smaller content providers, who haven't published controversial videos, to get in, and won't impact the big names until AFTER they screw up royally.

Re:

[drsquare]

The article doesn't say it's a consequence, it just says 'follows', which is a journalistic weasel word meaning nothing. It doesn't matter what the article said, it's just a story written by the BBC. Unless Youtube actually say that this change is directly because of Logan Paul then it's all speculation.

Re:

[drsquare]

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...

[Skuld-Chan]

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.

Re:

[slazzy]

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.

Re:

[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.

Re:

[Bob-Bob Hardyoyo]

A good amount of firearms channels have switched over to using full30 over youtube.

Re:

[losfromla]

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...

$45 signup fee

[tepples]

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

Re:

[losfromla]

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.

Re:

[G00F]

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

Re:

[swillden]

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

Re:

[MoralCharacter]

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

Re:

[Skuld-Chan]

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.

Re:

[Local ID10T]

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.

Re:

[Stan92057]

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

Re:

[jim_deane]

What's your channel? Or at least something I can search to find your channel.

Re:

[nitehawk214]

Everyone except corporations or super-big channels.

My guess is that Logan Paul and any other big channel targeting tweens will get picked up on this new "paring" program since it is big enough.

Re:

[serviscope_minor]

Everyone except corporations or super-big channels.

Wow, the bar for censorship has got *REALLY* low these days.

It's not enough for google ot provide you a free platform to espouse your views. If they're not paying you OMG CENSORSHIP EVERYBODY PANIC11!!111one

Indie Music

[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.

Re:

[mysidia]

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.

Re:

[dodged]

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.

Re:

[AHuxley]

People will just not use the site ads on offer.
The video will have an ad spoken about by the presenter as part of their video.
The ad can find the content and work direct with the content creator.
No need to have site ads and be under the control of new SJW site rules.

That real ad in the video uploaded supports the content creator directly not the site.
The more the site makes demands on the people who make the content the more other sites that respect freedom of spec and freedom after speech stat lookin

Re:

[tlhIngan]

People will just not use the site ads on offer.
The video will have an ad spoken about by the presenter as part of their video.
The ad can find the content and work direct with the content creator.
No need to have site ads and be under the control of new SJW site rules.

People already do that on YouTube - you get lots of videos sponsored by various companies.

The problem is,

1) You need to be an established creator with lots of views, or ad companies won't talk to you
2) It irritates viewers because they are now

Re:

[AHuxley]

Re " they really have no statistics about it other than views"
A discount word mentioned that is only given for that creator to use.
The number of people who then follow the link and enter the word

Re:

[tlhIngan]

Come on, you know that's what they'll end up doing, don't you? Conservative, right-of-center, Euroskeptic or Muslim-critical videos will be deemed "unworthy of monetizing."

It's not Google, it's the advertisers.

Before the adpocalypse happened, YouTube slapped any ad on top of any video and things were good.

The problem is that people started realizing (because the election of a certain president seems to have given legitimacy to viewpoints that at best were controversial, at worse, something generally disallo

to good to be true

[epine]

Basically, the ad-sponsored revenue model suffer from implicit censorship through the pedestrian sensibilities of the major advertisers and this probably can't be fixed.

If something seems too good to be true, it probably is.

In the modern eyeball economy, the coyote walks off the branch into space, but doesn't fall down. He just floats there on a hidden wire gathering eyeballs. Once enough eyeballs are harvested, coyote retires the hidden wires, and then all the sparrows sputter in disappointment that econo

Re:

[Cajun Hell]

So, somebody makes new content on Youtube, but Google gets all of the ad revenue from their content. That makes no sense whatsoever.

You're right, it makes no sense. We need to find out why people are making content and uploading it to someone else's website (e.g. Youtube) for that website owner to make money on. Is it pure selflessness, or is Youtube using force or threats or blackmail to make them do it against their will?

Re:

[nitehawk214]

They probably round up. So produce 3 shitty 2 minute videos every day instead of one well produced 1 hour video a week.

Re:

[tepples]

In theory, 1000 subscribers and 4000 view hours per year means 240 view minutes per subscriber per year. That can be satisfied if all your subscribers, say, view one 5-minute video a week.

Re:

[Leuf]

The subscriber count has almost no correlation with the view count or watch time. I have 60k subscribers and my videos get anywhere from 5k to 1 million views. If I could actually count on 60k people watching every video it would be a completely different animal.

Seems to me Yahoo is burning their seed corn

[Maxo-Texas]

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.

Re:

[jetkust]

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.

Re:

[Mandrel]

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.

Re:

[mysidia]

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.

Re:

[Mandrel]

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?

Re:

[mysidia]

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.

Re:

[Mandrel]

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

Re:

[mysidia]

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

Re:

[Mandrel]

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.

Re:

[mysidia]

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

Re:

[Mandrel]

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

Re:

[zabbey]

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.

Re:

[Pyramid]

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?

Re:

[Maxo-Texas]

I'm still seeing ads on tiny channels. Sometimes two ads for longer videos.

Re:

[Maxo-Texas]

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.

Re:

[DNS-and-BIND]

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.

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:

[stooo]

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

There are no ads before videos.

So basically favoring the Big Guys

[Jarwulf]

over the little ones and turning YT more into online television. Which is the direction they've been wanting to go anyway.

In Defense of Youtube

[jetkust]

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.

Re:

[eastjesus]

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.

Then I need some new subscribers :-!

[ReneR]

For my new, raw tech channel: http://youtube.com/renerebe [youtube.com] anyone? ;-)

Goodbye $ from viral videos

[poached]

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 you tighten your grasp...

[Mal-2]

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.

RIP Vidme

[tepples]

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.

Re:

[Mal-2]

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.

Mandatory infringement scanning

[tepples]

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.

Re:

[epine]

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.

Re:

[Mal-2]

"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!

Re:

[drsquare]

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

YouTube becomes the cable company

[eastjesus]

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

Re:

[skovnymfe]

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

Re:

[Kevin108]

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.

It matters little.

[ruddk]

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

Re:

[coastwalker]

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

Subscribers Metric Good?

[Mandrel]

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.

Re:

[fleabay]

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.

Re:

[Mandrel]

How do you know that something new is available? What alerts are on by default, and which have you switched off?

Re:

[fleabay]

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.

Re:

[Mandrel]

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...

[Kazoo the Clown]

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.

Re:

[Paradise Pete]

So you made the world a slightly worse place today and you came here to boast about it?

Re:

[webmistressrachel]

Why don't they just let the market decide?

I will explain. Advertisers who wish to avoid appearing on "edgy" and adult content can sponsor the fluffy censorious version which currently calls itself Youtube.

The vast majority of advertisers who just don't care what the far left does, and knows it's basically bad for business to kowtow to them (marvel et al), can get better numbers of eyeballs for less by sponsoring "normal" random Youtube, the Youtube we once knew and loved. Let the market decide.