YouTube Will Stop Making Most Original Shows (theverge.com) 43
YouTube will scale back a significant portion of YouTube Originals, which produced original content including scripted series, educational videos, and music and celebrity programming. Chief business officer for YouTube Robert Kyncl announced the changes today in a statement on Twitter. From a report: Going forward, the company will only fund originals in the YouTube Kids Fund and the Black Voices Fund, a program created in 2020 that committed $100 million to "amplify" Black creators on the platform. "With rapid growth comes new opportunities and now our investments can make a greater impact on even more creators when applied towards other initiatives, like our Creator Shorts Fund, Black Voices Fund, and Live Shopping programming to name a few," the statement reads. YouTube Originals has changed approaches throughout the years.
I forgot this was a thing (Score:3)
I do know that they have a rival cable service that is no better than cable. Hell cable might be better. Spectrum has never given me problems, Google has.
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I had a look when it was fresh, but Cobra Kai was the only thing on there of interest. That show has moved to Netflix now, so zero interest in YouTube Originals.
I'm not interested in their ad-free offering either. It only removes the YouTube ads, not the in-video ads. For that you need SponsorBlock.
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Youtube was making original content?
good (Score:1)
Re:Pretty soon... (Score:4, Insightful)
YouTube will cancel the Black Voices Fund too.
No they won't. Virtue signalling is actually important to them.
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Well, I cancelled my YouTube Premium account because of this (really, about two minutes ago).
I don't like to do politics. At all. I avoid it. YouTube will occasionally throw up tons of videos I don't want to watch in the section of the home page where they do that...Covid, Black Lives Matters, etc. I'm pretty tired of it, and I'm not interested in what they are pushing. I'd rather not fund that stuff.
Obviously they can do whatever they want, and losing my $15/mo isn't going to hurt them. But I don't s
stop advertising your own services too (Score:1)
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Or at least make the ads skippable... I can't believe how much I hate and loath googleFI now because I've had to sit through that stupid ad 300 times.
Are ads something you see when you're paying for youtube?
Only show they made worth watching they sold (Score:3)
Cobra Kai is owned by Netflix now. I'm failing to see why the rest of it matters even a little.
Google's Standard Procedure (Score:2)
Create a new service or product, then cancel it. lol
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Google Orphan(tm)
Oh no... (Score:2)
What will their 3 viewers watch now...
Really, i can't recall the name of a single one of their shows.
Also, surely this has nothing to do with their disputes with several networks not wanting to carry them anymore.
What *IS* YouTube? (Score:5, Insightful)
YouTube has long ago forgotten about the "you" in its title.
YouTube is now all about controlling, manipulating, filtering, censoring and restricting the content that appears on its platform, often in massively hypocritical ways.
For example, channels have been banned in the blink of an eye for *ALLEGED* breaches of the community guidelines in respect to "misleading" content -- when in fact the content was not misleading, it simply presented an alternative perspective or opinion.
"Deceptive practices" are also alleged on occasions when a creator dares to go against the YT narrative and exercise some independent thought -- or simply when an AI bot has an brain-fart. Most of the time any attempt by small channels to appeal these "decisions" are rejected out of hand.
Yet, we see ads like this ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3eYK_SVBAuE ) continue to run on the platform, fleecing thousands of people out of their hard-earned cash and, despite numerous, repeated reporting of such scams by those who have been duped, YT seems unconcerned and allows them to keep running. I guess it's all about the $$$.
YT wasn't built on scripted content commissioned by an online superpower, it was built on the concept of giving regular internet users a platform through which they could express themselves and voice their opinions. That concept is becoming increasingly restricted and limited these days with a resulting reduction in YT's "value" to the online world.
I for one will not miss any YT commissioned "scripted content". Good riddance to it.
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This. It feels like they leave content moderation up to machine learning, and unless there's enough people complaining, they won't do anything.
Alphabet just really wants to change what YouTube is, which is too bad because there's a lot of good content in one place. Hopefully someday they'll go back to their roots but I'm not holding my breath and mostly just waiting for a good YouTube alternative to push them aside.
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I'm still wondering why people aren't migrating to Vimeo.
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That's exactly what they do. They have machine learning as a first line, then low level moderators who use simple rules as a second line. To actually get a proper decision made requires it to be escalated above those two, and only big creators have much hope of getting access to that.
It's an unsolved problem. Vast amounts of new content, and in video form which is computationally expensive and difficult to automatically moderate. It's time consuming for humans to moderate too. YouTube is a major target for
What is an alternative to YouTube? (Score:1)
YouTube has long ago forgotten about the "you" in its title.
This is a real conundrum for me. I've been thinking about starting a channel on a hobby topic, and would love to just publish some videos people would see.
YouTube seems like it has the greatest reach, but I'm really feeling like I don't want to reward increasingly erratic behavior from YouTube, I don't want my videos increase the value of YouTube, however marginal an extra draw it would be (and believe me, it would be super marginal).
So what is a
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I can tell you but let me first tell you about the sponsor. Squarespaz.
Re:What *IS* YouTube? (Score:4, Interesting)
Let's start from first principles.
YouTube is owned by Alphabet, also better known as Google.
Google exists to make money.
Therefore, YouTube exists to help Google make money.
To do this, YouTube sells advertising. By putting ads before the video starts, in the middle of the video, and other places, they earn money.
To help sell ads, YouTube needs people to see the ads.
To have people watch ads, YouTube needs people to make content that they can put around the ads.
Therefore, YouTube exists as a platform that will show viewers content created by other people in order to put eyeballs in front of ads.
To help with the content creation process, YouTube may pay those creators a bit of money to entice them to create more content.
Thus, we now know what YouTube strives to do. If you're a content creator that helps YouTube sell ads, you're what they want. If your content doesn't sell outs, you're out. it's as simple as that.
Oh sure, some people like to throw around things like "free speech" and such, but that has never existed. All YouTube cares about is you making content for YouTube that YouTube can make money off of. If it doesn't satisfy this basic requirement, you're not wanted.
Forget about anything else - that's pretty much irrelevant. If you cared about your content, you can put it up on your own website. YouTube isn't a platform for people to put videos on, it's a platform to make Google money.
Remember what they say - if you're not paying, you're the product. Creators are the product as well, because they're not paying to have their videos hosted by YouTube, either. YouTube tweaks "the algorithm" in order to steer content creation the way they want in order to sell more ads.
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If you cared about your content, you can put it up on your own website.
Unless, of course, the big tech companies deplatform you.
But hey, we've always been at war with EastAsia ... and the Left has always been in favor of big corporations owning the public square. Er, right?
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Unless, of course, the big tech companies deplatform you.
Unless of course, the big tech companies de-platform you AND you're too lazy and stupid to find an alternative. You could always use the same webhost I use, but you don't actually have anything substantive to say, so you won't bother.
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Last I checked, most of the hosts like brietbart and others still had websites and still were running. Heck, even The Pirate Bay is still up and running, so running your own website seems to be the most resilient way. I mean, it might cos
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If you cared about your content, you can put it up on your own website.
Unless, of course, the big tech companies deplatform you.
But hey, we've always been at war with EastAsia ... and the Left has always been in favor of big corporations owning the public square. Er, right?
Youtube is far from the only video service available.
Again, Youtube exists to make money, content that is offensive or harmful gives the platform a bad reputation and costs them money.
And the problem has never been "big corporations owning the public square", there's always some kind of entity controlling the public square, either a corporation, a government, or a mob. The problem is when the custodian is using their role to drive a self-serving narrative, rather than trying to promote a useful discussion.
T
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There are other video sites for stuff that YouTube doesn't allow, such as the aptly named banned.video.
Re: What *IS* YouTube? (Score:2)
it was built on the concept of giving regular internet users a platform through which they could show us their cats
FTFY
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What is it? It's UsTube, of course. You will watch what we want you to watch, and you will say what we want you to say. Or off you go.
Which if they presented themselves as UsTube, or LeftTube, or whatever, would be fine, I suppose. But they don't. They pretend to be a place where you can publish videos. It's right in the name ...
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>> Yet, we see ads like this ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com] ) continue to run on the platform
> This RC plane deal sounds almost too good to be true, doesn't it? Well guess what (if you hadn't figured it out already). It is a SCAM! Please make sure that neither you nor any of your friends are caught by this scam or similar ones.
ProTip: At least read as far as the video description before you go deciding this is the video you will choose to illustrate your point.
Must Have Missed that News (Score:1)
I didn't know they STARTED (Score:5, Insightful)
Which is probably due to the lack of if it catching on, which is why they are giving up. Google has a reputation for bailing quickly on early duds. The upside is you don't bleed money waiting for things to turn around. The downside is that you have the reputation for hit-and-run products such that nobody wants to invest their time in your products.
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Fox is notorious for doing that with TV shows too, or at least used to be. I don't see their name much anymore, are they still going?
Anyway, used to be that if you saw a show debuting on Fox it wasn't worth starting to watch it because there was a very good chance that it would be cancelled 8 episodes in and without any kind of ending.
It created a self-fulfilling prophecy, where people didn't want to get invested in shows on Fox because they always got cancelled, so they inevitably bombed in the ratings and
Good riddance. (Score:2)
The only YouTube "original" content I recall seeing were puff pieces that tried to garner sympathy for ridiculous celebrities with questionable content [youtube.com]. Note that the dislikes and dislikes were hidden on these episodes long before the wholesale "removal" of the dislike button and comments were turned off on the trailer very quickly as well.
Now, release Season 2 of Scare Pewdiepie, darnit!
So, virtue signaling by a tech company AGAIN? (Score:2)
I mean, original content production is really "key" if you want people to keep reliably paying for monthly subscriptions to ANY streaming service. That's the lesson everyone from Amazon Prime to Netflix quickly learned. If all you do is regurgitate the same old content that's already out there and has been available elsewhere before? Your service acts as kind of a library for viewing whatever content you've got available -- but it has diminishing value to people as your competitors offer something similar.
Y
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"YouTube Red" so people could subscribe and dodge annoying ads
Only to find that almost every video you like has sponsored bits recorded by the creator, so you have just as many ads as you did years ago. It stinks.
um (Score:4, Insightful)
and the Black Voices Fund, a program created in 2020 that committed $100 million to "amplify" Black creators on the platform.
This is literally racial discrimination.
Good. (Score:2)
Now lower the price.
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used to scoff at "originals" (Score:2)
But all of them produced at least one series that just blew me away and shut me up.
Other things notwithstanding, I bear no ill will to YouTube for giving it a shot.
Good move (Score:2)
The streaming space is already too crowded. Stop flushing money down the toilet on a losing proposition.