Hi, I'm stuck waiting on laundry to finish and am bored, so why don't I come on here and write some hot takes about YouTube?
I mean, I can think of several reasons, but too bad I'll do it anyway.
Knowing the leanings of the folks on this particular platform this is likely to spark some debate, but note that I'm not trying to paint YouTube as a saint - in fact, the first thing I want to talk about is a strategy they've taken which puts me and all YT creators in a weird place:
Seemingly few people know (or understand completely) that YT Premium is a good deal for all parties involved - it kills ads, creators get a cut of the membership, and (in my experience anyway) it neutralizes many of the platform's weird tendencies because serving relevant ads to the viewer is no longer a concern.
I would advocate for it much more strongly (and I say 100% truthfully that Premium views pay me more than ad-supported views do) except YT continues to lump YT music into it.
I have been paying for YouTube Premium since it was called YouTube Red, and I will happily continue to do so.
So many of the "YouTube is getting so much worse" takes I see just... don't apply to me because I haven't seen an ad on the platform in years now.
I would tell you that by signing up for YT premium you should happily think about it as a small Patreon membership for everybody you watch - your money will be sent to those folks split up based on watch time.
But Music complicates this.
I honestly don't know how your fee gets split up here.
Does more go to video creators if you stream music less? Or not at all? Don't know!
What is the typical split? Don't know!
I really wish YouTube/Google would split this out. I use YT music because I never got started with a different service and enjoy it. But if I had invested in a different service with playlists and stuff, I probably wouldn't bother with YT music and that makes YT premium far less compelling.
Now, saying anything positive about YT or Google on this particular platform is... well it's probably not going to be received well.
Understand that I would love for there to be a competitor to YouTube that worked like YouTube, but so far nobody has had the balls to copy their revenue split model. That's what it takes. Pay your creators!
Some alternatives kinda-sorta do but I would rather my content be accessible to all and currently I'm not interested in another thing to manage.
Also, one last thing:
Creators have always had control (and as of now still do) over whether to use mid-roll ads AND where to place them.
I don't use them. You shouldn't see them on my videos.
And if you are watching something and the ad cuts off a sentence, that is 100% the uploader being lazy and letting YT just toss them in wherever.
kay bye
@TechConnectify To be honest, I hadn’t even thought about the possibility that part of my YT Premium subscription is going to YT Music and possibly NOT the creators I watch. I don’t use YT Music. I don’t want my Premium subscription going towards it. And now I’m a little upset that there’s the possibility I’m literally paying for something I’m not using, and creators aren’t getting that cut.
@bedast I wish I knew as well.
I do know concretely that I make more money per Premium view than I do ad-views, and I have an above-average CPM on the ad side because, well, my audience trends geekier and wealthier and the ad auctions work out in my favor.
But I have absolutely no idea how YT music works into this, and I wish they would offer a video-only version. Also, Google's abandonment of Google Play as a brand was a massive misstep. Classic Google, though.
@TechConnectify I think it'll make a lot more sense if you look at lists of most watched videos.
It'll show that YT and YTM aren't meaningfully different products (outside the frontend app) and can't be meaningfully split when it comes to monetization.
YT (without M) was always a bigger music platform than YTM, Spotify and others.
@jernej I dunno. I mean, anything that I stream through the YT music app feels markedly different.
I would think a cheaper tier which doesn't include that function can easily be done.
@jernej I know that this existed, but I want to know why it didn't pan out. And I also feel that YouTube isn't considering how few creators make the Premium pitch because of how the music angle complicates things.
Basically, copyright sucks, and the music industry is especially ruthless about it.
@TechConnectify @jernej I think the TL;DR is “music videos”. I rarely watch them on YT (I’m also a Premium subscriber) but I believe there are many people for whom music videos comprise almost all their YT experience.
And (thanks to ASCAP and their ilk) it's not possible for YouTube to offer this without having to pay for general music rights also, hence…
@Uhausername I mean, honestly yes!
But lots of folks (particularly On Here) see the fact that Google is behind it as a bright red line.
And/or they're bitter about their anti-adblock push, which to be honest I find understandable.
But YouTube remains the only site where anyone can just put their stuff and get paid. As with anything, there are hoops to jump through, and some folks find those hoops objectionable for plenty of valid reasons.
@Guardian @TechConnectify @Uhausername anti-adblock isn't fully rolled out to everyone, so its a mixed bag of which A/B test you ended up on and your region. and some adblockers like Ublock Origin have been keeping ahead of youtube (painfully and persistently)
Youtube has a detection script that gets updated several times a day (different url/name/code structure/etc) so it's difficult to rip out of the page in an automated manner.
@TechConnectify @Uhausername "But YouTube remains the only site where anyone can just put their stuff and get paid."
Aren't there others? From my view youtube is the most effective site to advertise your content to a very wide audience, thanks to the free non premium access, but is not the only platform where you can monetize your content. That is different.
@TheEnbyWitch @TechConnectify this is very gratifying to hear. I've had YT Premium since the pay tier of Google play music got folded into it, and I've always been a little concerned that the channels I was watching weren't getting supported to the same degree. Glad to hear it's a complete reversal.
(Full disclosure...I work for Google, I even work in *Ads*. But my opinions are my own, not necessarily those of my employer. And I have no idea how any of the YouTube payout stuff works... that's all far from me.)
(Also...I know there's lots of Googlers and Xooglers on Mastodon. There doesn't seem to be as much anti-big-tech rhetoric here as I saw on Twitter, or even on Slashdot back in the day.)
@digifox Mastodon is very much what one makes of it. On Twitter, (and much moreso on X), you had a lot less control over whose messages would get dropped in front of you. On Mastodon, I've found an instance that's non-toxic, and I avoid following toxic people. So I see a lot less of the messaging that you see from people always looking for wedge issues to drive up engagement. I also have enough people I follow that I don't have to spend much time on the federated view to find things to read...
Where I see critical posts, it's typically measured and thoughtful. (If it's not, I'll unfollow unless I really want to see that person for some reason.)
@digifox there's a lot of those folks within tech, too; they can be found.
I'll note that a friend of mine works at a railyard and is seriously into trains. (You know that youtube vid of a model train that was plowing snow in a yard? The one that went viral 3-5 years back? that was his video.) He once bemoaned how toxic so many fandoms and hobby clusters are, and that it comes because there's so much fear of not finding other people in a given niche that there's a strong disincentive to risk offending the toxic aggressive people. I don't remember if the point of the story was that his hobby tended to have fewer toxic people, or whether he'd visited an enclave of similar railfans elsewhere that was startlingly toxic compared to what he was accustomed to. One of those, anyway.
Point is, you have to be the change you'd like to see in the world. It's hard dropping friends and connections both because they're toxic and you don't have the spoons or cycles remaining to help bring them around. But sometimes letting go of those individual connections is what you have to do; compromising principles will just bring you unhappiness over time, one way or another.
@TechConnectify This is one of the reasons I don't pay for premium. I don't use YouTube Music, and I know that I wouldn't use it even if I had it, as I keep all my music on my own media server and stream it from there. I can't justify paying £16.99/mo for something when £10.99/mo of that is effectively for something I don't use (as £10.99 is the cost of Music on its own).
If they dropped the price down to like 50%, but excluded Music from it, I think I'd be happy to buy it.
Plus, using YouTube these days is genuinely turning into a pretty awful experience, so I'm not really incentivised to pay them anything. Feels a lot like paying protection money to the mob - they're artificially creating a problem and then trying to make you pay them to make the problem go away.
@oolivero45 @TechConnectify If you pay to use their service, you are the customer. If you watch ads, then you are the product that is being sold to their other customers.
Personally, I'd prefer to be in the former relationship with a platform than the latter, both for the ad-free experience and to align their incentives with my satisfaction instead of someone else's.
@TechConnectify That’s what I was curious about! I like premium but didn’t know how well it actually worked out for creators.
Great to hear.
@foobarsoft @TechConnectify
My main source for youtube economics seems to be the Spiffing Brit
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