>) For niche channels, like my own, it can be easy to have the views but difficult to have the subscribers. These two should not be tied together for purposes of monetization.
I completely agree.
I've saved hundreds of dollars [and time] on car maintenance/repairs and plumbing by watching some guy or gal on youtube with very specific information (for a given make/model/year) for example.
I hope these kinds of instructional videos get a reprieve because many many people use them and save tons of money and time [finding manuals and reading them is arduous].
This could be a terrible loss for some audiences as well as the creators who get compensated, slim as it may be.
Honestly I think people will keep making those sorts of videos anyway. We never get paid anything for posting on Stack Overflow or Hacker News yet here we are. And YouTube had lots of good videos before it had monetisation.
Right, but if even 5% of car mechanics were making Youtube videos only a few would still be able to make a meaningful amount of money off of them. A car mechanic capable of adapting to a new technology early, and building an audience off of that is more than just a car mechanic.
If you benefit from a disruptive technology, you can't expect the "new normal" to persist indefinitely. The ride certainly may not be free or easy, but it would be abnormal for it not to change.
This whole thing seems very reminiscent of SEO about a decade ago. It was still fairly new and thousands of people built incomes and entire businesses with employees around it. In some cases a search algorithm update wiped out all of their audience. Of course, in nearly every case those impacted immediately blamed Google.
When something is fairly new, the first movers often get outsized benefits. You have less competition which makes the ability to both capture and monetize an audience easier. As the market matures more competitors appear. If the pie doesn't grow as fast as the new competitors arriving, all participants earn less profits.
The results of what Google/Youtube is doing now is just bringing the same effects early. The future of Youtube producers will consist of less search visibility combined with ad revenue divided more ways. 15+ years of double digit only advertising growth has gone a long way to mask the audience problem (and when it ends it is going to result in massive changes to Google.)
Perhaps. I think there are people in places [even in the US] where money goes further for whom a dozen dollars here, a dozen dollars there from different uploads made it worthwhile for them. I hope you are right, but I fear we might lose some great contributors.
Would you still be here or on StackOverflow if you knew that some of the contributors were "gold members" who got directly paid while you didn't?
We participate in these places for the intangible rewards and one of those, I believe, is feeling that we are helping to foster an egalitarian community. When the community is explicitly tiered and money-based, is that still something people will want to chip in to out of the goodness of their hearts?
If they do, then that is great. Since there is no compensation from youtube, these creators should upload the content to a bunch of online streaming platforms.
99% of the affected channels make less than $100 per year. I don't think most of these types of videos are made with a plan to make money. I think people like making videos explaining things they understand.
Not everyone lives in the US. $100 for me or you may not be worth putting hundreds of hours into making a bunch of videos but it may be for others. My father's late friend used to do that since he was disabled and had few other options. He was in this sub-$100 category.
If you have a following in Patreon or any other similar platform, it shouldn't be that hard to jump ship and start uploading somehwere else. Any serious internet publisher should have at least one alternate channel for followers. I'd go with Twitter and a newsletter, so if YouTube decides to screw me, I can tell people "hey, I'm moving to [random platform here]". Patreon allows you to communicate with your followers too, so going, you can take your actual contributing followers with you wherever you want (theoretically).
This describes the benefit of being diversified but it doesn't explain how you get there in the face of YouTube's efforts to prevent that. I mean you could plug your Twitter then plug your patreon there but then you're relying on the YT -> Twitter conversion rate multiplied by the Twitter -> Patreon conversion rate.
You could just plug it verbally and skirt the enforcement of the YouTube rules that way, but if they became concerned enough they have automatic transcription and did start enforcing it on annotations/descriptions...
I find it almost callous that not only do they make it super hard for "small timers" to monetize their channel using their own product, but then proceed to block any efforts to let fans contribute via others.
Sure, but why does youtube need to care? From their perspective, those videos probably aren't helping their bottom line. It might be better if they weren't uploaded in the first place: Less disk space used, no need to index them, etc.
Youtube absolutely should care. The "long tail" is one of Youtube's competitive advantages. Sure, each individual video in the "long tail" may only have a couple thousand views, but collectively as a whole the "long tail" is the reason why you instinctively check YouTube over any other site when looking for:
Those videos get me to YouTube in the first place. Once there they can try to get me to watch 'better' videos and the videos I do watch gives them lots of useful information about me that they can sell to advertisers.
I completely agree.
I've saved hundreds of dollars [and time] on car maintenance/repairs and plumbing by watching some guy or gal on youtube with very specific information (for a given make/model/year) for example.
I hope these kinds of instructional videos get a reprieve because many many people use them and save tons of money and time [finding manuals and reading them is arduous].
This could be a terrible loss for some audiences as well as the creators who get compensated, slim as it may be.