Comments by "SmallSpoonBrigade" (@SmallSpoonBrigade) on "Why YouTube NEEDS To Get Worse" video.

IMHO it's too expensive. YouTube isn't producing any of the content, and they have a well-earned reputation for shafting smaller channels. Right now there's that invalid traffic thing going on and they can't be bothered to actually address it in any meaningful way. I’m not sure why I'd pay that much money for the service when I could spend the money on other things.
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It's kind of their own fault for selling their souls early on to elbow everybody else out of the market. In the traditional online advertising market you get a certain amount of money just for having your image viewed and another if you click through to the advertised site. They could have offered the equivalent of some small amount just for the placement and more money being paid if the viewer made it through the 30 seconds and the entire amount being paid if the viewer clicked the ad. It's a minor change, but one which would discourage some of the more obvious scams. I'm not sure why they're taking their own incompetence out on the people creating the products that the site is selling. The videos and the audience that comes for the videos.
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@coffeedragonstudios TBH, it's a minor inconvenience, if we don't want to watch the ads, there's not much YouTube can do to force us to actually watch them. These days it's not super hard to set up a program to automatically click the mute button before and after the ad so that you're effectively not watching the ad, even though it's being shown. If anything, that's a lot worse for the platform than people being allowed to block the ads completely.
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That's not going to happen as long as YouTube is playing games with which videos are being shown and burying the stuff they know people are likely to want to watch under all the garbage video sthat are advertiser friendly.
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It's not a great video though. I usually like these videos, but this one just wasn't any good. It doesn't justify a lot of the things which are driving this. It doesn't justify the removal of the thumbs down count, it doesn't justify the pushing of unpopular videos with such frequency, and it doesn't justify the complete refusal of the platform to allow smaller creators to make money through the platform. It costs YouTube practically nothing to handle it when a viewer clicks on the thanks button and donates directly to the creator. The cost of transferring money electronically is practically nothing, even when you include the cost of complying with various money laundering and fraud regulations. They could easily reduce the amount that the top creators get and give a bit more to the smaller channels earlier and have better videos. The larger channels are getting much of their money from direct sponsorship deals anyways. The smaller channels are the only reason that I even bother to come here. Only a couple of the channels that I regularly watch have more than a couple hundred thousand subscribers and most of them have fewer than 10k. You have the content distribution that you've got because they pushed the content being recommended in that direction. I'd probably pay for YouTube Premium if the kind of channels that I like to watch had a fair crack at the money. But, they mostly don't, you pretty much have to be searching for those sorts of videos to find them, and it's inconsistent how many of them show up, even when they're just about the only thumbnails that I click on.
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I think that the bigger issue is how the small creators have been exploited for years and once they get large enough to get a share, it gets taken away with things like the invalid traffic bug and the vaguely worded rules against having too many ad accounts, but no information about which ones need to be closed in order to proceed.
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@theCastleberry It is. For the time being I'm somewhat shielded from that because I'm mostly interested in smaller autism channels that are mostly using YouTube for access to the audience with the funding coming either from direct donations or from selling to the audience. That particular niche is never going to be given a fair shake as autistic people have very little money and most are either unemployed or underemployed.
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Nebula is probably fine, but most of the content I'm watching is from smaller creators that aren't allowed to post to that site. There's little point in me subscribing when so many of the creators I follow are autistic and don't have a large enough audience to get noticed and invited over. Which isn't the worst thing in the world if you want solid creators that are doing mainstream stuff, but if you're mostly using YouTube for less common content, then it's a waste of money.
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@benjaminfranklin329 Viewing the ads isn't supporting creators, either. There are so many games that YT plays with the revenue that small and mid-sized channels can't count on getting their share of the cut far enough into the future to rely on it. It's why you see so many of the same questionable sponsorships on just about every channel with any viewers.
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Ad blockers will eventually win out. It may mean that you have to wait for the entire video to play in order to have an ML program remove the ads, but that's where things are headed. Especially with YT having so many ads on videos where the creator gets none of the revenue at all because of a glitch or technicality.
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TV is somewhat better in that respect now, but it's still a problem. The issue that I've got here is that the kinds of videos I'm watching are mostly smaller channels and it's unclear to me how many of them get any revenue share and of those that do how much it is. There's little point in me paying for the premium package if most of the money is going to channels with less of a need. Especially with the dickish stuff like not allowing smaller creators to get donations directly from the viewers.
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@alansquared I think that if YT would be more transparent with potential subscribers about how the money is being divvied up that it might be easier to get us to subscribe. The fact that YT has regularledy screwed over smaller channels doesn't inspire much interest in giving money directly to the site.
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The issue there is that the sponsorships exist because YT isn't paying some of these channels enough. It's part of why you'll occasionally see sponsorships on tiny channels that wouldn't be making enough to compensate for the gear or purchases involved with running the channel.
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That's a major problem. The content that they're pushing is of such low quality that nobody is likely to be willing to pay that much for it. I wont even pay for Netflix and the content is of much higher quality than the stuff that YouTube pushes. I'd be willing to sit through the ads if they weren't mostly scams and the creators I was watching actually got a chunk of the revenue, regardless of size.
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They may be, but they're also not paying anywhere near the cost of production for most smaller channels, and the rules involved with monetization effectively prevent new channels from any funding other than 3rd party sites. On top of that things like the invalid traffic "bug" and the random demonitizations of various channels for various reasons require that they pay more than they should just because the unpredictability and lack of options for getting funding directly from the viewers. There's a reason why nearly all except the smallest and newest of channels is touting various sponsorship deals. Perhaps if they'd do things like allow channels to get those thanks by just submitting the relevant legally required documentation, then there wouldn't need to be as much pressure on ad revenue to allow the creators to fund their channels. Or, perhaps Alphabet could also stop funding so many unprofitable services that they will then abandon after failing to provide any of the necessary support before then dumping the service completely.
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You can tell YT not to show you specific channels. I suspect that if enough people do that that the algorithm will stop trying so hard to push them. The problem is that enough people click and watch that it's like playing Whac-A-Mole.
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@Liamtff That's not to say that I think it's a terrible video, I do think they bring up a lot of valid things to consider. I just wish they wouldn't have bothered if they weren't going to address some of the other bits as those are really the relevant things IMHO. I do think that the video is likely correct that the aggregate payments to channels is probably unsustainable, but I do think that the way forward needs to be more transparency about why Premium is good for everybody and for the curve to be shifted on the payments a bit so that the newer creators can get some money earlier in the process to keep people coming. There's just so many times that any of us can watch a Mr. Beast video or the various copycats out there. I personally would be more than happy to pay for a version that only shows ads on larger channels if it means that everybody gets a slice, provided that the creator is legally able to be paid under the various international regulations on the movement of money and subject to whatever minimum amount it costs to actually make the payment profitable.
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@kylespencer6461 It's an illegal practice in the US and most other nations. The problem is that it's not enforced very often.
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@flintfrommother3gaming I'm not sure about other people. But, given the shenanigans with how the ad revenue is doled out, and how these sorts of programs are run on other sites, I don't trust that the money will be given out fairly. They already rig the algorithm in favor of corporate news outlets and went to the extreme of hiding the dislikes so that people wouldn't know just how unpopular some of these channels are that are being pushed. I don't personally trust that they'll hand out the money to channels fairly.
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It depends on what kind of videos you're watching. I keep getting videos of a guy bothering a caracal even though I have no interest in that. Meanwhile, many of the videos I do watch are from creators that get little if any money from YouTube even though the site is running more and more ads on the videos.
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That likely wouldn't work. The main thing that they have going for them is a massive catalog of videos. If you had stuff being removed for any reason other than the law says they have to, it would make it harder for them to defend their niche against newer rivals.
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@PrincetonTech-h1w There's also times when the algorithm accidentally gets it right. It's widely known that it does sprinkle in a mixture of random other videos to check to see if you're clicking on them even though you haven't in the past.
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Honestly, they'd do a better job if they fixed the way that the ad system worked so that content creators can get funding earlier. It's nuts that you have to have 500 subscribers in order to get donations through the thanks feature. And likewise, they can't help but screw various channels via the algorithm and can't be bothered to substantively address problems like the invalid traffic bug or cases where a person can't get monetized because of a vague message about an old adwords account that the creator can't figure out how to delete. As far as paying to upload, why would anybody start uploading videos if they had to pay? It can take years for a channel to reach a large enough audience to be monetized, so you're putting in hundreds of dollars for just the uploads after spending all that time and energy creating the things in the first place.
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@sg5sd It's Steam, people over there are different. YouTube is nearly 20 years old and uploads have always been free. As far as Steam goes, there appears to be some actual human involvement in the process that doesn't happen here. You don't get an actual human involved with a YouTube account unless you're a relatively large channel. Also, if I understand things correctly, the money includes permission to sell your game. So, more payments, but also profit if that happens.
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One of the reasons that I refuse to pay for Premium is because of what they did with Google Music. They had a great app that could play music just fine. Then they decided to force everybody off of the app in order to charge a fee for playing our own music and running ads on our own music as well. To make matters worse, they took away just basic music player functions in order to force people to pay for a subscription even if they weren't listening to licensed content.
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@how2pick4name The thing is that they pay on the basis of individual ads. If the ad doesn't play because nobody watched it, it's the same amount they get from not watching any other video. It's them trying to consolidate all the views on a small number of videos that's a problem. Nearly all the ads that I see on this site are for scams anyways. It's also a good reason to stop limiting which channels we can send thanks to. As long as the payment can be legally made, that should be the only thing that really matters. I have no problem with YouTube getting a cut of that money for providing the service.
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@paulsheldon8838 It makes precisely no money if nobody clicks the ads. And, the degree to which the traffic is concentrated into a few channels increases the risk by a lot in terms of what happens if those creators decide they want to split off and create their own website.
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That's a good question, but it can take a prolonged period for some channels to find an audience, and YouTube already screws smaller channels in terms of running ads on them without giving them anything at all for the handwork involved with creating the videos.
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@asherlito3801 That ony works when there are viable alternatives or at least ones that are acceptable.
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