Comment on Goodbye Youtube and thanks for all the fish
ChunkMcHorkle@lemmy.world 8 months agoPeople despise ads, but then they want content for free.
You have it perfectly backwards: YouTube wants content for free, and to not have to share any but the most pitiful fractions of ad income with the ACTUAL content creators.
YouTube does not produce content, others do. YouTube has gone out of its way to dick the vast majority of them, especially the smaller ones, to the point that as such, unless you have a Patreon, a website or store of your own, corporate sponsors, merch, or some other side hustle in addition to making YouTube content, you’re literally making content for a fraction of a penny per view, and entirely at your own cost.
And even then, you’re subject to an algorithm over which you have no control and which can just as fickly ban your content to oblivion as it can raise your content to the multi-million views club. By skipping YouTube ads and finding other ways to support the content creators I enjoy, I help give my creators a financial buffer from the unpredictable vagaries of the algorithm and also withhold reward from YouTube as well.
When YouTube shared ad revenue with content creators in a much more equal fashion, I did not have a problem with their ads. But several years ago – I want to say six or seven, but it’s been going on for at least ten – YouTube got greedy with the ads AND with becoming incredibly unstable and unreliable for creators in all manner of ways AND decreasing payouts to creators all along the way, at which point it became clear that me watching an ad or not no longer affects the content creators I enjoy at all. And they are the only reason I am on YouTube to begin with.
(And don’t get me started on all the copyright/demonetization scams there are on YouTube now: I have a friend who got a copyright strike for playing a C scale on a piano because some asshole claimed it and YouTube lets them do it: even when a creator gets views, they can get demonetized at a drop of a hat even for obviously ridiculous claims, and then that revenue goes to the person making the copyright claim. Win/win for everyone except the person who actually made the content.)
Over the years, YouTube has never failed to excel at two things: server space, and fucking its golden geese, the creators of the actual content, without which no one would be making any money there at all. So get back to us when YouTube recognizes the creators of the gold mine they have in the content hosted there, and once again finds a way to respect for the amount of time and effort and cost that goes into creating that content by sharing revenue with content creators in a more equitable manner.
TL;DR: Why should I watch ANY YouTube ads at all when I can support content creators via Patreon or a creator’s website and know that a much more equitable amount of that revenue will go straight to the creator of that content, where it belongs?
neblem@lemmy.world 8 months ago
YouTube still pays creators pretty high comparatively (55% of ad revenue according to businessinsider.com/how-much-influencers-get-paid…). You are simply getting a service (hosted, searchable, collection of the largest collection of web videos in an extremely nice interface) that costs money even outside of the creator’s cost. For creators they are allowing that 45% cut of ad revenue to get access to the YouTube audience, paid hosting that simply works, nice creator tools, etc.
You can state that it’s a valueless thing that anyone could replicate, but the evidence is that there aren’t many alternatives that do better. Today we do have things like PeerTube (which I think all creators should consider selfhosting with ads/subscriptions and federating the free stuff after a delay) and joining creator owned video services like Nebula (which could be made even better with federation). Unfortunately, with both you run into the discoverability problem, something creators and their audiences are paying to solve when you are hosting on YouTube.
I’d take your argument further back on the sourcing of getting content to you - why should you pay for internet service when it’s the content of the videos you watch not the wires that deliver it that have value? If you hacked around your neighbors WIFI to get some free network access, you could zero-cost get something you might not necessarily want to budget for, and you get quite a nice service out of it. Why shouldn’t that be okay when you still Patreon the creators of your videos given your reasoning about YouTube providing no value?
ChunkMcHorkle@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Yeah, except I didn’t say that, nor any of the other strawmen you erected to slam down.
What asinine aggrandizements and distortions. “Why should you pay for internet service” lol. (Reading your response I am momentarily rethinking it, certainly.)
Get back to me when you can address what I actually wrote, and not what you need me to have written. Thanks.