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With Instagram looming, YouTube is trying to keep its creators happy
YouTube is realizing it needs to treat its creators better, now that rival Instagram is making a play for them with its own video platform, IGTV.
The video service announced on Thursday three new ways for YouTubers to make money on its platform, during a presentation at the online video convention, VidCon, in Anaheim, California.
In the next few months, audiences will be able to support their favorite channels within YouTube by paying $4.99 per month to become a member of that channel's community and get access to exclusive posts, videos, live streams and other perks offered by the creator. The program, called Channel Memberships, will be available to channels with 100,000 subscribers or more that meet certain standards, like being eligible for ads and run by creators over the age of 18. The feature, previously called Sponsorships, launched last fall on YouTube Gaming to compete with rival streaming services Twitch, and will soon be made available on YouTube more broadly.
YouTube is also partnering with custom t-shirt company Teespring to allow creators to customize and sell merchandise directly through their channels, as of this week. Many YouTubers, large and small, already make and sell merchandise on their own for extra cash. Not to mention, hawk it incessantly in their videos.
Your video channel has been demonetized. Sorry about that :/
Previously: Facebook/Instagram vs. Twitch and YouTube
(Score: 3, Insightful) by takyon on Monday June 25 2018, @04:37PM (2 children)
Scarcity isn't the point. People blow decent amounts of money on some artists, musicians, entertainers, programmers, etc. on Patreon, despite them being a dime a dozen, because they like them or what they have to offer. Example: Fraser Cain [youtube.com] of Universe Today publishes Q&A type videos about space topics, as well as articles on universetoday.com. He has 835 patrons [graphtreon.com] donating some amount of money per month (you can hide that number now), and is ranked 283rd among video-related Patreons. At #1 is Philip DeFranco [graphtreon.com]. He mostly just offers his opinion on news topics and YouTube drama, but he has over 16,000 patrons. The Graphtreon site tries to estimate revenue per month, even for those who choose to hide their earnings. The low estimates have Fraser Cain making $2k/month and Philip DeFranco making $32k/month.
So while you may dismiss these YouTubers, and many fans are as cheap and fleeting as any pirates, some people still manage to make a living or even a killing off the platform + Patreon.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 25 2018, @04:54PM (1 child)
$5 is a lot for this sort of thing though. Especially for people who are either making minimum wage or who have a large number of channels that they're interested in. It's going to be difficult to convince people to pay money to YouTube when the main point of the payment is that YouTube has been fucking with content creators.
There's this attitude lately about how people need to be shoveling money in various directions. It's just $5 a month, less than a cup of coffee etc., but the reality is that $5 here and another $5 there adds up relatively quickly. And considering how many Americans don't have a thousand dollars in the bank, this is probably not something that should be encouraged.
YouTube should just do the right thing and put the ads back. Or, if they're not going to do so themselves, then they should offer some way that these content producers can have their own ads outside of the actual video.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday June 25 2018, @05:09PM
Yes, it would be nice to have some flexibility. YouTube has probably made the default (and only) option $5 to decrease the amount spent on payment processing. I'll note that Fraser Cain's average take per patron is about $3.50... which is 70% of $5.
I'm hesitant to use something like Patreon or Kickstarter due to the single digit cut the platform takes and other flat fees which would cut into a $1 pledge. But YouTube wants to up that to 30%. Despite the fact that many YouTube creators would not have turned to Patreon in the first place if it wasn't for the rampant demonetization.
You can't give YouTube all the blame. Old media types raised a stink about ads appearing on controversial videos and other things to panic about, and it led to an advertiser exodus. Now GoogTube has to try to up their policing on a platform that sees hundreds of hours of video uploaded per minute. And the only way to do that effectively is with imperfect and unfair machine learning algorithms.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]