http://www.vox.com/2016/9/2/12746450/youtube-monetization-phil-defranco-leaving-site
Prominent YouTube star Philip DeFranco is known for his candid, often satirical delivery and his willingness to cover everything from celebrity gossip to memes. As his audience has grown, he's won awards for his informal news series and formed partnerships with major platforms like TMZ and SourceFed.
But on August 31, YouTube disabled monetization for at least 12 of DeFranco's videos. The official reason provided to DeFranco was that his content was either not "advertiser-friendly" or contained "graphic content," or "excessive strong language." DeFranco frequently swears in his videos, and regularly refers to his followers as "Beautiful Bastards." The demonetization means DeFranco will not be able to run ads (read: make money from ads) on any of those videos, and also means his channel is considered to be in violation of YouTube's community guidelines.
"I've seen channels dinged now for talking about depression and anti-bullying. And I've also seen channels like CNN include footage of a Syrian boy covered in blood, after his house was reportedly bombed, and right next to the video is a nice little ad for sneakers. So you get the question, 'Why me and not them?'" he said.
DeFranco pointed out that internet fame doesn't lead to a sustainable full-time income for the vast majority of "celebrities." If YouTube starts cracking down on content for not being "ad-friendly" enough, it could hurt these middle-tier vloggers far worse than a more major figure like DeFranco.
Related Stories
YouTube to crack down on inappropriate content masked as kids' cartoons
Recent news stories and blog posts highlighted the underbelly of YouTube Kids, Google's children-friendly version of the wide world of YouTube. While all content on YouTube Kids is meant to be suitable for children under the age of 13, some inappropriate videos using animations, cartoons, and child-focused keywords manage to get past YouTube's algorithms and in front of kids' eyes. Now, YouTube will implement a new policy in an attempt to make the whole of YouTube safer: it will age-restrict inappropriate videos masquerading as children's content in the main YouTube app.
[...] Also, all age-restricted content is not eligible for advertising, which will undoubtedly hit the wallets of the creators making these videos. While it's hard to understand why anyone would make a video about Peppa Pig drinking bleach or a bunch of superheroes and villains participating in a cartoonish yet violent "nursery rhyme," it's been a decent way to make money on YouTube. Some of these videos have amassed hundreds of thousands (and sometimes millions) of views, gleaning ad dollars and channel popularity.
Check the related videos to see some bizarre clickbait. Some are even live action skits performed by adults.
Are we doing enough to traumatize our kids?
Related: YouTube's "Ad-Friendly" Content Policy may Push one of its Biggest Stars off the Site
Google Fails to Stop Major Brands From Pulling Ads From YouTube
YouTube is shaving off more of the smaller channels from its monetization program:
YouTube is tightening the rules around its partner program and raising the requirements that a channel/creator must meet in order to monetize videos. Effective immediately, to apply for monetization (and have ads attached to videos), creators must have tallied 4,000 hours of overall watch time on their channel within the past 12 months and have at least 1,000 subscribers. YouTube will enforce the new eligibility policy for all existing channels as of February 20th, meaning that channels that fail to meet the threshold will no longer be able to make income from ads.
Previously, the standard for joining YouTube's Partner Program was 10,000 public views — without any specific requirement for annual viewing hours. This change will no doubt make it harder for new, smaller channels to reach monetization, but YouTube says it's an important way of buying itself more time to see who's following the company's guidelines and disqualify "bad actors."
[...] The new, stricter policy comes after Logan Paul, one of YouTube's star creators and influencers, published a video that showed a dead body in Japan's Aokigahara forest. Last week, YouTube kicked Paul off its Google Preferred ad program and placed his YouTube Red original programming efforts on hold.
Anyone under 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 total hours watched annually would probably be making a pittance anyway. This change could allow YouTube to put more human eyes on the unruly but popular channels, so it can censor suicide forest vlogs (NSFW) in record time.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by tekk on Sunday September 04 2016, @07:27AM
Now obviously this move is bad for Google, but I really have to wonder why, and how they came to this conclusion? It had to be asked for by advertisers, because these are advertising guidelines, not video removal ones.
Advertisers had to be coming to them complaining about ad placement, but where exactly are these advertisers going to go, Vimeo? They shouldn't really have any teeth in this situation because, quite simply, there is no other video site out there, relatively speaking.
So now Google has gone and put their content creators (that is, the people who generate the revenue) in a tough spot in response to toothless threats from advertisers?
It just has to be something really dumb: Google's bored with YouTube and wants to kill it off, or, more likely, this wasn't actually asked for by advertisers. It's all about pushing the people on the site towards using Youtube Red. I imagine that Google makes a hell of a lot more per person off the direct payments from Red than it does from the ads, especially with the growing popularity of adblockers dragging the average down so hard (the advertising value of someone with an adblocker is $0.00, skewing that figure.)
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 04 2016, @07:33AM
> I really have to wonder why, and how they came to this conclusion?
Unintended consequences of poorly considered policies. Simple as that. That's basically the history of all human organizations in a nutshell. No need for a conspiracy.
Since it is an utterly normal event, what matters is how well Youtube responds to the problems. Do they double-down due to managerial rigidity or do they come up with something more sensible that takes into account the revealed problems? Time will tell.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 04 2016, @09:17AM
Why? Profit motive. Google is all about profit, which makes them just like almost all companies.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Marand on Sunday September 04 2016, @10:24AM
I really have to wonder why, and how they came to this conclusion?
Same reason as every other large corporation that decides to encourage or enforce "soft" censorship: appeal to the maximum number of people by carefully crafting every message to avoid offending anyone.
You see it with adverts every time one deliberately shows a just-right balance of gender and ethnicity. You see in film, where the creators are careful to stay safely within that PG-13 range to maximise potential audiences. You see it in television every time a show avoids religion, nudity, and sex because it offends the overly puritan and prudish general public. You see it every time a site like Twitter or Facebook shuts down a user for saying the "wrong" things, not because they're illegal, but because they're unpopular.
It doesn't even have to be outright blocking, since you can implement policies like this and let the chilling effects do the work for you. Who needs government censorship when private companies are so much more conservative, and so much better at it?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 04 2016, @02:25PM
Don't we all just love the lowest common denominator?
Bland food is best food!
(Score: 2) by Marand on Monday September 05 2016, @12:52AM
Bland food is best food!
Great comparison, because many restaurants do exactly this with their food. Franchise restaurants suck for getting spicy food, because their "spicy" dishes are lowest-common-denominator spicy, with just enough heat to make someone that never eats spicy food feel the burn. Someone that actually likes spicy food, like me, just ends up disappointed.
Also happens with local Thai, Mexican, etc. places that offer spicy food but give the white people weaker meals with less heat. (Though if you argue over it and push for something spicier, I've noticed they often decide to be wise-asses and try to overdo it just to fuck with you...Then get disappointed when you like it that way.)
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 05 2016, @12:56AM
As they say, freedom of the press belongs only to those who own one. This has been a concern for a long time and is even more pronounced today with the growth of massive media conglomerates. The Internet could have put an end to it as it made the costs of owning a metaphorical press small, but we still wind up in the situation that a small number of major sites like YouTube are visited by large numbers of people. There is a de facto cartel in media both traditional and new, and this is a situation which should be intolerable to any society that enshrines freedom of speech and of the press among its core values. Media monopolies and cartels should be broken up and punished at least as vigorously as any other such anti-competitive behaviour.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 04 2016, @07:31AM
of many
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a68zFfsdRgI [youtube.com]
(Score: 4, Informative) by timbim on Sunday September 04 2016, @08:44AM
They only demonetize your video if you use harsh language in the tags. h3h3 explained this and confirmed it two years ago. https://youtu.be/UUkj4h_Tq-0 [youtu.be]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 04 2016, @11:29AM
VΛ
(Score: 2) by n1 on Sunday September 04 2016, @06:16PM
So this 'revised' policy that has become news in the last few days when youtube content creators got notified about this update, is actually 2 years old?
https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6162278?hl=en-GB [google.com]
Doesn't say anything about it only applying to tags/titles or something, it's very broad the way I read it.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by takyon on Sunday September 04 2016, @09:51PM
Watch the video. The assertion is that they have been doing this in some cases ("demonetizing" videos with banned keywords in the tags) without telling uploader accounts, but now they have made the policy official, slightly more transparent, and have ramped up the demonetization.
I think the tags mentioned are invisible to users and are just used for internal SEO (when you make a search on YouTube), but the video also claims that titles and descriptions could be affected based on keywords as well. And AlphaGoogTube can always add more keywords to a banned list.
Another commenter said that the demonetization allows Google to collect ad revenue for the video but not the uploader, while this h3h3 person claims that you still get some revenue for it, but only from a tiny pool of advertisers that have checked a box saying they don't mind what videos their ads are seen on, and this leads to a massive decline in expected revenue per X views. I'm not sure which view is correct, but either way somebody is getting ripped off.
It would be easy to say, "that's what you get for surrendering yourself to AlphaGoogTube" and the networks (middlemen that negotiate YouTube's flawed copyright strike/takedown system, protecting your videos from outright deletion but taking a cut of your revenue). However, it shows how precarious the YouTube monopoly has become. People have an expectation that they can earn a living from creating content for YouTube, but it can be ruined easily since having your fair use rights respected is a gamble at best, and YouTube comes up with BS like this. If they were to go with a different video site or make their own, they would make a fraction of the revenue or face big problems with scale/security/advertising/legal costs, etc.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 04 2016, @09:21AM
(I am going to go off a tangent here)
Youtube sits around doing nothing, while content creators create value for it. It can screw over its content creators because there is no competition. There is no competition because ideally some capitalist would come invest and take advantage of the niche (i.e. create youtube's competitor) but how come they do not? This is a huge opportunity.
What if nobody really has the money to enter the market? After all, all clients will demand high-speed and responsiveness on behalf of the Youtube's competitor and this is expensive. But even if this is so, this is a textbook example of "I have a great business plan but no money, so c'mon Banks, lend me some".
But in practice the capitalism game is rigged: if you are not part of some "greater plan", like Microsoft, Google, Twitter and Facebook (for that last one such an effort was made to summarily "immortalize" it by entering it into the stock market) and even perhaps Apple, then you're out. Why? Because those are mostly spy networks, or because would like to be spy networks, or because their (true, not the strawmen in front) founders go into the same cocktail parties, who knows.
I will further the tangent and go even more conspiracy by guessing that if you owned a time machine, and you went back to 2002 or so, and you tried to put together Facebook, you would fail because the system would not let you.
Banks may lend out small sums to anybody, but big sums go only to "friends and colleagues". To do this they just type a number in a computer, and then the money "exists" and they "lend" it to you. SUCH a scam.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Nerdfest on Sunday September 04 2016, @02:02PM
Unfortunately they don't do "nothing". They have a *huge* infrastructure in place to support those videos. One of the existing competitors could step it up and compete with them, or less likely, a new one. Yes, it would take a really big investment to do it, as well as either payments by content producers and subscribers, or an ad platform. It wouldn't be easy, but it does happen.
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Sunday September 04 2016, @02:25PM
There are competitors, they just aren't as well known. For example, I've posted some videos on https://vid.me/ [vid.me] because in order to sign up and post a video on youtube, I was required to turn over my phone number which I'm not about to do. There's Vimeo of course too and probably a bunch of others.
The best way to get Youtube to walk back the policy would be if some big names started posted elsewhere. Doubt that happens though.
(Score: 3, Informative) by hemocyanin on Sunday September 04 2016, @02:27PM
Apparently, vid.me gets the opportunity: https://vid.me/KEnH [vid.me] "Give us your fucking profanity ..."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 04 2016, @04:48PM
I have posted videos on YouTube with no phone number. It may have to do with making an account on Google instead of doing it on YouTube, or other Google bullshit where they convince themselves you are a bot.
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Sunday September 04 2016, @06:16PM
I have too with a very old account for which I forgot the password. Last winter though, I tried making a new account to post a video and I was unable to get around the phone number thing. I probably could have if I tried harder, but it wasn't important enough to me - I just went elsewhere.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 05 2016, @09:31PM
There is no competition because look what happened to Megaupload when they tried to compete even though they didn't break any laws. and Veoah (the original, see https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20111220/11021717143/veoh-still-perfectly-legal-also-still-dead-due-to-bogus-copyright-lawsuit.shtml [techdirt.com] ).
(Score: 3, Insightful) by gnampff on Sunday September 04 2016, @09:37AM
"If YouTube starts cracking down on content for not being "ad-friendly" enough, it could hurt these middle-tier vloggers far worse than a more major figure like DeFranco."
It could only hurt them if their content is 'not "advertiser-friendly" or contained "graphic content," or "excessive strong language."' and if they are in it solely for the money. For the rest of them the world will keep turning at regular pace and nothing is changing.
It probably comes as a shock to people like this guy but there are people out there that just use YT as a distribution platform for creative/informational/useful/etc content. Content that they just wanted to get out there or that serves the purpose of advertising for (the skills of) the people that created the videos rather than the purpose of delivering a mildly entertaining filler between ads.
If I have to decide between providers of mildly entertaining fillers between ads and advertisers then my vote goes to advertisers. As much as I dislike ads I do see the necessity for them to keep the whole thing running. And I hate the spam videos of the big attention whores on YT a lot more than the occasional short ad.
Maybe that would change if YT stopped trying to direct me to oh so trending videos and people all the time when all I wanted to see is a talk/tutorial on some C++ template trickery or a speedrun from Awesome Games Done Quick.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 04 2016, @01:27PM
I post stuff onto YouTube and only have a few viewers who find it interesting. Few but still more than one. I don't go spamming links to videos to people who won't be interested. My target audience are the few who are interested in that sort of stuff. So I don't put unrelated/trending tags or fake titles or thumbnails or do the rest of the crap that makes youtube shittier (why is youtube search so crap though?).
In theory I'm eligible for monetisation but I'd probably only get a fraction of a cent every month, so I'm not going to bother putting in my real personal details to do so.
So guess who is paying for all that. The advertisers for other videos. Not mine. So if the advertisers truly aren't pleased with YouTube because of DeFranco then YT should care.
That said I find it peculiar that the advertisers would care. Or that all advertisers would care negatively. Youtube should just have multiple categories and market the category to advertisers accordingly. If they aren't doing that already, but if they are, why the fuck are they doing this?
(Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 04 2016, @01:54PM
YouTube is taking monetization from videos under the premise of “not advertiser friendly” and still running ads on the content, keeping all the money for themselves. [wordpress.com]
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Monday September 05 2016, @03:25AM
Thank you, I had wondered about this.
It occurs to me that one way to fight back is to remove, or at least make private, any demonetized video -- to eliminate chance viewers that have to be a good portion of Youtube's pay-per-ad revenue. Basically tell them -- we're fine with helping you make money so long as you help us make money in return. We're not fine with our content making you money but getting nothing in return.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by ledow on Sunday September 04 2016, @06:47PM
When people are giving you free money for putting up your videos, they get to make the rules on what they pay for and what they won't.
Nobody's stopping you putting up your own videostream. A site to handle a single stream for every 10,000 visitors isn't that hard to knock up. It'll cost you, though. That's the price that YouTube are paying for you and not telling you about. That's why they get to make the rules. And even if it did it, your views would PLUMMET overnight and you'd be lucky to pay for your server hosting.
These kinds of "vloggers" (yurk, really?) would be described by my grandfather as "not doing a real job". And yet they are expecting not only payment, but control of how that payment is sourced, and payment even from people who might be being bad-mouthed in their videos, or not want that kind of publicity at all (why would Disney, say, pay to be on an expletive-ridden video? It limits the audience of your ads, which limits the advertisers willing to touch you, which limits your monetisation of said advertisers).
Honestly, wish I could get thousands of pounds for making junk like this:
TASTE TESTING THE 6 NEW STARBUCKS FRAPS!
(Hilariously, one of his videos is called "The World Doesn't Owe You Anything")
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Sunday September 04 2016, @07:17PM
This is a related problem to the Internet Advertising problem. People thinking the Internet changes everything, including the requirement to actually conduct business. These guys are bloggers, text, audio or video it is the same thing. You are in the publishing content business. Unless you are subscription only you are principally in the advertising business. Yes you are. Outsourcing the whole business end to Google doesn't change that, it only makes you a bad businessman.
The purpose of advertising supported publishing is selling eyeballs to advertisers. Content is simply the bait to attract salable eyeballs. If you don't have a plan to convert those eyeballs into advertising revenue you are wasting your time and Google's money. If you aren't at least politically agreeable enough for them to not care about the money (yet) they are going to boot you off now. If you do not like that reality then tough, get out of the business and into another like directly paid content. This means publications on the Internet, exactly like print and broadcast, need to be expending at least as much effort on attracting advertisers and maintaining long term relationships with them and the middlemen who exist to broker the connection between advertisers and publishers as they put into their content. It means you need to get your ass off YouTube, stop using Doubleclick and the rest of Google's ad network. Yes that means a one man show is going to be very hard. It is going to be a JOB.
The other thing this development means is that the SJW Convergence at Google is happening at Internet speed instead of something that would normally take a generation, after the Founders are gone. The Impossibility of SJW Convergence means Google is going to get into cash flow trouble a lot faster than analysts think possible.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 04 2016, @07:35PM
Ah yes, good ol' J'Lo weighs in with a complicated analysis of ad supported business. Everything is done for money, what the fuck is wrong with artists and creative types eh?? /SARCASM
Obligatory SJW tie in at the end, very nice. Tool.
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Sunday September 04 2016, @11:30PM
what the fuck is wrong with artists and creative types eh??
Stereotypes are usually based in fact. The stereotype of the 'starving artist' is one of those. You either get really lucky and score a rich patron or two, you discover a way to monetize your art by finding an audience for it that is willing to pay or you live in a shitthole loft in a crappy part of town 'known for a vibrant indie art scene.' I.e. you are a starving artist. Or you do it a year or two, realize nobody cares about your 'art' and you will have to get a real job because ramen noodles every night gets old. Maybe do the art as a hobby.
(Score: 2) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Sunday September 04 2016, @07:38PM
I've said this many times, but the only way to win is not to play. If you go into someone else's walled garden, they're going to call the shots. Don't act surprised when they put a sawed-off shotgun in your face and pull both triggers. Wait, where did that metaphor come from? I'm scaring myself. We once had an open Internet where you could post whatever you wanted on Usenet without advertisers, shot-calling corporations, walled gardens, and so on, but people threw that away and ran to the corporations. So people who don't like this have no one to blame but themselves. Imagine if the open, decentralized Internet had grown from the mid-90s to today. It would be like a sawed-off shotgun pointed at - wait, no, it would be a decentralized, open place you wouldn't have to worry about these issues. Oh, wait, I get it. If you had an open Internet, YOU couldn't "monetize" your drivel on YouTube. When it's YOU who gets the money, the walled gardens are great. But when THEY step on your air hose, then it's a problem. How did that old expression go again about sowing the wind and reaping the monetized content whirlwind?
(E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Username on Sunday September 04 2016, @10:32PM
Vox, the goto website for SJWs, is now angry that the censorship they sponsored is now affecting SJWs.
(Score: 2) by Techwolf on Monday September 05 2016, @02:46PM
Google did it wrong. They just need to put the right tools on the advertisers. If the advertiser does not want non-family friendly videos on THERE ads, just click a checkbox. Some advertisers WANT there ads on racy, vile, disgusting, etc. videos due to they are marketing to that demographic.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 05 2016, @08:44PM
If the advertiser does not want non-family friendly videos on THERE ads, just click a checkbox. Some advertisers WANT there ads on racy, vile, disgusting, etc.
Once is a typo, twice points to functional illiteracy! Are you sure they want there ads to be their? Or do they want they're to be there ads on the their? We can't read you if you cannot spell. Vile, disgusting, edgy and just wrong spelling is not good for our advertisers, or, since we have none, for your fellow Soylentils.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 05 2016, @09:28PM
I still see advertisements on many political videos and videos full of swear words. Youtube better be paying the uploaders for those videos otherwise why should they have the ads unless they are simply taking all the revenue themselves.
Why should viewers have to suffer watching ads if the uploader isn't getting paid. At least if you remove the ads this could help the uploader get more views and they can then figure out themselves how they want to monetize their content (ie: working with advertisers more directly themselves, selling their own products, asking for donations, etc...).
We need to start looking out for videos with ads that aren't being monetized. It makes no sense for Youtube to put ads on those videos if they aren't receiving money and aren't paying the uploader. It wouldn't surprise me at all if Youtube is in fact doing that.