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YouTube is about to get a lot spammier as changes to the YouTube Partner Program are set to reward channels that can produce a regular stream of click bait trash at the expense of niche channels producing videos of lasting value.
Channels currently in the program will need to meet new thresholds of 1000 subscribers and 4000 hours watched over the past year as of February 20 or get kicked out. This affects my channel as well. I started that in 2010 and have mainly posted coffee related videos such as How to Develop a Roast Profile. In the years since then I've heard from people who have used what they've learned in my videos to advance their careers in coffee, to improve their businesses, and to make their coffee better. I can't go to trade events, even ones on the other side of the globe, without being recognized from my channel.
Still, that doesn't always translate to view time. Last year I put together a weekly series of 1 minute videos. I got a lot of positive email response to the series, but it tanked my average view duration with the result that total view time for the months last year correlated negatively with new videos uploaded. The result is that I'm suddenly expected to drum up double the view time for a good month without much warning to avoid getting kicked out of YPP.
While I'm certainly concerned about my own channel, this is hitting a lot of niche educational channels that either have the view time but not the subscriber count or the subscribers without the view time. It's hitting animators who put in a huge amount of work for short pieces. It is leaving untouched the real "bad actors" at the root of YouTube's PR problems. And it is showing that YouTube does not value the huge number of small channels that make YouTube a site worth visiting on the Internet.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday February 01 2018, @02:22AM (3 children)
So what was the old standard for being in the program? Is there a plan B, if you can't stay in the program?
(Score: 2) by N3Roaster on Thursday February 01 2018, @03:56AM (2 children)
The old requirement was 10K views over the life of the channel so once you're in, you're in unless you break the rules. That last bit apparently didn't apply in practice to especially popular channels, which frankly has more to do with the problems they've been having lately than most of the accounts getting hit with this bs. I've been getting over that every year since 2012. These days I get over 60K views per year. Had this been pulled late 2016/early 2017 I'd have the minutes, but the short videos uploaded last year (following guidance from YouTube to not make videos longer than needed to get the point across) took a serious bite out of my overall minutes watched.
As for plan B, HTML video seems to be pretty well supported these days. 6-8K video views per month isn't really all that much, especially if most people go for lower resolution versions. I might experiment with just hosting new stuff on my own server where I don't have to worry about bad actors who fraudulently reject all ContentID appeals without consequence (YouTube doesn't kick them out so there's a financial incentive to be dishonest there), I don't have to worry about machine learning algorithms deciding that a video isn't "advertiser friendly" (the false positive rate here is so idiotically high that this should never have been let out in public), and I don't have to worry about whatever nonsense they pull next (and who knows, maybe I could get that site approved for AdSense to help cover CPU/storage/transfer costs). For longer form stuff, Amazon Video Direct has a much smaller reach (nobody searches for random educational stuff there) but at least they pay me every month.
Typica - Free software for coffee roasting professionals. [typica.us]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 01 2018, @10:09AM (1 child)
Thoughts on bitcute?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 05 2018, @09:47PM
Did you mean BitChute/SpkOut [bitchute.com]?
Very interesting. Thanks for the pointer. I've been looking for a youtube alternative for some time now. (I don't make videos, but Alphabet DBA Google DBA YouTube is obviously trying to make it a platform for drivel and propaganda in preparation for World War 3.)
(Score: 2) by realDonaldTrump on Thursday February 01 2018, @08:47PM
I call it foolish thinking. The YouTube people aren't in business so you can make money. They're in business so they can make money. They're trying to keep more money for themselves. And they'll have a great quarter, very big profits for the quarter. But it's going to blow up in their faces. Because so many of the best videos are from people trying to make money off the video itself. And maybe they won't take down their old videos. But they'll stop putting up new ones. And let me tell you, something that was interesting, something that was funny, something that was smart a year ago -- or in 2016 -- nobody wants to watch it any more. Birth of a Nation, it was huge in its time. But have you seen it? Nobody watches it any more. Not nobody, there's a few. But you say to a lady, "let's make a date, let's watch Birth of a Nation," she'll think you're crazy, she's gonna tell you "no." It's very old, it's Black & White, the young people don't want to look at it. They don't want to see Black & White. And they're not gonna want to look at YouTube because it's gonna be full of very old videos.
But let me tell you something, there are so many people working in Social Media. And you can hire them to do anything you want. Anything. You want someone to open 1,000 accounts and watch your videos for 4,000 hours? There's folks who will do it. For a price, they drop to their knees and do whatever you say. It's a pretty picture. It's a beautiful picture. Believe me.
And there's Twitter. You watch videos on Twitter, right? Everybody does. The folks at YouTube, maybe they don't know, they're not the only game in town. People can just put their videos on Twitter. I love Twitter. Because they pay big money, they call it Twitter Amplify. And they pay 70 percent of the money from the ads. Which is a lot more than YouTube gives. They don't let everyone do it. You have to be one of their favorite people. But remember what I said about Social Media. In business, a good suit opens many doors, you find yourself a good tailor. And he makes you look amazing, you have a lot of success. And Social Media is the same. You can hire someone to make your Twitter account look amazing.