I think people are missing the forest for the trees here. Despite what the PR says, this has very little to do with the relationship between YouTube and creators, and everything to do with the relationship between YouTube and advertisers.

YouTube is renting out billboards at a music festival, and the advertisers, predictably, want to know who's playing. "Well, I dunno, like, whoever shows up" has proven to be an answer that they can't get away with. YouTube's negotiating position with advertisers depends on how they can position their package of advertising space. Right now they're trying to sell a big bundle of uncertain providence, with loads of little no-namers mixed in with the heavy hitters.

But what can YouTube do? If they split it up, they now have a gold package, a silver package, and a shit package. The rates for the shit package would be so bad that current YouTube revenue starts to look like winning the lottery. The smallest channels are subsidised by the bigger ones, not in terms of views but in terms of reputation. So if you need to improve the reputation of the group, what's left to do but drop the weakest performers?

If you're thinking "but that's totally illogical! Smaller channels collectively contribute an enormous number of very valuable advertising impressions", you're right, but making the same mistake YouTube did. The advertising industry isn't logical, it's 18 layers of ticket-clippers and con men playing telephone with money. It doesn't run on economically rational real-time bidding systems, it runs on trend-chasing and reputation. That other stuff is just to keep the nerds happy.

So, like in every other field Goophabet has entered, the techno-utopianism lasts right up until it hits the balance sheet. Party's over, folks. YouTube is an advertising company and now it's realising it has to act like one.

As one of the people whose channel is affected by this policy change, I have to say I am not happy. There are a few issues I have with their new policy:

1) They should not have made this change retroactive to channels. If you already met the criteria you should be grandfathered into the new program. To terminate monetization entirely gives me no incentive to continue with YouTube.

2) For niche channels, like my own, it can be easy to have the views but difficult to have the subscribers. These two should not be tied together for purposes of monetization.

3) The ones that seem to be causing the biggest headaches on YouTube lately are the bigger creators.

4) Finally, their email to me says that they made this decision based on discussions with creators like me. I would be hardpressed to find a creator "like me" that suggested this. Instead, I suspect, they reached out to the creators with the biggest say and decided to squash the little guys for greater visibility.

I am curious if they will continue to monetize my videos while not sharing the revenue with me or if they will remove ads entirely from my videos.

Great. /s

I published ONE video about how to easily fix a head-scratching computer hardware problem, because there isn't any other guide on it.

I get about 1000 views a month, tons of thank yous and make a few dollars.

Because I won't get 4000 hours of watch time[1], and nobody will subscribe, I'll get squat.

And zero motivation to publish more videos.

The next time I figure out a life-trick[2], I won't bother.

Who subscribes to videos about fixing stuff anyway?

[1] Don't you hate those videos that are 5x longer than necessary? WHY ENCOURAGE THAT?

[2] That fancy French mustard you bought? Don't bother with your hands. You'll need to use a corkscrew to open it.

A signed suicide note by YouTube. It's those peanuts that motivate actual content creators to post content and grow. This is the problem with "free and always will be", smh.

You get a centralized broker. In Google's case, between sellers and viewers, who are cast as buyers. This all happens under the shadow of "video content". Google feeds off of the creativity of everyone on YouTube, its own Hollywood. Then they decide who is worthy of reaping the rewards with their rules.

Something as simple as an organic comment promoting a product can actually drive real sales, and the John Doe that posts such a comment gets zilch. Why does he get nothing? Is it too difficult for Google to index all of John Doe's comments, crunch the impressions and counts and then give him the few dollars he would have accrued over the past few weeks? This should all just "work" without having to download Google Surveys, or whatever their community feedback/rewards app is.

If they can index the web, they can do some math on behalf of me and count me in their little MLM payouts equation ffs. /ranty This is the perfect move to put more YouTubers past the tipping point.

I just got an email that my channel will de-monetized by this. I thought it was pretty funny actually. There are all these huge content creators losing out on their livelihoods because of Google's unpredictable de-monetization behaviour, and then Google even decides to demonetize even my tiny channel with only a few videos (that are over 9 years old).

I turned on monetization a few years ago and I think I've made maybe $20 so far. For a while, I actually considered investing time in making more videos with the idea that the present value of a large number of videos might be pretty considerable over the long term (say 30 years or so).

A few years ago one of my most popular videos (tens of thousands of views) was flagged as being 'not family friendly'. The video was a screen capture of me scrolling through a notepad.exe list of documentary titles with no audio. It was just a list of nature/space documentaries that were already on YouTube. Nothing offensive or controversial.

I guess this is the final nail in the coffin for my YouTube career.

tl;dr: Unless you have 4000 hours of watch-time AND 1000 subscribers, you're getting axed from monetization.

1000 subscribers is going to be impossible if your content is niche.

That guy who put together that excellent 40 minute step-by-step video on fixing my garage-door opener (plastic gears, seriously?)... why would I subscribe?

Youtube is pivoting to being a TV-replacement.

Shitting on millions(?) of small creators in order to better please the big fish is short sighted. It risks shrinking the total pie of views, if 9 creators get axed will pewpewdie's views really go up 10x to cover the shortfall?

It reminds me of the time my bank canceled my credit card because I always back before any interest has accrued, I wasn't degenerate enough for them to make margins. Totally short sighted because, there is nothing to say I wouldn't need emergency cash tomorrow.

Likewise with youtube there is nothing to prevent todays small fry producing super engaging content tomorrow. After all, how does one get to the big time without going through mediocrity first?

Other video hosting platforms, such as the vimeo, suddenly got a lot more attractive.

It's not a grossly unreasonable move, but it doesn't exactly smack of creator-friendliness.

It does nothing to address the ongoing grievances of YouTubers about monetisation. At this stage, it seems like getting paid is a complete crapshoot. Sometimes your videos will be classified as "not suitable for most advertisers", despite not breaching any of YouTube's policies. Sometimes your video will be taken down or demonetized by a completely bogus copyright claim. Sometimes you'll get lucky and actually see some ad revenue for a video. If you've got a problem, you're stuck with the usual Google tech support system of "personally know someone who works at the Googleplex, otherwise you're SOL".

Pretty much every sane YouTuber is moving towards a Patreon-first business model and treating ad revenue as a bonus. If someone solves the discoverability problem for videos hosted on other platforms, YouTube are done. Do not pass go, do not collect $200, lose all of your content creators because you've treated them like criminals for years.

This really stings because you can't use cards unless you opt into the partner program. That's Youtube's mechanism for linking to an external site.

I had ads disabled on my Youtube channel but was forced into the partnership program just so I could link to my website in a card.

Now those cards are going to disappear which means it's extremely unlikely someone is going to find my site since it's only listed in the description. As a content provider this makes me less interested in using their platform.

I'm only at 2,000 hours watched and 366 subs which isn't remotely close to their new threshold considering those are life time stats. The 4,000 hours and 1,000 subs have to be less than 12 months old.

The weird thing is, the channels with the largest amount of subscribers are the ones who are the most risky to advertisers. I don't follow Youtube drama but didn't some kid recently video record a corpse with tens of millions of subscribers, and now advertisers are ripping into Youtube.

That one video from 1 person with tons of subs is responsible for more negative advertising press than hundreds of thousands of people with smaller channels.

I had some original content with over a million views from a decade ago. I now have other priorities and the language like

> Accordingly, this email serves as 30 days notice that your YouTube Partner Program terms are terminated.

feels like a pretty big fuck you.

My bet about how they are choosing the 1000 subs and 4000 hours watchtime criteria: it is about to get this number as tractable as possible, considering they will now manually review your channel prior to monetization. Even with their smart machine learning algorithm, they cannot scale beyond this number.

It is a little insincere to use the 99% of the channels number here. Vast majority of the channels from Youtube makes barely better than nothing because the long tail effect. What is actually interesting is, how many of the channels that previously make around a sizable chunk of money from Youtube, like say 1000 dollars, now will not qualify. I bet it won't be as harmless as Youtube want people to believe here, but they probably believe it is inevitable casualty.

What I find most interesting is that immediately the top comments on the post are all channel owners asking for subscriptions from other channel owners in exchange for subscribing back.

To be honest these new thresholds seem entirely too low to do any good. The spammers and scammers can easily reach the thresholds. But small scale operators who aren’t interested in gaming the system will be the hardest hit.

When is there going to be a legitimate YouTube contender? Seems like it's ripe for a replacement...

Vimeo's OTT is an interesting offering in this space that let's filmmakers launch their own subscription services. https://ott.vimeo.com

Someone (not me) is going to create a webservice to buy fake subscribers in the next hours/day, that's a guarantee :D It's not like creating a google account is exactly difficult ! Thank you Youtube for providing new markets for shady shops !

And now that I think about it, fake view time doesn't really seem difficult to put up either. The time is coming where you'll pay to have you video viewed so you can be payed to have your video viewed, looks a lot of fun :D

I pity all the animators publishing short content since they are going to have a problem get the number of hours in when they spend the time on quality product.

This is why I am excited for competitors like Linus Tech Tips' floatplane to start getting traction. YouTube seems to be turning into more of a behemoth that doesn't care for the little guys every day.

As a smalll Youtuber, I am appalled and shocked. Google is shooting themselves in the foot with this. This is killing the small creators. Google is chasing short term profit over long term stability. I guarantee you, a smart startup will try to upset YouTube and succeed due to this new rule. Everyone started from the bottom. And now Google is sinking them.

I don't have many videos on my channel. There is a couple of "niche" videos with ~70k+ views. And I'm going to delete them all. This is my protest. RIP youtube.

Anyone with small channels, remember that you can turn off ALL ads for your videos (under Channel -> Advanced) if you're not going to get your cut, as small as it may have been. Surely that option will also be taken away eventually, but for now it's still there.

So, will they also be screening the legitimacy of subscribers and watchers in those 12 month?

The first thing that came to my mind is that I can't imagine it is terribly difficult to purchase bot subscriptions. Their policy changes to focus on relevant watched hours in a set amount of time could, and probably will, open new demand for purchasing illegitimate traffic as well. Same game, different rules.

I wonder if this policy will be easier to spoof than pure views alone? Surely the risk has been evaluated by the policy makers but I am interested to see how things pan out, and what counter measures against bots/spam they may take as a result.

There's nothing in here that addresses problems of content creators. It's a list of things that YouTube is doing to protect itself. I guess it's nice that they are sharing the information though?

I think some folk are missing the point that some small publishers do derive a benefit from putting up a video, even if they don't get cash from Google ads. They gain a reputation, perhaps enquiries about their business, collaboration opportunities etc etc. If I was running a smaller channel with cool content, I would definitely start hunting around for partnerships, and start marketing my own business/money source more aggressively if I could. A YT channel can even be a big benefit to a resume, no?

Everyone's talking about how this is bad for small channels, but surely this is a big hit to YouTube itself as well.

Since they've decided they need to vet all channels before ads are shown, and they can't do that to every channel, they've had to set an arbitrary view/subscriber limit. But now they're going to lose out on ad revenue for millions of previously-monetised videos, while still having to host them for free.

Youtube is run by idiots. What they needed is to create their own Patreon clone/gift system (like Twitch did, for example) and open it to all the users. Bang, no more ads needed! Even if big advertisers don't like some channel's content, both youtube and the creator are still getting money off it, as long as fans are willing to support the creator.

>) For niche channels, like my own, it can be easy to have the views but difficult to have the subscribers. These two should not be tied together for purposes of monetization.

I completely agree.

I've saved hundreds of dollars [and time] on car maintenance/repairs and plumbing by watching some guy or gal on youtube with very specific information (for a given make/model/year) for example.

I hope these kinds of instructional videos get a reprieve because many many people use them and save tons of money and time [finding manuals and reading them is arduous].

This could be a terrible loss for some audiences as well as the creators who get compensated, slim as it may be.

> 3) The ones that seem to be causing the biggest headaches on YouTube lately are the bigger creators.

You're probably referring to the recent events where well-known youtubers have published questionable content and causing an outrage.

But I think this is about the low-quality spammers and copycat content farms that create videos automatically or semi-automatically or just otherwise with low effort, and aggressively optimize using analytics. To make matters worse, a lot of these target children and some of these have even been approved to the "for children" category.

Even though the outrage hasn't been as loud in the media (but there has been some discussion about it), I think it's a much bigger issue for them than a few high profile makers publishing questionable content.

From their point of view, the spam accounts are impossible to distinguish from individuals who have just a few videos or are just getting started. If they allow monetization with no barrier to entry, there will be spam content.

I'm not sure what other alternatives they would have, apart from manually vetting each and every account eligible for monetization.

I do understand that this is a pain in the ass for niche content production. I've been considering starting some niche video production too (I enjoy activities that others enjoy watching) but now it looks like it would take 6-12 months (at least) to get to the point where you could make a dime. For me, this would mean non-trivial time and money investment in equipment. I wouldn't do it to make money, but I don't want to be spending money with not hope of getting any back either.

> 3) The ones that seem to be causing the biggest headaches on YouTube lately are the bigger creators.

Not quite:

* Paying for views/subs is a huge issue. The lifetime view count makes it so that you only need to pay once to reap the benefits of YPP. Making the requirement continuous gives less financial incentive.

* Elsagate and content aimed at children was a smaller but frequent controversy last year. I’m guessing they need more time/resources to vet that content and slow down the rate that spammers and low-effort content providers try to game the system.

> The ones that seem to be causing the biggest headaches on YouTube lately are the bigger creators.

This is a great observation. They're punishing the small, niche channels for the terrible shit pulled by the huge channels, with Logan Paul just being the most recent and which is probably the precipitating event here.

YouTube doesn't understand or care about the true underlying value of its platform, let alone its potential. And they continue to make bad choices to steer it in entirely the wrong direction. It could be a powerhouse but they keep screwing it up. This is all part and parcel of google/alphabet being horrendously bad at product management and customer interactions.

Leave youtube, start your own business? Do Patreon or something. Seriously, we need to cut down our dependence on big tech. They've been taking advantage of us for too long.

I don't get the views/subscriber criteria at all. If the changes are to "protect the community", why worry about number of views or number of subs? And not only they made it important, they made it the first pre-requisite to even consider your channel!

What’s your channel? I found a Jeff Mould but it was just junk video of burning houses.

If you post a link we can see the sort of content they’re cutting out.

Have you seen the comments on the blog post? The firsts are all about asking people to suscribe to their channel, possibly with subing back.

Edit: Well, all the comments are asking for suscribers.

What's the motivation here then? To stop paying money to one-hit wonders and funnel it only to the professional/serious content producers? I don't really understand why that'd be necessary.

Youtube makes some strange choices with their monetization. I really wonder why they are so obsessed with finely controlling who can profit from producing good content on their platform. Why not let a) the users and b) the advertisers decide this? Who is losing out here, absent their preemptive interventions?

If they keep this up it might highly incentivize a decentralized video platform with a built-in monetization scheme.

I doubt that your video is making Youtube any money with a 1000 views a month on a niche subject. Yet they let you stay on their platform, for free.

Most videos like yours aren't made to make $2 extra each month, they're made because people wanted to share the information. Youtube provides a platform, allowing people to distribute videos, for free. The most prolific content producers are given a cut of the profit, or make their advertising deals.

>The next time I figure out a life-trick[2], I won't bother.

Your motivation for uploading that one video was money? Just wondering, because if that was the case I'd expect you to have more than one video.

And 1000 views a month is nothing. Certainly not enough to expect any kind of worthwhile revenue.

"Don't you hate those videos that are 5x longer than necessary? WHY ENCOURAGE THAT?"

From googles perspective it's because they don't care about the user, and are cowtowing to the advertisers. Longer videos mean more ads, which means more $$$.

I wish google had never bought youtube... I knew they would ruin it eventually.

I think the real discussion here though is more meta than just google... we have allowed advertisers to gain way too much power on the internet, and if we aren't careful they will ruin us just like they did newspapers.

This isn't just advertisers though, this is the general business model of internet companies. Here is the pattern:

1) Create cool new thing, with no ads, no tracking. Users love it and it spreads like wildfire.

2) Slowly boil the frog. Start tracking users and selling user data to third parties, justified under esoteric EULAs and TOS. Start small, unobtrusive ads.

3) Make the ads more prominent, more frequent, and harder to skip/ignore.

4) Allow your platform to be used as a corporate promotion tool that's more like sockpuppet central than regular advertising. Bots talking to bots, subtle corporate products in memes, etc.

5) Now that you have completely aliented the userbase, now is the time to ramp up all of the above and then go public, ride the boom wave up, and at peak sell a massively overvalued company to some dumbass group/company/people, run away with the cash, and take video of your product as it burns to the ground.

The users will stick around until someone else starts at 1 and does the same thing but under a different name.

> And zero motivation to publish more videos.

Why not? You're posting on HN without financial reward.

> Who subscribes to videos about fixing stuff anyway?

Me. I subscribed to a few DIY home repair channels, plus a channel on modding a Mark7 Golf R.

>This is the perfect move to put more YouTubers past the tipping point.

YouTube is dead for the ______th time. Now YouTubers will finally move to ______ with monetization strategy _______ and we will enter the golden age of online video.

I agree with the other (downvoted) poster - YouTube has no where to go. They literally have no competition, and bled billions of dollars for years to get where they are today. No one is lining up bleed money on user generated content like Google did.

If you think creators should be compensated for the work they put out anymore than YouTube is doing, then build that platform. Until then no other platform has come close to actually writing checks to actual creators - even Facebook has seemingly decided to not touch that landmine with a 50ft pole - and they were supposed to "dethrone" YouTube with their billions of minutes watched.

It's amazing people think that YouTube is screwing over creators when no other platform has even come close to what YouTube is doing at scale. Facebook/Twitter - heck even most ad networks give you zilch for putting content online.

YouTube isn't just deciding who reaps the rewards, their the only content platform sharing the rewards.

> Something as simple as an organic comment promoting a product can actually drive real sales, and the John Doe that posts such a comment gets zilch.

Of course, if you incentivise this, you destroy comments entirely as they fill with people pretending to be organic product recommendation.

I (and I think quite a lot of other people) devalue information when someone has been paid to bring that recommendation to us, because it's in their interest and not ours.

>A signed suicide note by YouTube.

It's difficult to take your comment seriously when your opening line contains so much fail. YouTube isn't going anywhere but up. It has no rival and never will.

This is why one should not entrust their livelihood to any company. I'm a fan of the Patreon model. If I was starting a video publishing enterprise (say something like Primitive Technology or Computerphile or a music band channel) I'd definitely use all the most popular subscription services available, and a newsletter & blog with proper RSS. I'd upload to YouTube to drive viewers, than take them to my blog, show them where else I upload stuff and where to pay to take active part in the community, which allows for pre-releases or access to live programs after some videos where they can ask questions. I'd earn less than PewDiePie, but nobody would be able to challenge my enterprise. Though certainly to earn with such model, you need to be publishing high quality stuff (or of a quality too low for the decent peope), that is, high quality content.

Never was, and probably won't be there for a long time.

If you wish to compete with Youtube, consider a feature match of the followings:

1. Fast streaming, everywhere, on phones and browsers.

2. Super High resolution videos.

3. Huge content reserves.

4. Good search and discovery experience.

5. The ability to battle spams and handle external copyright claim to avoid lawsuit.

6. Robust ad platform and sales and the infrastructure to sustain operations.

Youtube has achieved this because they are part of Google, they enjoy all kinds of technological advantage: Storage/Serving/Spam filtering/Video encoding/Machine Learning, and years and years of accumulation of data, losing billions of dollars while getting constant cash injection from Google.

It is hard to replicate Youtube, heck, even Chinese doesn't succeed to copy one of their own. None of the video streaming websites in China is exactly the model of Youtube.

Is YouTube even profitable? Even if they are, it seems like the only reason cost could be "reasonable" is because they piggy back off of being Google scale (co-location, negotiated bandwidth rates, global network of self-hosted data centers). Not to mention the network and aggregate effects of having an existing ad market and user profiles for targeting ads.

One could probably mitigate high operating costs by charging for the service or limiting who can post on the site. But I think these two factors greatly contribute to YouTube's monopoly status.

The closest I can think of is Vimeo, but they've concentrated more on highly edited, niche, even arthouse style video. I don't know much about their technical equivalence with respect to performance because I don't find any videos on there I'd like to watch.

Twitch has been attempting to compete in the video game space by adding uploads and comment systems on videos, but Twitch has its share of problems such as a haphazard dashboard and a terribly designed mobile app.

Vid.me was around for a while but recently shut down.

It's not a very competitive space imo.

There are a million better options for video hosting. The problem is discoverability - YouTube's search box and recommendations bar have a near-monopoly on discovering new video creators. If you're not on YouTube, you'll have a huge uphill struggle to build an audience. It doesn't help that Google also have a near-monopoly on search, so they can strangle traffic to any competing service through opaque algorithm tweaks.

Someone please do this. (You'll probably need a lot of money.)

In the meantime, download anything you enjoy today, because it may not be there tomorrow.

wait, so I need to navigate away from youtube to watch some highly niche content? This is what people on youtube thinks and the perceived opportunity cost is not enough to force people to switch....unless its content that is downright banned on youtube

Basically niche videos will just be replaced by other people who will find ways to monetize it...or not even motivated by money at all but just to put content out there and for people to enjoy.

So far, all the comments on HN are about how they won't get paid, they will be replaced by people who do it without monetary rewards or saavy enough to monetize through external revenue sources.