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by Mirioron 2625 days ago
But do those video streaming sites offer comparable quality to YouTube, while also giving away half of the ad revenue they receive? Because YouTube does that. If it didn't give away half of the ad revenue to creators then YouTube would probably never have become as big as it is now.

We know that YouTube has trouble making money with this type of criteria. What do you think is the chance that another company with far less economies of scale will somehow make it work better?

1 comments

Youtube is so capricious with demonetizing user content that it's become a meme, and content creators have to resort to merchandise and Patreon to survive. They're definitely not giving away anywhere near half of their ad revenue.
YouTube takes 45% of the ad revenue in a video, the creator of it takes 55%. If a video is demonetized then it won't have ads on it. This means that YouTube won't make any money on that video. It's in YouTube's best interests not to demonetize videos. They do it, because they want to avoid bad PR and avoid advertisers from doing yet another boycott.

I don't see how YouTube is not giving away half of their ad revenue. Note that even when a video is "unsuitable for advertisers" the creators still get paid by YouTube Red.

They do it, because they want to avoid bad PR and avoid advertisers from doing yet another boycott.

A part of YouTube has been captured by activists, and a lot of that policy is warped to their ends. Often, this is political. Often, it's arbitrary abuse of power in service of this or that "Internet slap fight." Either way, it's looks bad to someone who can see the big picture.

> Youtube is so capricious with demonetizing user content that it's become a meme,

Yeah, and this meme is absurd. In what other ad business are advertisers obligated to pay you? Normally when you are trying to sell ads, you have to have a sales team to try to get advertisers to pay you, and it's a constant effort. Creators do not have a right to monetization. If they want monetization, nothing is stopping them from finding their own advertisers and striking their own deals (many creators do exactly this).