[Stevvo]

Roblox is not comparable to YouTube.

When you make a video and upload it to YouTube, that creation is entirely the result of your own hard work and ingenuity. YouTube doesn't need to exist for your video to exist.

When you make a game in Roblox, you are combining some amount of hard work and ingenuity of your own with a larger amount of hard work and ingenuity by Roblox Creation.

If you want to keep all the money, then you need to do all of the work.

[FemmeAndroid]

> If you want to keep all the money, then you need to do all of the work.

The person you're responding to isn't even talking about the cut. It's the threshold at which you may take money out of the ecosystem. Both YouTube and Roblox take a cut, but with Roblox, even after the cut, you need to have made a substantial amount of money before you can see a penny of it.

[endisneigh]

By your logic unless Roblox corporation created computers they shouldn’t keep all the money, either.

I’m not sure why anyone would defend a dollar amount above $1. If you have money in you should be able to get it out immediately IMO.

[jerf]

I expect it'll need to be higher than $1 because there's going to be some legal matters to deal with around paying the legally-minor creators any amount of money.

To be honest, when I think about it that way, you're not going to get that far under $1000 no matter what you do. There's tax forms at the very least, and probably extra stuff to do with dealing with minors, plus generalized legal risk of being sued or investigated anyhow... we need to be dealing with more than a few bucks here before it's worth Roblox's time & risk. Some of this is the cost of protecting minors, too.

[endisneigh]

I don’t see why the amount matters. It’s a solved problem. All of it can be aggregated and forms can be sent once at the end of the year. It’s not like this stuff has to be manually dealt with. Computers deal with virtually everything.

[jameshart]

You’re definitely undervaluing the raw video encoding, transmission and delivery framework YouTube brings to bear there. Sure, you made a video. But that’s not the same as having a player that works in multiple browsers, support for multiple streaming bitrates and codecs, optimized global distribution and caching.. and that’s all before we get to the discoverability, hosting and channel management features.

[Talanes]

But with a video you have the portability to take your content somewhere other than Youtube for the supporting infrastructure. Your Roblox game is much less portable.

[jacobr1]

> When you make a video and upload it to YouTube, that creation is entirely the result of your own hard work and ingenuity. YouTube doesn't need to exist for your video to exist.

YT probably does need to exist for many creators to get the kind of distribution that enables them to monetize their content including the operationally managing the scale of the site, the brand they've built and the ad network. A highly viewed piece of content is generally much more valuable than unseen content. Which isn't to say you can't monetize video outside of YT, just the YT is providing a very valuable service and it isn't clear to me that is qualitatively of less value than what Roblox provides its content creators.

[ashtonkem]

Also, YT content creators and the YT algorithm are clearly affecting each other in complex ways. The content created for YT is tailored to succeed on YT, and would obviously fail on any other platform with a different recommendation engine and community.

[ashtonkem]

I mean, it’s not like YouTube content creators made YouTube, by your logic YT shouldn’t be paying its content creators either.

In reality the relationship between these platforms and the creators is a necessary and mutually beneficial relationship. The exchange in value between these parties should be in a format useful to both sides: cash.

[fshbbdssbbgdd]

I’d guess that more engineer-hours have gone into making YouTube what is than Roblox. At least, if someone’s going to express a strong claim about that, they ought to supply some numbers and not just an assertion.