I have a family Premium subscription. I'm sad this can not be the default YouTube experience for everybody as every time I see someone watching YT without a sub I do not understand how they can tolerate the barrage of advertising.
Surely this attention economy model must be a loss for humanity as a whole, no?
Interesting. Can you elaborate? Last I heard creator revenue is a direct result of total ad views. A quick google search would seem to confirm this is still the case.
It's much less direct than it used to be. The raw revenue from advertising sharply declined, any of your videos will be "demonitized" by an opaque black box "algorithm" that seems to have no actual rules, and the other half of your advertising money gets rerouted to nintendo because you showed mario for ten seconds or to some weird fly by night company that claims to be the rightful copyright owner of white noise and actual silence.
Oh, and if you don't keep up with stupid recommendation algorithm updates, which change how things work seemingly on a whim, youtube will decide you don't have a competitive click through rate for your spammy, clickbaity thumbnails, and just stop showing your videos to people so that your viewership and revenue hits the floor.
I think he is talking about other revenue streams that most large creators use. Such as ads the creators place in their own videos, merchandise, and direct payments (Patreon, subscribe star, etc).
This is reasonable. However, I don't like being forced to also pay for their music streaming service because I already pay for (and prefer) a different service.
If you watch a lot of youtube video's it's worth it for just the ad-free experience alone. I actually did some math a while back and figured out based on my hourly bill rate that it's technically costing me money to not pay for YT premium (that is the time spent watching ads times my bill rate was greater than the monthly subscription cost).
If I only watched YT on the browser sure. But I mainly get it so I can go without ads on mobile and on my TV. Yes I know there are apps like Vanced but I personally find it worth it not have to always look for workarounds.
I don't care about YouTube getting paid, but apparently YT Premium is lucrative for the creators (in comparison to ads). It's a very cheap way to support the people who make the content that you enjoy.
You're not really, it just doesn't cost YouTube any more in terms of licensing the music for their music streaming service than it does to clear the rights for YouTube Premium, so they literally may as well include it.
A YouTube Premium lite is available in a few territories, but where it isn't that's because the music situation means it could cost single cents a month less than the full service and therefore isn't worth doing.
Why? Because its probably the largest video hosting website by multiple orders of magnitude?
And you still hasn't given me a straight answer.
Let's say YOU are Youtube, and you are trying to be an honest businessman (while staying alive).
What would you do?
1. Turn it into a fully paid service. Which means you will probably never take off and some other guy will create an ((((free)))) alternative like Youtube.
2. Free service with premium features but people apparently don't like it because they feel like they are missing out.
I personally prefer 1 because that would remove 99% of the shitty videos that plague the website.
I was saddened when I saw that people don't share my sentiment.
That was the one moment where people have the opportunity to say "yes, let us pay you and you give us a direct and simple service".
I easily "watch" around 12 hours of HD Youtube videos counting all the music in the background that I listen to. It is _definitely_ worth the premium price.
I think the right question is: are they free cash flow-positive? I don't know the numbers off the top of my head. "Operating at a loss" means different things to different people.
Profit is an irrelevant metric for a company like YT that would reinvest every dollar of FCF into growth. (See Amazon for the well-fleshed out reasoning as to why this is so.)
I guess hulitu meant to say "very, very aggressive compression with rather noticeable artifacts and banding which are hard to ignore even for a layman"
I have some 444 10 bit progressive files, you could argue that the mere act of sampling an analog domain is lossy, but if you accept a typical YUV422 as being non-lossy then I have a fair amount.
But yes you're right that typically video today will be stored in the 150-250mbit range which is lossy.
I imagine a typical youtuber will then compress that again out of their video editor to something like a 20mbit long-gop file and upload to youtube/vimeo. That platform then takes the original upload and makes a dozen or so versions and different frame sizes, bitrates and codecs to cater for different consumers
> Income from premium is distributed by your watchtime. YouTube takes a portion of your monthly fee and divides it between the videos you watched. You watch only a single creator, that creator will get all of it. You watch only few videos, those videos will earn a larger chunk each. You watch hundreds of videos, each video will only earn a small amount. You pay a lot for premium, more will be paid to creators. You use a vpn to buy premium from india or so, only a fraction of that payment will be distributed accordingly.
> If you are not using premium creators get paid from advertisements that are actually watched. So either you have to watch the full advertisement, if it is shorter than 30 seconds, or at least 30 seconds from a longer advertisement, before you skip it. Skipping an advertisement after 5 - 29 seconds means no payout to the creator.
IIRC, premium was a large part of the reason behind those wacky auto-generated kids streams that was in the news a couple years ago. Parents don't want their kids watching ads, so a good number of kids have premium accounts. Premium pays a lot better than ads, so targeting kids can be quite lucrative.
Surely this attention economy model must be a loss for humanity as a whole, no?