| I can't believe I'm going to defend YouTube here, but I don't agree with this. YouTube Red/ads, and sponsored content in the creator's videos are totally separate things, and should stay separate things. I'm not a creator myself but I've done some research on the idea and there are basically three ways to make anything like decent money with a YouTube channel, in increasing likelihood of success: 1) Get stunningly popular over a short period of time, a.k.a. Go Viral. This is almost entirely down to luck, so is not a strategy for normal people having a serious go at it. 2) Accept (and generally beg for) donations from subscribers via Patreon or similar. Optionally, lock up some percentage of your videos behind a subscription via Patreon or similar. This only works well if you can generate a significant following that will not also abandon you the instant you decide to start monetizing things. 3) Product placements and sponsored content. Typically this means accepting a significant chunk of change in exchange for a 3-4 minute ad for a VPN or some crap smack-dab in the middle of your video. Notice that nowhere in this list is "rake in the cash from YouTube ads" because there is no such thing. Yes, YouTube pays creators _something_ for ads, but unless you are the top video creator in your broad field (e.g. LTT -> computers), you are never going to be able to live off it. (And we'll put aside the difficulties that content creators regularly encounter with monetizing their videos through YouTube ads, due to bogus copyright claims, and false positives from the AI thinking it heard something politically incorrect. And to be clear, YouTube will still show ads in demonetized videos, it just keeps the ad revenue to itself in those cases.) So if you are paying for YouTube Red, you are REALLY only paying YouTube, not content creators. This is why most semi-serious content creators go with either the donation or sponsorship model. You may wish to know about Sponsorblock, a browser extension that clips out sponsored segments. It only works if at least a few people have marked the sponsored sections before you watched the video. It works a lot better than it has any right to. |