[ChuckMcM]

Do you ever think about the fact that if you're making $500 - $1000 per video on average that means Google is making $5000 - $10,000 on each of your videos on average? I mean its working for you, and that's great. I am a student of information asymmetric markets and the whole 'Ad supported' business that Google runs on all of its properties is perhaps the largest one in the current time frame.

The point being that building a production company to produce videos is a known thing, Peertube is a distribution network, and historically this is a remarkable mirror of 'independent' theaters and 'studio owned' theaters. It was a characteristic of that time that the big studios would use their monoply power to force small studios to give them their work at a discount that allowed the studio to get most of the income. They made it just enough that the small studios didn't feel motivated to build a competitive system.

When I read your comment it struck me that perhaps "$500 - $1000 average per video" was the number Google has determined to be 'just enough'.

[TechSquidTV]

Google splits with the creator 50-50. If you got paid $1000, so did Google. And given their hosting infrastructure, network, and other tools, I would say it's a miracle they don't charge to upload.

[PakG1]

Not a miracle if the math works out such that their margins cover the infrastructural fixed costs. Just simple economics.

[ShinyLeftPad]

You clearly don't work in AI:)

[IncreasePosts]

What Google makes is irrelevant to the content prouducer. What matters to them is what they could make on alternate platforms, and the answer is no where near that amount. The slice Google keeps is only relevant to Google and potential competitors who may try to move into the space.

[ChuckMcM]

> What Google makes is irrelevant to the content producer.

Is it though? Let's say I weave a basket out of reeds I've spent the weekend picking from the shores of a local creek. I take the basket to a guy who pays me $20 for it. Then that same guy takes it to a swap meet that he runs in town and sells it for $200.

That's just market economics, until you try to set up your own smaller swap meet on the route to this guys market and sell your baskets there, and this guy calls the police and has them shut down your "illegal swap meet." So you go to city hall for a permit and they say, "We don't sell permits unless you can prove that at least 1,000 people will go to your swap meet and every week you'll have at least 10 new products to show." See where I'm going with that?

Asymmetric markets are ones where a single individual or small group of individuals can exercise control over the entire operation of the market. You can think of then as nascent monopolies or perhaps price fixing cartels. In the US, after experiencing the Great Depression, as a result of unregulated markets, the US made it government policy to regulate market abuses as no single participant (or even a set of participants) could hope to compete with the monopoly or cartel.

Information markets, or non-real property markets like video content, did an end run around controls in an effort to capture the value that is associated with a product you can manufacture instances of for pennies, but sell for dollars. Games, Office processing suites, Videos, Musical recordings, can all be "sold" for 100 to 1000x the cost to produce them. It is an area that is under studied in my opinion.

[IncreasePosts]

What's preventing anyone from trying to launch a YouTube competitor? Or content producers monetizing and hosting their own videos?

[ChuckMcM]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Google_LLC_(2...

[purpleflashing]

There platforms like this. I subscribe to Nebula, for example.

[ShinyLeftPad]

It says "at least"... on many channels there's videos with just a few views and videos with tons of views with much more than 10x difference

[ChuckMcM]

That's fair, Google admitted in the DoJ trial where it was convicted of being a monopolist that the revenues that it paid out were roughly 10% of the revenues it collected. If you have fewer than a requisite number of subscribers they keep 100% of the monetization proceeds. I was simply struck by the parallels between the way YouTube has grown up and how the whole movie industry grew up.

[Ferret7446]

Because Google is losing money for those videos, they're collecting 100% of the revenue and shouldering 100% of the costs and 100% of the net loss. Perhaps they should split the net loss 50-50 with those users, but then no one would use YouTube.

[Scoundreller]

Goog’s monetization requirements make no sense: requiring regular posting of new videos costs them money. You have people posting crap just to keep their monetization active.

More subscribers to a channel doesn’t save Google money at all.

Requiring X hours of views encourages posting longer videos, which costs them more to store and process.

[earth-tattoo]

They just want more content. They don't care about quality - the algorithm does a good job of sifting through all the content to find the good quality content. The definition of good quality being something that generates more money and keeps more eyes fixed to the screen!

[ShinyLeftPad]

Wow, how many subscribers does one need to have?

[AlienRobot]

1000 subscribers, 4000 hours in the last 12 months, and you must have uploaded 3 videos I think in the last 3 months to be allowed to apply for monetization.

There is a different requirement if you only post shorts.

[Scoundreller]

Also worth pointing out that they’ve demonetized people after meeting the old monetization requirements and then not meeting their new requirements. No grandfathering.

I shed a tear (and subscribe) when I encounter an incredibly useful video but they have “only” a few hundred subs.