this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2023
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Unpopular opinion: They should've just started charging big creators, kind of like Vimeo. Mofos be having youtube ads, sponsorships, built-in ads, courses, merch stores and patreon, and then they whine when youtube wants them to comply with advertiser's demands.
YT Creators get paid a share of ad revenue and that is what funds their channel. Charging them would just kill a lot of channels.
That's ignoring the first part of his comment though. He said the ones that have merch stores and patreon pages. Not just getting YT money.
That's not accurate, they didn't say "charge creators who have their own sponsorships and merch stores" he said it as two separate statements "Charge creators" and "They have sponsorships and merch stores."
While we're on the topic, YT does already penalize people for videos that contain advertisements and have in the past put strikes videos that link to crowdfunding pages. Monetary fines for the larger pages might make sense, but idk how profitable it would be, especially if it gets contested in courts and adds legal fees.
It would make sense to charge some channels for being on the platform. A good example in my feed is Banks Power. They make their money selling turbos and other stuff to WT. Then they come to YT and build brand precense basically for free. YT deserves some of the money generated from being a cheap advertising platform imo.
So we're thinking some sort of self reported income bracket? Or maybe if the channel gets deemed as a primarily advertisement channel? How do you define it in a way that doesn't negatively impact the good actors and entertainers?
Right it would be hard to implement. It's just one of the types of channels I don't think should be getting income from ads because it is an ad. Realistically it's much easier to not bother making more rules that are expensive to implement.
That's completely true for smaller creators, but YouTube is more than just people who rely on adsense for the livelihood. I don't think Jimmy Kimmel or Taylor Swift would miss a few dollars, even a few hundred, a month to be on the platform.
So how do you implement it?
Good. It's the same for me as regular businessee: if you can't make a profit while don't breaking the law, you shouldn't make business.
It's already regular business, they aren't breaking any laws by running a channel and getting ad revenue...
Here are a couple argument why it shouldn't be legal:
Patreon: In the real world, you can't just give money to a business for nothing, there has to be some kind of value exchange. Patreon probably has some bullshit in their TOS that you're not actually donating, but buying some "perks", but that's not what a lot of youtuber's convey in their messages. To accept donations the "right" way, they would have to register a non-profit entity, then they'd have to publicly report exactly how much they received and spent, from where and on what. If they also do ads they'd have to also have a separate for-profit entity, and overall they'd have to be very careful with how they use the money as the non-profits can't just give money away either. None of the youtubers I've seen actually do this.
Ad integrations: It should definitely be against Youtube's TOS to have ads inside the video (and possible other sponsored deals), because most major channels can easily find their own funding, disable google's ads and use their infrastructure without paying squat. And if they don't, by doing advertisement themselves they're still Google's competitors, as you can't shove infinite amount of ads in a video - the viewer's patience is limited and they tend to either leave the platform or set up ad-blockers, both of which cut into Google's revenue. So what I meant by "charging creators" initially, was some kind of deal among the lines of "If your video reaches 100.000 views, you owe us $0.10 per 1000 views over that, unless your video has ads enabled and not demonetized" or something like that.
You absolutely can give people money for nothing, and the receiver pays taxes on the amounts unless they fall under specific circumstances such as charity organization.
You have to select that your video contains advertisements during the upload process. Failure can result in a channel strike, and three strikes can lead to channel deletion (which can result in a huge monetary loss for the channel owners).
How well did that work out for Vimeo?
Charging the people to create the content you sell is downright dumb.
Works well enough that it's still one of the major video hosting platforms.
The part you miss is "you sell" part. Unlike youtube, where it solves both monetization and content delivery for you, Vimeo, AFAIK, doesn't do any monetization and focuses enterely on content delivery. You pay for the service, and how you monetize the content is entirely up to you. May be the ad deal with NORD SHADOW MANSCAPED, may be donations. Or, the video may be promoting your own business, which seems to be the most common use case - as a business you don't want a competitor's ad on a video which purpose is to promote your own.
Only fans really doing terrible rn you're right
Idk if that would be a good business decision. They would want it to be free and easy to start a channel still, so it would mean once your channel gets to a certain popularity google makes the deal progressively worse. This would create a big incentive for competition if all your biggest content creators are suddenly paying over cost to subsidize smaller channels.
Not that this would be a bad thing, but I don’t see why google would ever want to risk it.
Is this really an unpopular opinion?