adpocalypse [UPDATE] YouTube is tightening rules of monetization further - requires 4000 hours of annual viewing & 1000 subscribers, humans will now review videos

[captain_to_fire]

4 minutes ago, DavePlays said:

Just got this email. This is ridiculous. It's so discouraging.

That must've sucked so much. 

[DavePlays]

Just now, hey_yo_ said:

That must've sucked so much. 

It makes me lose all my drive. I've made about $50 per year that I reinvest into new gear... but now there's nothing to get out of it except disappointment.

[Sniperfox47]

3 minutes ago, DavePlays said:

It makes me lose all my drive. I've made about $50 per year that I reinvest into new gear... but now there's nothing to get out of it except disappointment.

Or, you know, just run a patreon and get substantially more than $50 a year...?

[captain_to_fire]

Just now, DavePlays said:

It makes me lose all my drive. I've made about $50 per year that I reinvest into new gear... but now there's nothing to get out of it except disappointment.

Indeed. How can YouTube expect 4000 hours of viewership in a year for a small content creator? Most small YouTubers I know make videos with ten minutes duration or less? Their previous 10,000 views to enable monetization is fair enough but this new one is just plain stupid and selfish and I stand on what I said before in this thread on why does smaller creators have to be sacrificed at the altar for the sins of one son of a bitch named Logan Paul?

[DavePlays]

It's a common thread.... let the big people get away with all kinds of crap, and let the little guys take the slack.

[Arika]

4 minutes ago, hey_yo_ said:

Indeed. How can YouTube expect 4000 hours of viewership in a year for a small content creator? Most small YouTubers I know make videos with ten minutes duration or less? 

you really think Youtube cares?

 

they will still make money from it, in fact they will make more since they will still run ads and make the money from it, they just don't have to give any of it to the creator.

[kokobash]

Damn this is just sad, I just received the email too and getting that 4000hrs watch time is really hard to pull of for new content creators

[mr moose]

2 hours ago, hey_yo_ said:

There will still be ads playing (depending if the advertiser and YT algorithm allows it) but the creator will not earn his/her CPM from ads.

And this is where I want to give youtube the royal adblock finger.  I don't mind sitting through ads if everyone gets paid and I don't have to do the paying, but when the content creator doesn't get paid,  well that's just BS.

 

And I am mostly against adblock.

[Centurius]

Being a YouTuber still well below the threshold. I demonetized myself months ago. It basically did nothing for my revenue and at my current level not having monetization on is proving much better at keeping my audience. I was making more money off of Patreon anyway. Once I am at 10 times the new minimum I'll probably turn it on again. 

[Guest]

3 hours ago, JDE said:

D*** move YouTube, now channels with small communities (like, bus and coin ones that I watch) don't have incentive to make videos other than "I like doing it".

At the end of the day if you don't enjoy making them you're going to move on. There are other methods of supporting your favourite channel as well.

[captain_to_fire]

14 minutes ago, RorzNZ said:

At the end of the day if you don't enjoy making them you're going to move on. There are other methods of supporting your favourite channel as well.

Given how many of these popular vloggers on YouTube spend so much money on useless stuff because they think their adsense revenue will just replace it, I wouldn't be so surprised if some of them become homeless or end up in AA. 

 

 

[LienusLateTips]

46 minutes ago, RorzNZ said:

At the end of the day if you don't enjoy making them you're going to move on. There are other methods of supporting your favourite channel as well.

Fine, channels can't improve equipment that they have without a lot of personal expense. I know a Youtuber who has 200 to 300 subs but can't afford any new equipment, excluding his phone.

[Taf the Ghost]

And YouTube's continuing inability to operate a White List is still one of the most dazzling displays of corporate mismanagement that you'll ever see. YouTube has some absolutely top-tier talent dealing with the technical side of things, but Alphabet has clearly decided that YouTube is the place they send people's management careers to die.

 

These changes to basic monetization strike me as YouTube limiting their need for running smaller accounts. They just eliminated, potential, a huge amount of accounts that needed to be paid small amounts. Which means this was a cost-savings move more than anything else, thus it has absolutely nothing to do with the Logan Paul video. Now, by causing disconnect among small channels, they'll run some of them off while everyone ignores that the video that caused this issue hit #1 in Trending. Trending is only semi-automated, and there is always someone that's curating it. 

 

Part of YouTube's entire haphazard response to the situation might have more to do with trying to convince the Japanese government to look the other way with a "see, we're responding to this!" list of actions. The management's reputation for incompetence is well established enough that they can use that as a proactive defense, which could be very important to them. Logan Paul likely broke a bunch of Japanese Laws by posting that video, though there's some interesting jurisdiction issues that crop up. It's enough for the Japanese government to get really irate at YouTube and start asking questions that YouTube probably doesn't want to deal with. (Beyond the Japanese not taking cultural insults very well.)

 

What we do know for sure is that YouTube rolled out a change they were planning already, which would cause controversy, under the guise of the Logan Paul situation. That's YouTube blatantly lying about the activities, at minimum.

[Guest]

16 minutes ago, JDE said:

Fine, channels can't improve equipment that they have without a lot of personal expense. I know a Youtuber who has 200 to 300 subs but can't afford any new equipment, excluding his phone.

theres too many channels with 300 subs for that to be affordable for ad revenue YouTube gets

[TheUzu]

50 minutes ago, JDE said:

Fine, channels can't improve equipment that they have without a lot of personal expense. I know a Youtuber who has 200 to 300 subs but can't afford any new equipment, excluding his phone.

They should get a job and buy a camera that way, meeting these min requirements would probably only get you $100 a year tops anyway.

[FloRolf]

4000hrs? So I can just leave YouTube running while mining 24/7 and get myself over 8000 hours a year, double $$$profit$$$

[Bcat00]

6 hours ago, JDE said:

D*** move YouTube, now channels with small communities (like, bus and coin ones that I watch) don't have incentive to make videos other than "I like doing it".

I say good riddence

[alphaproject]

RIP my youtube channel. I started over just over a year ago because my old one got axed via strikes.... and I've finally started getting traction and now this. Seriously... YT is so lame it's not even funny.

[LAwLz]

I think this outrage is hilarious, because it's basically a bunch of people being mad they can't make ~20 dollars a year for doing their hobby.

 

6 hours ago, mr moose said:

So does this mean any youtube channel that doesn't meet the criteria will just get published and we won't have to sit through ads? or do we viewers still have to sit through ads while the content creator gets nothing? 

I don't think we know that yet, but the thing is that the uploader decides if they want to enable ads on a video or not.

So it's quite simple, if you don't meet the threshold then just don't enable ads on your videos. If you don't meet the threshold and still decide to enable ads then I assume that money just gets pocketed by Youtube, although they might just disable the "enable ad" button. We will see.

 

4 hours ago, DavePlays said:

It makes me lose all my drive. I've made about $50 per year that I reinvest into new gear... but now there's nothing to get out of it except disappointment.

If your only motivation for making video was ~50 dollars every year then you should not have made videos to begin with.

[Thony]

1000 subs is very low requirement, if u keep uploading weekly you easily achieve that in few months. Such amount of subs doesnt make you a celebrity nor prevents you from creating a harmful content. So I dont really see how this “restriction” is gonna help Youtubes reputation in any way. Its probably the minimum they agreed on to get away with the situation around Paul.

[Ryujin2003]

6 hours ago, hey_yo_ said:

If your kid is using an Android or iOS device, you can restrict the videos he/she watches with the YouTube Kids app for iOS and Android.

I don't trust the YouTube filters with videos like Spiderman Elsa Shark Bomb Fun Happy Unicirn Pregnant Time machine Mario Princess Movie... So we don't use it.

[NelizMastr]

3 hours ago, S.Stephenson said:

They should get a job and buy a camera that way, meeting these min requirements would probably only get you $100 a year tops anyway.

Can confirm. When I was at 1k subs, I made diddly squat. Maybe one or two payments per year (€70 threshold). Now, I'm at 3200-ish and I get 0-1 payment a month, all that with a €100 1080p30 compact camera and a €20 tripod hah. At least it's somewhat lucrative. Time is more of an issue these days.

[Misanthrope]

7 hours ago, Sniperfox47 said:

Or, you know, just run a patreon and get substantially more than $50 a year...?

I doubt he'd had good chances at that: Patreon doesn't has any build in way to grow an audience. It's just a tool for people with already large audiences.

 

Monetization it's not only about how much money you get but how much are your videos are pushed in front of more eyes and how much you grow which is usually exponential. Without monetization there's just no way you'd be able to sustain a Patreon audience imo. Big channels try this because their drop off is slow enough that occasional drama helps them but trust me take even a million sub channel and remove all monetization and have that creator rely on Patreon: you will very slowly but very surely kill that channel.

 

There needs to be a solution and incentive for small content creators to be able to eventually break through beyond dumb luck. Because what this will encourage is a lot more annoying people pestering celebrities for retweets, doing more "I've found a dead body!" style videos, anything that with get eyes on them: more of the worst possible kind of videos and youtubers will become the norm.

[captain_to_fire]

1 minute ago, Misanthrope said:

There needs to be a solution and incentive for small content creators to be able to eventually break through beyond dumb luck. Because what this will encourage is a lot more annoying people pestering celebrities for retweets, doing more "I've found a dead body!" style videos, anything that with get eyes on them: more of the worst possible kind of videos and youtubers will become the norm.

I guess I should start a video series on YouTube reacting to videos of tech reviewers. I heard reaction videos are popular lately and I hope Linus won't issue a copyright strike on me.* /s 

 

*even though I think a channel about reacting to someone else's videos is one of the laziest kind of YouTube videos because it doesn't require so much effort

[captain_to_fire]

2 hours ago, Thony said:

1000 subs is very low requirement

You're forgetting the 4000 hours of viewership in a year. For a starting channel, that's not low.