If I put what you’re about to read on Youtube, I would not qualify for monetization. If I can’t make money from it, I’d be a starving artist and I lack the artistic talent to reconcile myself to that way of life. However, I do have experience in monetization and streaming in a professional environment.
Oh, how the times have changed. If you were a “content creator” for Youtube, you had 10,000 subscribers or more to your Youtube channel. There do exist a select group of people that are content creators, full-time. They live their lives through Youtube videos.
Sounds like a dream, right? Sit around, upload a video and collect that advertising money. The reality? It’s incredibly laborious. If you want to be something besides meme-of-the-month, the more views you receive, the more established you are, the more your viewers expect from you.
Rarely does a content creator work alone when they reach the point of monetization that they can live off their advertising money. A personality typically compels more views, than surprisingly just physical attraction. Both is ideal towards producing content, you want to be attractive and have attractive content.
You work with an editor most of the time. Streamers often hire both editors and live cappers, who watch their streams and compile their antics into another product to monetize. Through this way, you can meet a variety of people with weirdly unique capabilities that translates into video production and overall, content creation.
The issue now is that Youtube is exercising some controversial constraints on what they are permitting to be eligible for monetization. Youtube is saying, if you break these rules, no money for you. That translates to “we do not support profiting off of having this type of content.”
Youtube is owned by Google, who is not free from accusations of censorships. To me, the restriction of funds do to this particular set of rules does translate to type of censorship.
Youtube cannot create an avenue for business through partnership, for which people can attain a professional level from, then revoke their source of income—and not call that silencing. It’s the flow of money, as it relates to their ability to produce content and maintain their well-being.
Why am I so ants-in-the-pants about this? Because the rules are ridiculous and completely against what we even go to Youtube for. Take a look:
http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2016/09/02/11/37D28D8800000578-0-image-m-9_1472810818904.jpg
What’s happened is simply that you can feasibly report an existing Youtube video, en masse and enjoy the content being removed from monetization through the abuse of the reporting algorithm.
This happens frequently on Facebook, which is yet another service provider that profits from what you create, yet has questionable search algorithms that obscure certain perspectives and news from being featured.
Don’t like something? Just ‘bot’ it down. Now you can just flag almost any video for demonetization. It’s a double-edged sword, clearly this was meant for whatever really harmful videos Youtube is trying to take some weird moral stance on, but they’ve overshot. They want their content that makes money to be safe and fluffy and not controversial, but we don’t check Youtube to watch paint dry.
Our Youtube experience is one that should reflect our real life—how else do we go about escaping it while simultaneously relating to content? It’s a type of enjoyment, of escapism, and the attempts to take those same elements that cause us problems in the specific order they appear in our lives and reassemble them in content for us to consume, enjoyably.
Trying to deflate the pockets of those you don’t agree with? What type of moral stance is that? Pretty pathetic to try and shake out the few dollars you can make from monetized videos.
To break it down briefly, enabling monetization allows you to profit off what is known as CTR (click through rate) and CPC (cost per click) models. Within those, you have what’s known as CPV and CPC, where the advertiser will pay when the advertisement is clicked, not just viewed. If you have a million views and no clicks, you make no money. The second option is that an advertiser will pay out when someone views the ad for half the duration or at least 30 seconds. They do not pay for both.
Other types of ads exist that can show up on the side of your video and under suggested viewing, but the main ads I’m concerned with are the above.
What we’re now seeing is just groups on social media abuse these algorithms to get content they dislike removed from monetization, despite not truly violating or doing something grotesque enough to merit the loss of an ability of monetization.
Do we want to open businesses where if you don’t like someone’s views, you can not pay them for the work that made your business successful, and is largely attributed to those very views?
If so, as a business I believe you’re free to do so, but as a company in a massive adjustment period—do you really want to push away your content creators? It sure isn’t going to make itself, and it’d be quite naive to think Youtube is the only site willing to partner with talent for content in a mutually profitable manner.
We’re all going to enjoy our cat videos and see-it-to-believe-it, tag your friends and post the crying-laughing-emoji-twelve-times-stuff somewhere, but Youtube holds no monopoly on monetization of video content in a fleeting world of the next big social media technology.
Barton Kleen
Executive Editor