I couldn't find anything but a friend of mine in the biz says he's pretty sure YouTube is going to open up monetization to basically any channel with any number of subs. As a way to attract even more of the TikTok mass of content creators. Anyone else hearing anything like this?
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YouTube Networks Monetization for all?
- Thread starter MediaMan
- Start date
The problem would be selling the ads. As an advertiser you want your ads seen by more people. A channel with 100 subs, or a channel with 100,000 subs... easy choice. Even if they opened it to all (and that is a huge "if") you would still make no appreciable amount of money. When I first got monetized I would regularly earn $15-$20 a month. I was lucky to get two $100 payments a year, and that was with 3,000 subs.
Monetization does not equal money.
Monetization does not equal money.
Monetize your channel outside of YouTube. That's the first step to monetization.
I believe there has to be a special challenge to get money off content so I donΓÇÖt agree with one shoe fits all but everyone likes different things
Maybe TikTok has changed the way YT thinks. Shorts has proven you can get a lot of views at the expense of very little sub retention, so why not give those content creators a slice of the financial pie? I do think the tide is turning where views are ultimately going to be more important than subs, especially with shorts. I could see something like ad revenue opening up on a video by video basis where each video has to cross a certain threshold of views before monetization kicks in.
Only thing I've found so far is this.. "In addition to the above, weΓÇÖll be introducing lower eligibility thresholds for YPP creators to access Fan Funding even earlier (such as Super Thanks, Super Chat, Super Stickers, and channel memberships). These new eligibility thresholds for Fan Funding will start sometime in 2023 and apply to long-form video, live stream, and Shorts content. More info to come!"
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Personally, I think YT is about to go down the toilet. Ever since they decided to chase TikTok instead of LEADING, YT has been going down. They are losing advertisers every quarter since they decided to put all their effort behind the SHORTS insanity. If they don't get their head unstuck out of TikToks posterior, they are going to lose all their bread-and-butter creators. Since TikTok is running circles around them in the short video department and YT has no freaking concept of how to even make an app for this, YT will become just another streaming service like Netflix and Hulu. YT was once a leader, but they got fat. lazy and greedy, and the competition blew past them. I am pretty much done with YT. I have already begun to move my content off the platform to greener pastures.
I disagree - among my demographic, YouTube is a verb that you hear every day. Just this morning, a neighbor asked how to code a new key for his Camry on a community form and was told that "you just need to youtube that" by several people. I'm confused about shorts, but am trying to post one every day. They require little effort and get massive (for me) views. My best so far is two women rolling pasta. That video received over 7K views. It was strange that most of the views came from India. The video was shot in Italy. I'm mostly located in the US. Maybe the algorithm had a burp?
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What you don't understand about this is, I am the creator that is teaching you how to program your Camera key and I am starving to death because YT has killed my channel. I agree, YT is a wonderful place to learn useful stuff. But ask yourself this honest question. "When have you ever seen YT promote educational content creators? You will hear YT promote Gamers. You will hear YT promote LGBT. You will hear YT promote racial minorities. You will hear YT prompt gobbledegook Shorts. But you will never see or hear of YT doing ANYTHING to help the creators that make the actual useful content that most people go to youtube to see. Don't argue with me on this. I start doing YT in 2006; I have been here since the beginning. I know what I am talking about.
YT is KILLING creators like me and driving us away. They are slashing our earnings to nothing and just throwing money at Shorts creators for doing absolute CRAP! Like you said, Shorts are EASY to make. Easy, does not equal GOOD and USEFUL. Good content is hard to make, but YT is rewarding mindless garbage, not the creators that invest their hard work, time, and money into making quality content that actually brings something useful into the world.
You got 7,000 views on a Shorts video. Woohoo! The real question is, HOW MUCH MONEY did those 7,000 earn you/ My guess is NOTHING or just a few cents. Now, it used to be that I made a video that got 7000 views, that was a $35 to $150 paycheck for me. Before this whole Shorts insanity started, I was making about $2,000 per every 100,000 views. Now, I am making about $500, for every 100,000 views. YT has cut my earnings by 75%. And it is not just me. Just about all long-form content creators have seen similar cuts. Where did the money go? It went into the YT Shorts fund. Why does YT need a fund to pay out money to Shorts creators? BECAUSE SHORTS DO NOT EARN MONEY? You see, if Shorts were earning money, YT would not have to pay money out of their own pocket. Think about this for a second and it will dawn upon you that I am right eventually.
Within one month of YT deciding to enable ADs on Shorts, advertisers canceled over ONE BILLION dollars in ad contracts with YT. Why? Think about it. Say you are Ford Motor Company and you are going to spend 100 million from your ad budget to run ads for the new F-150 on YT. Where do you want those ads to show up on? Do you want them to show up on a 30-second Short video of a teenager making fart bubbles in a swimming pool, or on a 20-minute DIY of a guy building a log cabin? Well, what is the demographic that is most likely to watch a teenager making fart bubbles underwater? Are they the kind of people with steady jobs and lives that want and can afford to buy a brand new F-150? No, those kinds of people would be watching the video on building a log cabin.
That is the problem with the "Easy to Make" Shorts. Sure they get a lot fo views, but they are essentially mind crack for brain-dead teenagers to watch. Serious adult people with real jobs and money to buy things don;t waste their day watching that kind of crap. Advertisers want people with money to watch their ads. Not irresponsible immature broke people.
You are right. People do think of YT as a place to learn valuable information. The problem is YT does not want to BE THAT PLACE ANYMORE. YT wants to chase crap content creators that bring nothing useful to the table. YT wants mindcrack content like TikTok has, and they are slitting the throat of the hard working content creators to get there. We are tired of being the ones people come to YT to see, but being treated like the red-headed step child by the YT staff who has consistently and intentionally IGNORED us and never not once launched a program to promote our type of content.
YT can do what it wants. I have a lot of great content, and they are going to lose it, along with many other channels like mind that are jumping ship.
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That I cannot tell you. I am testing the waters in a lot of places. I am making TikTik vids, Instagram Vids, and some others. I have my own monetized website and may eventually just move my YT content onto it, but that is a complex process. I could do it by making all my videos Unlisted on YT and just using YT for hosting and making money from the Ads running on my website. I am still doing testing to see what works. For right now YT is still making enough to leave my content on it, but if my earnings keep dropping, there will be no reason to. I am not giving my content away for free.
Fact my channel is a great example of this. Ford, Chevy and RAM all know that every fisherman with a boat needs a good truck to haul it. That's people with money willing to buy something. Every oil company knows that every guy with a good truck needs good oil to keep it running. Every shock and strut company know we will need advanced shocks and springs to keep the truck under control when driving at highways speeds. Every tire company knows we'll need long wearing tires as we're longing hundreds of miles to get to our fishing holes.
I just bought a Jeep this spring, used but is was a Jeep 4x4 with the old straight six engine. The kind of engine you can work on yourself. Yup, I bought new shocks, new tires, oil change, everything I mentioned about above. Where did I learn what brands to buy or how to install those things myself? YouTube education-based channels. Dudes in their backyard building freakin' offroad Jeeps. Have I ever seen any of these channels promoted in my feed? Hardly.
In comparison, teenage fart bubble videos are completely worthless economically. Aside from millions of views, those views are from a people group with little to no money, revenue or income. Yet YT wants to pivot the whole platform to cater to that demographic. It is suicide economically. Sadly, it seems that the fishing channels, hunting channels, gardening channels, educational channels, basically any "real-world" channel and the companies who market their products via ads over them understands this healthy economic life cycle. However, YouTube and their lopsided world-view seems to have completely missed this or just don't care.
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Of course. However, those kinds of ads pay nothing because the products they are selling are cheap. Ads that pay well, are ads that sell expensive products. Ads that target teenagers are targeting a demographic with no money, that can only afford to spend a few bucks on something. The most expensive thing a teenager wants to buy is a video game console worth a few hundred. Mature adults are buying cars, houses, and other high-dollar stuff. Ads that target mature adults pay a lot more. A gaming channel is doing good to get $1 per every 1000 views. Before YT went nuts chasing TikTok, I was earning an average of $12 per 1000 views and had some videos earning as high as $27 per 1000 views. That is because my channel demographics is 95% Males between the ages of 40 and 60. I have a 0% 18 and below viewership.
The problem with YT is not YT itself. Everyone knows what YT is. Ask 100 people what they use YT for and 99 of them will answer, "To help solve a problem." If you need to find out how to do something or learn about something, you go to YouTube. That YT's core purpose for existence in today's world. YT has this market all sewn up to itself. The problem is, the immature YT staff, does not want YT to be that place. The staff at YT wants mind-crack content because that is what THEY want to watch. It's not what the viewers want to watch, it is what the YT STAFF wants to watch. So, instead of building on the market that YT already owns, they are sacrificing this market in order to chase some dream that they can somehow beat TikTok at its own game. They are driving the platform into the ground in their mad dash to capture a market that nobody wants them to be. In the meantime, TikTok is expanding its market into the DIY and Educational departments by allowing longer videos and now supporting horizontal videos. While YT throws money at Shorts creators begging them to create content for YT, TikTok is circling back around behind YT and picking up the disgruntled DIY Educational creators that YT has all but abandoned.
Quite frankly, TikTok is genius-level marketing. Don't get me wrong, I don't like TikTok, but that does not prevent me from seeing what they are doing. Take for example the TikTok app. I mean, it is a full-fledged video editor that was designed to be drop-dead user-friendly. Compare that to the YT app and it makes YT apps look like a sad and really bad joke. YT has never Helped creators CREATE content. TikTok was made so that anyone with a smartphone and two functioning brain cells can make content on their phone with ease.
Once you create content and upload it to YT, it is almost IMPOSSIBLE to get off. If you are on a smartphone there is NO POSSIBLE way to download your own videos from your own channel that you are logged into. Contrast that with TikTok. When you create a video on your smartphone using the TikTok app and upload it to TT, TikTok automatically creates a local TT watermarked and channel-branded copy of the video on your smartphone for you to share on other platforms. It's absolutely genius. TT gives you an amazing app to create content with, hand-holds you to help you create exciting content, and then says, "Here! Go out there and share it on any platform you want. We have already watermarked and branded it to help you promote your TT channel."
The writing is one the wall for YT. YT is lightyears behind TT and the only thing they can think of is to throw truckloads of money at creators and beg them to create Shorts, while doing absolutely NOTHING to help people do that. YT keeps coming of with new ways of monetizing your content, but all of them are a joke. No one wants to sign up for Channel Memberships. Only one out of a million viewers will ever give a creator a tip using Super Thanks. I watch all the YT Creators Updates and all I can think is, "What kind of idiots are these people".
But YT is not the only one that is behind the ball. TB is as well. SEO has become almost irrelevant. Every one of my videos has a TB SEO score of 100, but it has not helped, because YT no longer cares about SEO. YT is now a human-driven algorithm that favors mindless content consumption. YT does not care if the content was useful to you. The only thing they care about is the kind of content you Keep watching Over and Over again. It does not matter if you even like the content. It only matters if you jump from one piece of content to the next. So, the new algorithm for getting views is, BWC, "Binge-Worthy Content". YT does not care how good your video is or whether it has the best SEO on earth, or if 100% of your watchers love your video. What YT cares about if people stay on your channel BINGE watching one video after another. That is all they care about. But Guess What? Somebody that comes to YT to find out how to program a Toyota smart key for their car, is NOT going to watch ten videos on you channel on how to program keys for a bunch of other cars. People don't BINGE watch this kind of content. So guess what? If people don't BINGE watch your content, YT's BWC Algorithm determines that your channel is not worthy to be suggested to anyone anymore. SEO is irrelevant on YT. The only thing that matters is "Binge-Worthy Content".
And I am making binge-worthy content, just not for YT. I have built a YT channel around being a mature adult and have a demographic that reflects that. If I start posting that kind of stuff on my channel, I might as well kiss my channel goodbye. NO, people come to YT to learn stuff. People go to TT to watch silly short vertical videos.
Actually, I am having more success on IG. I released a video last night at 1:00 am and it already has 1200 views. I keep a backup copy of all videos I have ever made, so I have almost unlimited content to convert without having to make a single new video.
@MediaMan, that's a fair point, and I do think that is a good supplement revenue source. However, the numbers simply doesn't support it as a primary means of revenue. Think about it:
We're talking YouTube abandoning three or four orders of magnitude more money. Why? The advertisers with three or four orders of magnitude in cash are puling out. It's a bad situation. Is there any wonder I'm getting half the revenue that I did just a few years ago? I know of other fishing channels experiencing the same thing @The Jungle Explorer is talking about, so it's happening across several fronts. Yet, every time YouTube rolls out new stuff it's almost all shorts, something contrary to what built YouTube in the first place, or just some lame excuse for generating revenue for the creators. That's concerning to say the least.
You look at every revenue model like SuperChats and subscriptions, my audience doesn't buy stuff like that. They'd rather buy $120 worth on AMSOIL for the Ford Raptor they just bought. YouTube leadership really does seem to misundertand economics as a whole.
- 2023 FORD Raptor 4x4: $76,775 starting price
- McDonald's Big Mac: $3.99
- Movie Night: What, $25 bucks if you buy the popcorn and the 3D package?
- Music: My tunes sell for $1.00 on Bandcamp.
We're talking YouTube abandoning three or four orders of magnitude more money. Why? The advertisers with three or four orders of magnitude in cash are puling out. It's a bad situation. Is there any wonder I'm getting half the revenue that I did just a few years ago? I know of other fishing channels experiencing the same thing @The Jungle Explorer is talking about, so it's happening across several fronts. Yet, every time YouTube rolls out new stuff it's almost all shorts, something contrary to what built YouTube in the first place, or just some lame excuse for generating revenue for the creators. That's concerning to say the least.
You look at every revenue model like SuperChats and subscriptions, my audience doesn't buy stuff like that. They'd rather buy $120 worth on AMSOIL for the Ford Raptor they just bought. YouTube leadership really does seem to misundertand economics as a whole.
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One can only hope that YT will get their head unstuck from TikTok's posterior and decide to promote the content that people come to YT looking for, which is not Shorts. YT is an educational platform. They need to own this and play to this platform. If they do, and soon, they could turn things around. If not, TT is gonna take even this away from YT.
YT is supposed to be releasing new features and tools to educators who want to monetize their content further. However, I am leery about putting EVERYTHING into the YT basket. I still love YT overall because of its great infrastructure and reach. Even if Adsense got cancelled, I still see lots of value of having a presence. As @Damon reminds people frequently, we have to do our part to NOT be dependent on YT for all monetization options. To depend on Adsense is fraught with financial peril. From comments I have read from other creators, I am doing better than most for a channel my size. Out the gates, I made almost $200 in my first month after approved by YPP! I was so shocked. My numbers have tapered downwards since. I have no false illusions that it is entirely reliable money.
YT continues to shift and change. Even if I wanted to explore options outside of YT, as @MediaMan asked, where would I go? Go back to Vimeo and their rules and fees? Not me. Facebook? Not me. Instagram? Uncertain. TikTok? Unsure. From a biz perspective, video is where it's at to reach out and communicate with people. As @WackyIdeas pointed out, YT has become a verb much like Googling is a verb.
At a barebone video hosting level, YT makes it easy to have a video presence of which I have expanded to a 2nd channel. I am back down to 6 subscribers. With that project, my focus isn't to get to YPP for income. It is similar to what Damon talks about. Start converting and monetizing now even when the channel is tiny. I am not waiting until I get my 4K hours and 1K watch hours. The monetization effort begins...
I used to be with Vimeo. I preferred Vimeo for a number of years, then they kept trying to get creators to pay more than what I was already paying for. A couple years ago, I decided to entirely stop paying for Vimeo. What for when YT provided a whole lot more to me (even without Adsense). So, I made the wrong choice back in 2007. I should have stayed with YT.
Maybe it's the wrong choice to stay on YT but what good options do we really have?
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I agree with you Matt. I don't believe YT is going away anytime soon, but I have been around long enough to watch huge companies that thought they were undefeatable lose their market due to laziness and lack of creativity. Currently, YT provides a service no one else does, and that is to host valuable content that provides real-life usefulness. Sure this stuff can be found in other places, but YT is the go-to place to look for it. The problem is, the YT staff either hates this idea, or they do not realize this is what YT is seen as. As I said before, I have never seen, in my 16 years on YT, a single time where YT even acknowledges what I just said.
The truth is this, and I have watched thousands of hour from top YT pros on this subject. YT only cares about one thing and one thing only. After watching countless videos on how to be a successful YT creator, I have condensed it all down and coined it into this phrase. YT only cares about "Binge-Worthy Content". The algorithm is trained to reward those who make BWC, and to to ignore those who don't. Good quality educational content will never be BWC.
Take my channel for example. There is another guy who makes content similar to mine. He is famous and I am not. Why? Because he wears a blonde girls wig and breaks things while making his video. Basically he acts like a complete idiot. He he made the same video, but without all the shenanigans, he would be unknown. The thing is, I personally cannot stand his videos. There is actually some good info in his videos, but his fake "Playing the Clown" acting is such a turn off to me. Now you might say, "Well, his content is entertaining" and I would agree with you, but content does not have to be like that to be entertaining and popular. Ever heard of Martha Stweart? Does she have to act like a clown to get views. No. You see, it is not that you have to act like a clown, it is just that, it is YT that wants you to act that way. It is called "Playing to the Lowest Common Denominator".
People who make BWC on YT are the only ones YT wants to be successful. The algorithm is trained to find this kind of content and promote it. The algorithm looks for three things to determine if a channel is worthy to be promoted.
1. The Click. Do people click on your thumbnails more than others?
2. The Stay. Do people stay to watch your whole video, or the majority of it?
3. The Return. Do people watch more of your videos after watching the first one?
If your channel matches all three of these criteria, your channel will explode, without you doing one scrap of SEO work. YT could care less about anything else but those three things. You could have the best, most professionally produced, most useful and informative content on earth, with the best SEO, but if your content does not tik those three boxes, your channel is going nowhere on YT. The problem is, those three boxes only equal one kind of content and that is Binge Worth Content, and we all know what kind of content fits in that box.
Honestly, I agree. The more annoying, obnoxious the creator, generally the more "success" and popularity they will have. It's like the modern version of black-face Vaudeville.
However, that's exactly the kind of person I want to stay away from my brand and content. I can't trust them to use my products in good faith. So, despite the down flaws, the good thing is that although you won't grow fast, the people you do attract will be the perfect fit for your brand.
However, that's exactly the kind of person I want to stay away from my brand and content. I can't trust them to use my products in good faith. So, despite the down flaws, the good thing is that although you won't grow fast, the people you do attract will be the perfect fit for your brand.