YouTube’s Adpocalypse and Jimmy Kimmel

[fit bird]

If only there existed a way to share videos without the help of the Youtube.

[biggytitbo]

Can you give an example of this please? Preferably one with the minimal set-up and outlay of someone making videos on their computers at home

An example of what?


Love how you denigrate it too by dismissing it as just someone making videos on their computers at home. How do you expect them to make videos? Using a handcranked cine camera at pinewood studios?

[Gwen Taylor on ITV]

What did Jimmy kimmel do?

[Hemulen]

Yes, there are people giving tips for applying makeup and getting abs as well, and ASMR people letting other people get their rocks off.

And people doing in-depth pop culture criticism, niche documentaries, software tutorials, well researched educational videos, entertaining panel/quiz shows etc. etc. Maybe you don't care about any of that, that's fair enough. What bothers me is when people act as though these things don't exist - that YouTube is nothing but a bunch of vapid vloggers and funny cat videos when that is quite demonstrably not the case.

[jobotic]

What did Jimmy kimmel do?

I think he said something pro-gun control, you know, after a fucking massacre, and the alt-right cry babies are all upset now.

As for all this youtube business, do they believe in the free market or not?

[phantom_power]

An example of what?


Love how you denigrate it too by dismissing it as just someone making videos on their computers at home. How do you expect them to make videos? Using a handcranked cine camera at pinewood studios?

An example of a small business getting shafted by a bigger business they rely on refusing to work with them any more?

And I wasn't denigrating it. I was just pointing out that these people tend to start out as hobbyists making a bit of money on the side and their start-up and running costs aren't that great. They won't have massive debts to pay off if their funding stream ends is what I am saying, unlike someone who runs a shop or other business with larger overheads and running costs

[Phil_A]

I feel like the Youtube Income Bubble was always going to burst at some point, it was just dependant on too many random factors to be a sustainable business model. I didn't think youtube themselves would be the ones to do it, though.

I don't really watch many vlogs, but there are a ton of great video essay and documentary channels that I would definitely miss. LGR, Kim Justice, Dan Bell, hbomberguy, Mark Brown, Lindsay Ellis, Errant Signal, it goes on and on.

The Great War is a good example of professionally produced, well-researched channel that's clearly more than just someone with a webcam in their bedroom.

[phantom_power]

Surely either an alternative home exists for these videos, or if the demand is great enough someone will create one. I doubt these niche videos get many casual views on YouTube anyway

[Barry Admin]

Ethan from H3H3's attempt at making this a free speech issue is a bag of shite. I had to go and watch that video again as it took a while to sink in.

I am vaguely aware of the wider context of all this though, as I'm a huge fan of Mister Metokur, so have heard about Twitter and their new policy of filtering offensive tweets/tweeters etc.

If, say, Paul Joseph Watson wants to endlessly rant about Muslims and such, then why can't he do it for the sheer pure love of engaging in race-baiting? Surely that is reward in and of itself?

[biggytitbo]

An example of a small business getting shafted by a bigger business they rely on refusing to work with them any more?

And I wasn't denigrating it. I was just pointing out that these people tend to start out as hobbyists making a bit of money on the side and their start-up and running costs aren't that great. They won't have massive debts to pay off if their funding stream ends is what I am saying, unlike someone who runs a shop or other business with larger overheads and running costs

I havent got a specific small business to name off the top of my head but who isnt dependent on someone else, even if its just a landlord putting the rent up or a supplier increasing their costs? Any youtuber who has gone full time will have had to leave their job, and invest in camera equipment and computers at the least, not to mention the considerable time investment of building up a channel, brand and audience. 


You might argue they should have a more diverse income stream but youtibe is still where all the audience is so they don't really have much chocie and whether google are within their rights or not its really shitty and unprofssional just to seriously hamper if not destroy peoples channels with a click of their fingers, without much debate or consoltation beforehand and little or no communication afterwards.

[Cuellar]

Can't they just move to another platform? If they've built a following and own their own production equipment, it'd surely be very easy to do that. It's not like they're renting their cameras from YouTube and are obliged to stay there until they pay off the debt.

[biggytitbo]

For that sort of thing nothing else remotely compares to youtube for reach and amount of people, so I imagine its kind of a chicken and egg situation whereby any potential competitor could never reach any kind of critical mass for it to be viable. It took youtube a good decade before they made any profit after all.

[Hemulen]

Can't they just move to another platform? If they've built a following and own their own production equipment, it'd surely be very easy to do that. It's not like they're renting their cameras from YouTube and are obliged to stay there until they pay off the debt.

This assumes that there is another reliable platform out there with sufficient advertising infrastructure in place that they can simply point all their subscribers in that direction and immediately get a comparable level of income. It also assumes that just pointing people in the right direction is enough, which vastly underestimates just how lazy people can be on the internet.

Case in point, when "AMC Movie Talk" lost its contract with AMC and moved to Collider, they instantly lost their established subscriber base, and despite giving fair warning to regular viewers it was several months before they regained a similar number of subscribers on the new channel. And that's just from moving from one channel to another within the same platform.

I'm not a YouTuber, by the way. I have absolutely zero stake in this beyond being a fan of certain channels and hoping they can find a way to survive this mess and continue doing what they do. But let's not downplay this - it really is a mess and jobs are absolutely on the line. If my boss decided to comprehensively overhaul how I earned my salary, resulting in it dropping to about a quarter of what it had been up to that point WITHOUT GIVING ME ANY KIND OF ADVANCED WARNING, I expect I'd be pretty bloody ticked off.

[touchingcloth]

There already are non-YouTube ways of distributing and funding video content, and a lot of them pay the creators far more generously than YouTube's ad model does. I've bought a fair few software and photography courses direct from the producer's own site and pod for through PayPal or bank transfers, for instance, and they've all been of a markedly better quality than anything I've found for nowt on YouTube. Other than that there are companies like Lynda who provide similar content under a subscription model, and there's no reason that displaced YouTubers couldn't find a new home, and no doubt some of them will club together to create brand new homes. I don't think it's at all a bad thing for YouTube to no longer be seen as the first and last word in videos produced outside of the TV network system.

Edit: a lot of the above mentioned people and places give out a fair amount of stuff "for free" as well, with their free-to-the-viewer stuff being paid for by the small percentage of people who splash out for premium content rather than through adverts like on YouTube. The Richard Herring model, in other words.

[Dr Rock]

I am against YouTube deciding for me what content I might like to see, whether it's by banning or demonetizing channels. I have to sit through more of them shitty ads now, so i get to dictate their policy. I may not agree with things said by people I choose to watch, that's half the point sometimes, to see what they are saying. YouTube should remain neutral, as it has great power and with that comes the responsibility not to attempt to silence certain voices. It's easy to say who cares if an alt-right cunt gets penalised, but if you believe in free speech, like what I do, they should have equal access to the same platform, with the same ability to make money from it as anyone else, whatever their message.

Except for that Thunderf00t guy, he really gets on my tits.

[Barry Admin]

Can't they just move to another platform? If they've built a following and own their own production equipment, it'd surely be very easy to do that. It's not like they're renting their cameras from YouTube and are obliged to stay there until they pay off the debt.

This is the obvious solution, and any other community of that size would have had a massive schism by now. These guys are still making money hand over fist, though, whether it's through Patreon or merch. In fact, that h3h3 video has adverts on it, an advert for h3h3 merch at the end of it, and a pinned advert for his merch store at the top of the comments.

Long before "Adpocalypse" started, every big YouTuber has made a point of reacting in an over-the-top clickbaity manner about the latest changes to the platform. Big thumbnail of the YouTuber looking shocked and appalled, stuff like "THE END OF YOUTUBE", or "YOUTUBE IS KILLING MY CHANNEL", or "MY CHANNEL IS DYING."

When you're queuing up to fight over short-date late-night whoopsies then I'm sorry, but it's quite hard to give a solitary shit about people with a huge amount of money possibly making slightly less money. If biggy was on here every day ranting in all-caps about the value of his gold bars depreciating then I wouldn't give a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut about that either.

[biggytitbo]

I don;t think thats a viable model because a lot of this content is essentially recurring programming that people consume amonst a variety of other things on youtube, there's patreon which can help a bit but hardly any of these channels are either big enough, comprehensive enough or productive enough to actually support a direct funding model without a big network managing it. I watch say 2 dozen channels regularly, if i was to pay directly for them that would have to drop considerably, i just wouldnt be able to justify paying out for all these seperate thingsand I'm sure this would be the same for most of them.

[Phil_A]

For that sort of thing nothing else remotely compares to youtube for reach and amount of people, so I imagine its kind of a chicken and egg situation whereby any potential competitor could never reach any kind of critical mass for it to be viable. It took youtube a good decade before they made any profit after all.

That's the thing, for the majority of people youtube really is the only place they go to for videos. Other similar sites, even ones like dailymotion which have been around a similar length of time, get a tiny fraction of the audience. For most of these channels, the piddling number of views they would get on alternative platform would make it not worth the trouble of shifting all their content elsewhere. Youtube is where their audience is.

[biggytitbo]

Jim Streling doesnt take ads on his youtube channel, relying on patreon. He is one of the few who are big enough, and preusmably have another other income streams to make it work. His take on this mainly focuses on how shitty google are behaving in not communicating changes that potentially cost people their whole channels - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYinPJTxBNU

[touchingcloth]

I don;t think thats a viable model because a lot of this content is essentially recurring programming that people consume amonst a variety of other things on youtube, there's patreon which can help a bit but hardly any of these channels are either big enough, comprehensive enough or productive enough to actually support a direct funding model without a big network managing it. I watch say 2 dozen channels regularly, if i was to pay directly for them that would have to drop considerably, i just wouldnt be able to justify paying out for all these seperate thingsand I'm sure this would be the same for most of them.

The channels could still be free for the most part, with premium content and Patreon/Kickstarter/whatever funding drives paying the producers' ways. You might pay towards a handful of those two dozen channels, whereas other people would each pay towards a different handful.

To go back to Herring, how many people on CaB routinely watch or listen to his content compared to how many pay a pound a month to gofasterstripe or who contributed to his AIOTM Kickstarter? Or this place - how many put their hands in their PayPals and bung Neil a few digital coins each month EVEN THOUGH YOU ALL FUCKING SHOUKD YOU TIGHT CUNTS ITS A JUNGLE OUT THERE HES LIVING OFF BEANS AND THEY DONT EVEN MEAN HEINZ OUT IN THE JUNGLE

[Dex Sawash]

Are the Hysterical Literature videos going to get pulled off (steady)
I have not watched all of those yet.

[Gwen Taylor on ITV]

But let's not downplay this - it really is a mess and jobs are absolutely on the line. If my boss decided to comprehensively overhaul how I earned my salary, resulting in it dropping to about a quarter of what it had been up to that point WITHOUT GIVING ME ANY KIND OF ADVANCED WARNING, I expect I'd be pretty bloody ticked off.

Not to sound too pedantic but YouTube don't employ these people making videos.  There's no contract between them and while there's no harm in complaining to try to get things changed, the content creators should have been aware of the risk that their entire business model is based on a particular ad algorithm at one point in time and the only way to hedge that risk is to branch out into other areas/platforms.

I know it's a bit of a cop-out to say 'well, this is just what Google do', but frankly, this is just what Google do.  I think the onus is on the video-making people to develop a more robust business model if they've decided that making videos is their new livelihood.

[Barry Admin]

This is why all this started, by the way: http://adage.com/article/digital/super-bowl-ads-show-youtube-videos-promoting-terror/307956/

Worth bearing that in mind, given that it's quickly and inevitably been turned into yet another way to demonise the left.

[Cuellar]

For that sort of thing nothing else remotely compares to youtube for reach and amount of people, so I imagine its kind of a chicken and egg situation whereby any potential competitor could never reach any kind of critical mass for it to be viable. It took youtube a good decade before they made any profit after all.

For gaming, Twitch is already much bigger than YouTube.

[biggytitbo]

Twitch is specifically for streaming isnt it?

[Cuellar]

Not exclusively.

[Big Mclargehuge]

It sounds to me like what these youtube sorts need is a Union heavily focussed on protecting the interests of the creator. even if that union only consists of half a dozen "Top" youtube people and a handful of law savvy sorts...Its guaranteed that a steady and heavy campaign of "Blacking out" youtube for weeks at a time while continuing to provide content on other sites (Like Patreon or vimeo)  will eventually strong-arm google into doing something...either that or they'll just sod them all off and make Barrysbumminggamesxoxoxoxo1966ab the next pewdiepie out of spite...

[newbridge]

IT IS MY CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHT TO GET PAID BY YOUTUBE TO MAKE VIDEOS OF MYSELF PLAYING VIDEO GAMES AND COMPLAINING ABOUT HOW SJWS ARE SO SENSITIVE AND WHINEY AND ENTITLED!!!

(Note to right-wing dum dums: YouTube is doing this based on what advertisers want. Jimmy Kimmel is the host of a major network show on ABC. Advertisers are never going to stop wanting to monetize his videos.)

[Goldentony]

I spent 25 or so years what the end of Wonder Boy was like, the arcade version. I posted about it in the TECHNOLOGY forum and decided to have a watch on Youtube. It was oddly relaxing hearing that old familiar music again over and over, seeing those stages in front of me. Imagining the smell of cigarette smoke and fried onions in the distance, coins clicking against each other. That familiar old feeling.

Anyway, it's about 40 of the same stage, with the same end of level boss and at the end of world 6 you just hug a princess and it says GAME OVER in big fuck off pink letters. Absolute waste of a fucking hour and 25 years before that. Absolute shit.

For that alone, I believe Youtube should be abolished.

[Barry Admin]

I like the bit where he rants about CNN monetising tragedy. I've had to watch the whole thing three times to try and get my hungover head around all the problems I have with it. He's always struck me as a decent guy who has rightly complained about people on YouTube monetising tragedy, IIRC, but now his position is that it's a free speech issue and everyone should be able to monetise tragedy, because CNN.

He does make a valid broader point about how advertisers don't actually care about ethical concerns, but hey, that's advertising.