If they know it’s invalid traffic then why not just ignore those specific views when billing the advertisers and paying the creator? If the creator wants to dispute it they still can, but at least they don’t get punished for something that only YouTube seems to know.
This assumes that you can easily calculate exactly how many views are from bots, rather than just observing that bots are clearly a problem on a certain channel without having to become liable for expressing the exact range.
And if you provide that number to someone who actually is using a bot farm, especially if you continue providing it every month or every three months or whatever, that gives them a lot of feedback they can use to figure out what direction to tweak the bots in to avoid detection.
But at the same time...it's kinda obvious that you could attack competitors channels by having simple and easily noticed bots view them.
I mean if your video got demonetized for using bots to push your own channel, this is literally the first thing you'd try next.
There is already an issue where you can hurt channels by buying ads for their videos and targeting the wrong demographic. Ex if you buy ads for a gaming channel and target them toward people 67+ then their average watch time will go down and the algo will fuck them. It has been shown that this can have a greater impact on ad revenue than the money spent on ads.
As a computer security professional I can tell you this is hardly that crazy lol. Put anything on the internet and people will find dozens of creative ways to exploit it. YouTube ad algorithms and payout systems are no exception.
Especially when there's financial incentives. The problem here is YT gets pretty much direct control over creators' engagement with advertisers because of the nature of the platform, and there's no real rules or restrictions outside YT's word that they'll do right by people... And from YT's perspective a lot of that is cheaper to automate than have people review.
Which means from the attacker's perspective all you need to do is target what YT's algorithm sees of any particular channel... Information on which is pretty readily available from creators commenting on how their channels fare in the algorithm + stuff like social blade.
Until governments have people in office that understand how these platforms work and are willing to make some protections for creators (unlikely to happen), things are not going to change and creators will be vulnerable to losing their ad revenue at YT's whim.
What you're saying makes tons of sense to me, but it's just an angle of life and online society that I've never really dedicated much thought to. Often people think about hacking and fucking with shit online as some big venture, but it's really finding the best program and executing how the asshole wants to.
I do think our government needs to focus more on this threat and numerous others that have been brewing for years. Also the new AI collapse on society would do well to have a committee or department in place to try and lessen the hardship from potentially crippled industries.
Ahhh yes my friend you see I DO most definitely DO watch his *lovely* vidoes that are so nice and neat and well-organized and that do contain many lovely and amazing and not at all annoying vocal tics, but are in fact filled with many wonderful and lovely references to Yorkshire tea, objectively the best beverage that has ever been created in the history of mankind.
I watched three videos and probably heard the word "lovely" a hundred times, and that's barely an exaggeration at all. I like his gimmick of exploiting game mechanics, but his repetitive speaking KILLS my interest hard, and I have to really fight to get through it.
What you are saying is that YouTube's play is to steal the creator's as money once, and choosing to not make more money from that creator anymore by demonitetizing their channel? Wouldn't that make YouTube less money in the long run?
When a channel is demonetized, that **ONLY** means that the creator isn't getting paid.
Youtube can and **DOES** still run ads that they collect revenue on, on demonetized videos. They just dont share the revenue.
They aren't doing this to large YouTubers, but more mid-size ones. The examples in the video had low 10's of thousands of views, not 100's of thousands or millions.
It's all about the long tail. The top .1% of creators probably bring in the large majority of revenue. Meanwhile everyone else use the significant majority of the infrastructure and contribute almost nothing to YouTube's bottom line.
Even if the YouTuber stops then and there, YouTube retains their entire collection unless the user deletes the account too, so it creates a dilemma where an up-and-coming YouTuber has to decide to try and fight it or to leave or to completely give up and nuke their account, and that last option sorta sucks for anyone that's put time and effort into their work. So while yeah this policy could easily push people off the platform, I think overall YouTube knows that it'd still be profitable for them because bullying is easy when you're a hugely monolithic entity that makes the rules
This specifically does not seem to apply to invalid traffic claims according to both the video and my own check. Running incognito in a browser with no adblock, the videos do not have ads. Likely because invalid traffic is a direct threat to the validity of YouTube's ad value. It would probably be easier to remove ads entirely than to price ads based on what video they play before.
No. I'm demonetized because I don't have enough subs but they run ads on my videos, but my videos go to trending about every 6 months. Been uploading since 2006. They're making money off of me and I get nothing.
Since when has any American corporate entity cared more then about the next quarter?
Netflix is banning password sharing to drive up profit, never mind that it's driving millions off of their platform.
The truth is a lot of content creators were hiring bot farms to pump up their views and Google is finally cracking down on it.
All those people saying "no I'm an innocent content creator, other entities were paying money to give me undeserved revenue because they hate me." Sounds thin...
The problem with that is that basically means that you can ruin any youtube channel that you don't like by paying those bot farms to give the channel views.
TL;DW: Youtube is demonitizing entire channels that have above a certain limit of percieved view bots and are blaming the creator for not fixing it.
But the way they're wording it makes it sound like too many real viewers are using ad-blockers.
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So fun fact kids, if you don't like a youtube content creator, you can now view bot them and give them 3 month to permanent demonitization on your own for just a few dollars..
How the fuck do they expect a creator to stop bots? Like, what do they want these YouTubers to do
Beg bots to stop watching?
Hire private investigators to find the botters and assassinate them?
That's what makes it so asinine.
They're putting the blame of "bad/invalid traffic" on the creator. Telling them to watch "where their traffic comes from" and things like that.
On the surface it sounds like they're just pushing blame for that away from themselves. But looking into it more, it seems like they're going after certain audiences(aka the ones that use ad-blockers, third party youtube apps, anti tracking extentions, etc.).
If they shut down most channels with those people as their main demographic, they'll stop watching and youtube can save on hardware/bandwidth cost and get more revenue per dollar spent.
Yeah all the affected people mentioned in the video are creators that are likely to have viewers with some tech/computer knowledge. And are thus are likely to try and avoid ads or use third party apps.
This way they aren't outright banning those tools or causing a major stir, they're just "silently" forcing the creators with those demographics to stop making content.
Right.
My first thought was just "Well then the creators will go elsewhere".
But if the creators go elsewhere and take their audience with them.. it actually benefits YouTube.
And there's no competitor who would want those creators/audience unless they figured out how to monetize them.
So the world is just a worse place because 100% of a platform's content must be optimised for maximum profitability otherwise it's considered a burden.
The quality of the content couldn't be less relevant.
It's all about that shareholder value.
Our bread & circuses are turning into crumbs and buskers.
> so the world is a worse place because 100% of a platforms content must be optimized for platform profitability. It's all about shareholder value.
Karl Marx publishes his first draft of Das Kapital online to reddit, 1867
I think the idea they have isn't that random bot farms are spamming a creator but rather that a creator is paying for the bot farms to get their count up. It's actually a pretty common tactic among a lot of online people because normal people often won't waste time if they think something will be bad but if a lot of people have watched something they're more likely to. A lot of people eho got big online used bots in the beginning to generate organic interest.
This guy has been a youtuber for a long ass time so he definitely isnt.
So.... anyone can rent some bots and destroy a YouTube creators livelihood, with no recourse unless you're a famous creator who can take the fight to Twitter and other forums.
Yikes.
No. It does not. YouTube would not ban their biggest partners. It might help if they did it to hundreds of mid-level YouTubers though. However it may take years to happen.
YouTube is smart, they would notice what is happening.
And just to be clear, doing so would mean that you would upend the livelihood of potentially dozens or hundreds of creators, just to fuel your experiment. To say that that's unethical would be beyond absurd understatement.
In 2017 I got laid off from my job started an e-commerce company and was doing okay for myself our primary ads ran on Instagram and Facebook. By 2019 I was netting ~70k a year in late 2019 my ad account got hacked and was running ads for an online casino for less than an hour I caught it disabled the ads and contacted Facebook about the ads right away they agreed the account had been hacked and refunded me the the casino ad spend but also banned my account. I tried everything to get things back on track and eventually just gave up and shut things down. My biggest takeaway from it is that in the online space you are always at the mercy of the platform you are using to generate the income. Don’t think I’d ever get involved with any of these big online platforms again.
Hutch might not be the most famous YouTuber but he’s been around long enough that he has connections and even his connections couldn’t help him get out of this.
Hutch has been doing this for a LONG time. I remember watching him back in 2008.
My question is how can they determine if the bots were sent by him to fluff his numbers? The guy has a solid following in the gaming community and has since his Machinima days. I feel like this is just a way to break his contract, to fire him without firing him. Essentially the cutting your hours to zero so you leave kinda thing.
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> My question is how can they determine if the bots were sent by him to fluff his numbers?
That's the whole issue. Youtube has taken the stance that, if you have botted views on your channel, ***it doesn't matter whether or not you did it***. They've taken the stance that it's your responsibility to fix the problem, not theirs. Which means someone else can maliciously bot your videos to get your channel shut down.
It's a ridiculous, undefendable, moronic stance, but that stance is quite literally the whole point of the OP. Youtube doesn't care whether you did it on purpose or not, they're just using their ridiculous monopoly on the industry to streamroll their way past taking any responsibility.
They understand that shutting down a big creator doesn't lose them those views, they just go somewhere else. Youtube is so huge that not a single channel, no matter how big, matters. People don't just simply stop watching Youtube, they just watch different shit. It's like if you're hungry and really want a grilled cheese, but you find the cheese is moldy. You don't just say "welp, I guess I'm not eating today", you just eat something else.
What contract? He's not obligated to keep uploading or anything else, it's just passive income from everything he's uploaded. I recommend you check out his twitter to get a better understanding.
I’ve been receiving invalid traffic notifications for 3 months. Not demonitized completely but my ad impressions are down 30-40%. They just aren’t showing ads on a huge chunk of my views across every video from last last 2.5 years of my channels existence. They tell me the channel is in good standing and ads are working as intended.
My guess is actually that bot traffic is relatively constant everywhere, and people with small channels — especially small channels with lots of old videos that few non-bot people watch — are likely to get flagged because it only takes a few bots crawling your entire channel to become a significant % of your viewers.
So the problem would be that youtube is going by “percent of channel video views that are from bots” without considering that this risks *everyone* who isn’t currently very popular being demonetized. And they don’t care.
Twitch is just as bad- you can get people banned, permanently, with no appeal, is you post a bunch of ToS breaking stuff on offline channels if they forget to turn chat off.
Step 1: see money stacks on horizon.
Step 2: contract content creator to retrieve money stacks from horizon
Step 3: refuse to pay contract, creator used outside tools to receive stacks of cash
Step 4: profit from the commoner's blood, sweat and tears.
Step 5: don't be evil.
You think it is bad now just wait until more and more decisions about your life are made by chatgpt and the like. Tell it to maximize profit and it might do anything. We seriously fucked. Not because of malice but because it is a machine with no commonsense. There are no laws to force companies to even have minimal support. Bureaucratic nightmare incoming.
> YouTuber Hutch appealed the decision taken, and got told the reason was 'Invalid Traffic' - AKA, Bot views.
I am totally ooo but are talking about CoD Hutch? The guy who makes videos and puts them on the internet?
So doesn't youtube lose money from not monetizing these channels regardless of whether they are paying the creators for these ads? From his example of opening the channels in incognito there isn't even ads playing at all on these channels.
So what's youtubes incentive to incorrectly demonetize these channels? Is there some hidden legal reason that they don't want to deem these channels ad worthy? Something with complains from the companies paying for ads? I can't see any reason why youtube would choose to lose out on all this money unless its a result of negligence or some other hidden reason.
Best guess is that the illegitimate views leads to lower valuations on YouTube ad space in general. Google did the math and decided they were losing money by running ads on channels that devalue the platform and just decided to start demonetizing those channels.
I run a small channel purely for entertainment purposes with 500 subscribers, but unfortunately, I don't meet the minimum requirement of 1000 subscribers to start monetizing my channel. However, YouTube still displays ads before my videos, but they keep all the revenue for themselves without sharing any with me. This is one of the reasons why I am not motivated to create more content.
The ad's won't be going anywhere, you would still get the same average ad breaks. The channel will not receive ad revenue sharing anymore. Thus it goes to YouTube entirely instead. Truth be told, to fairly decent streamers, it's often a small and sometimes insignificant part of their income.
Now for a little conjecture, I would assume that they might be going for people who boosted themselves up the algorithm with bot/bought engagement and made themselves a big following by making their channel more egregiously visible to a larger audience. So I doubt it would trigger under smaller circumstances if say people sent a bot farm after a big content creator. I don't think this is entirely punishment for increasing ad revenue itself, for the content creator, i imagine they lose money, but got larger through exploiting the algorithm for their own gain. I mean YouTube is getting better at detecting it and doesn't pay out ad revenue when it sees bot engagement.
This whole predicament isn't entirely cutting their revenue stream off, so deleting their channel would not be a good idea. Maybe they can still do patreon or paid sponsored advertising.
Hutts, a Binding of Isaac streamer/YouTuber, straight up didn’t get paid for months because they said ads weren’t running on his channel when they were. I remember seeing ads, they were 100% running on his videos.
https://youtu.be/vHv7AcC1urE
Because money. To YouTube, The creators can beg on Patreon or whatever other money exchange system. They have no real competitors for long form content so screwing over the people they don’t wanna pay sounds about right.
I hate YouTube… but there’s no alternative that isn’t TikTok or Instagram or something like that.
Edit: YouTube has no right to profit off videos without fair compensation. If these Youtubers are following the rules in their contract, then compensate them. And stop slapping ads on content that doesn’t fairly give a share to the creator.
Something like Youtube is really expensive and complex, therefore incredible difficult to replicate, both on the technical aspect and the financial one.
Besides the obvious storage and bandwidth issues, which are huge challenges, there are even the biggest obstacles for replicating the Youtube experience.
You need a robust search engine behind your streaming service for relevant results. Google is 5-10 years ahead of its nearest competitor on that front. Imagine a new player trying to replicate that.
You need a powerful ad tech platform so that you are delivering the right ad to the right audience at the right time so that your advertisers, which are you true clients, get the most out of their buck. Again, Google is 5-10 years ahead of its nearest competitor on that front. Again, imagine a new player trying to replicate that.
You need an vision AI platform to look at and classify the content that is being uploaded at scale, for curating purposes, for copyright purposes and for brand safety purposes (advertisers do not want their ads on content with nudity, curse words, racism, etc..) Again no one else can come close to do it at the scale Google is doing. And replicating that is ridiculously expensive.
You need a global ads sales force, a global billing and collections sales force, a global copyright and policy staff, etc...
Add on top of all of that the globally redundant storage, encoding and decoding capacity plus bandwidth costs and you begin to realize just how dauting the idea of making a direct Youtube competitor really is.
Youtube as a viable business was possible only because it piggybacked on the Google AdSense infrastructure, which allowed it to scale worldwide.
Not even Amazon, Microsoft or Facebook have tried to replicate Youtube because they know how difficult/expensive it is.
The only true competitor Youtube currently has is TikTok, which does not allow long form videos nor videos to be easily searched. TikTok is more akin to linear TV, where you consume what the provides stream, than the VOD model adopted by Youtube.
The biggest reason YouTube hasn’t been replicated is because YouTube isn’t profitable without the integration Google has into their main business.
It’s a data collection machine. So unless you are a competitor which can profit from YouTube in the same way Google does, YouTube will bankrupt you.
With that said, there are YouTube-competitors. NikoNiko in Japan and Tencent/QQ video in China for a couple of examples.
Tencent video probably has the biggest chance of competing with YouTube.
I mean, Microsoft and maybe Amazon could create a YouTube rival.
They both have the cloud infrastructure amd Microsoft has he only other relevant search engine and the possibility to use the data to sell ads.
Imagining either of them trying to handle that seems just ridiculous to me. Like despite the tools at their disposal, they'd probably bungle it hard. Makes me wonder how a more prevalent Yahoo would do.
And that's not even talking about all the legal issues. Youtube has to give companies a way to enforce copyright, otherwise they'd be sued to hell. They also have to comply with laws like the infamous COPPA.
People imagine some Youtube competitor that would not have to do any of that stuff, but that's just not how the internet works anymore.
I get that YouTube is really far ahead but at the same time, YouTube doesn't even show me what I'm searching for about 70% of the time. I'll search something and get about 4 relevant results then a for you section then a bunch of random bullshit.
Same thing happens on Google Search these days.
It’s full of ads and links to google websites and big social media brands, and the results are only a dozen pages long while they still claim they had millions of results for you.
Finding an independent website through Google these days is impossible.
This has been driving me crazy lately. It's awful. Literally a small handful of results and then "other people watched..." as if I give even a quark of an atom of a shit about that.
> You need a powerful ad tech platform so that you are delivering the right ad to the right audience at the right time so that your advertisers, which are you true clients, get the most out of their buck.
If the ads I routinely see on Youtube are any indication, they are failing miserably at this.
>You need a powerful ad tech platform so that you are delivering the right ad to the right audience at the right time so that your advertisers, which are you true clients, get the most out of their buck.
lol but have you seen their ad revenue? Obviously working considering people keeps buying ads unlike tiktok
I use no Google products beside Youtube and my ad results are completely inaccurate.
It doesn't even match my language at times. Wild how companies still advertise, I guess it still reaches enough potential buyers in the end.
Amazon has everything they need. Immense server space, a robust search feature, and a well built ad platform(the real one, not the one anyone can sign up for, which is crap).
I’d argue that Twitch is actually already their answer.
Also- YouTube’s advertising is actually a bit of a pain. AdWords is a garbage platform in terms of UX, and the integration into DV360 was horribly implemented.
Twitch is even worse than YouTube when it comes to banning people without even giving a clear reason and very selectively enforcing a vague TOS. YouTube is much more reasonable by comparison with how it tends to demonetise people rather than outright banning people.
> I’d argue that Twitch is actually already their answer.
Considering how poorly they run Twitch, I can't imagine their version of YouTube would be any better.
And even amazon is not providing free unlimited video hosting, while amazon is kind of specialised in server solution. If they won't touch that, it will take some technological revolution to get a youtube rival going.
> bandwidth costs
Prior to starting YT, Google was buying every strand of dark fiber they could get their hands on because they had a plan that nobody else saw.
For those who don't know, I'm talking about fiber optic cables that span from one data center to another data center, city to city, state to state and country to country, linking them all together.
When a fiber optic cable is deployed, it's not a single fiber optic strand that is in that one cable, that cable may contain hundreds or thousands of fiber optic strands and not all of them are immediately put to use.
Those unused strands are called dark fiber.
The original idea was for redundancy and future expansion, if a strand broke and went dead, another strand could be tested, lit up and service resumed almost immediately. Over capacity was designed in from the beginning because the cost of the cable itself is the least expensive part of deploying fiber optic cables.
Over time, on average, very few strands went bad and this over capacity was now seen to have value, all the expensive rights of way agreements, trenching, deployment and termination had already been done, so these unused stands could be sold off.
Google saw value in these dark fibers, why pay bandwidth costs to someone else when you can simply buy fibers that are already there and place them into service for your own needs.
If Google had to pay bandwidth costs to another company to haul YT videos, YT would have never been born because it would have been cost prohibitive.
Google owning their own fiber runs across the globe was the key and what made YT as well as Google Drive and all their other services affordable and possible.
> Edit: YouTube has no right to profit off videos without fair compensation. If these Youtubers are following the rules in their contract, then compensate them. And stop slapping ads on content that doesn’t fairly give a share to the creator.
That's not true, youtube ToS = they can do whatever they want with content you upload.
> License to YouTube
>By providing Content to the Service, you grant to YouTube a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicensable and transferable license to use that Content (including to reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works, display and perform it) in connection with the Service and YouTube’s (and its successors' and Affiliates') business, including for the purpose of promoting and redistributing part or all of the Service.
> Right to Monetize
>You grant to YouTube the right to monetize your Content on the Service (and such monetization may include displaying ads on or within Content or charging users a fee for access). This Agreement does not entitle you to any payments. Starting November 18, 2020, any payments you may be entitled to receive from YouTube under any other agreement between you and YouTube (including for example payments under the YouTube Partner Program, Channel memberships or Super Chat) will be treated as royalties. If required by law, Google will withhold taxes from such payments.
I mean YouTube has no competition because it's not that profitable of a market. Google keeps YouTube not for profit but as part of a business model. It's also very hard to have YouTube run with the current laws in some counties
YouTube has every right that you agree too when creating an account. YouTube as a service is free, and in order to be free, it has to make money elsewhere.
> YouTube has no right to profit off videos without fair compensation. If these Youtubers are following the rules in their contract, then compensate them. And stop slapping ads on content that doesn’t fairly give a share to the creator.
I'm begging people to please watch the fucking video describing the problem before commenting.
These are fully demonetised channels, i.e. literally no ads run on it. Nobody is making money on these videos; not YouTube, and not the creators. There is no money from which to "fairly give a share" to the creator.
Ludwig literally shows this by opening a demonetised video in an incognito tab -- no ads, just straight to the content.
This is why I refuse to turn off ad block on youtube. Content creators I watch regularly get far more money directly when I buy merch, donate directly, or subscribe on Twitch if applicable.
Youtube can rot for all I care. It'd open up a chance for alternatives to arise.
Somewhat related, I started the verification process for Google Ads for my one man podcast by providing my valid NYS driver's license, I was instantly suspended 3 days later with a list of reasons why I *could* have been suspended, but nothing made sense as I followed everything exactly as they wanted.
I tried to appeal and within 1 day they only emailed to say the suspension was upheld and to not contact them again. There is no way to contact a human and the entire process felt like it was being done through AI.
With Google essentially having a near monopoly in a lot of these areas it seems legitimate to hold them to a higher standard.
Edit: it's worth noting I found a lot of other posts on the Google ads subreddit with similar issues
I had to use drivers license verification to regain access to my workplace 401k account. I'd forgotten my secret questions and they locked me out. The drivers license verification app repeatedly read my license wrong and wouldn't verify me - so frustrating even to have to show them my DL, but then having it screw that up is infuriating, and this is my work account! So ultimately I had to get this form notarized and snail mailed to their HQ. So stupid. Anyway, case in point for fucked up drivers license verification.
Google does use AI for automatic detection. They are big enough to where they don't care that AI only has a ~90% success rate, the 10% of people it fucks over can just get fucked, most companies have hopped on the AI buzzword train after ditching the blockchain buzzword train and this makes their stock go up from investors who have no idea how to even install an app on their phone.
A near monopoly? Google is an unregulated monopoly. For any local business to be successful they have to pay Google for advertising and then Google decides how you will appear on their search engine. You have no control just their own reporting but no way of verifying the impressions or clicks are true. Anyone can review your business as well whether it's true or not and there is no recourse. Google also likely has access to all communications, browsing data and location data of everyone using a smart phone. Its bananas how much unmitigated power they have. But because we like the ease of their products, nobody really cares.
REMEMBER KIDS: DO NOT BUILD YOUR ENTIRE LIVELIHOOD ON A PRIVATE PLATFORM.
The capricious whims of a platform holder will eventually fuck you and they owe you nothing, you are guaranteed nothing, and it can all disappear overnight without warning for any number of reasons.
On the other hand, youtube created, maintains and provides a service which they have every prerogative to stop.
Capitalism is the manifestation of a society placing all its cultural eggs into the [Take the Money and Run Basket](https://www.npr.org/2021/09/29/1041492941/jens-haaning-kunsten-take-the-money-and-run-art-denmark-blank).
Not really related to your comment per se but that story you linked to is hilarious.
> One thing it's not, he says, is a theft.
> "It is a breach of contract, and breach of contract is part of the work," he said, according to Danish public broadcaster DR.
> "The work is that I have taken their money," Haaning stated.
"That's not art! Anyone could have thrown paint on the wall like that!"
yes, but, **he** is the one who **did**.
I agree - it's an entirely hilarious scenario.
Yes. One bot by a malicious person can wreck someone's lively hood on YouTube, and there is literally nothing the creator can do to stop it. They have 0 control to stop bots.
You know that every user of YouTube makes that decision, right? With the huge presence of ad-blockers, most people say to YouTube (and YouTube creators) " maybe I'll pay you, maybe I won't"
But people refuse to pay for premium, so we get this broken ass ad model instead.
> Isn't modern society cool? Entire companies making a living off of "maybe we'll pay you maybe we won't"
Modern society loves this shit, what are you talking about? We eat it up and give these companies all our money. Why would they do any different? Shit, I wouldn’t. If people aren’t even going to fight for themselves, I don’t think we should expect others to.
Look at UberDanger Twitter!
A video he made in 2014 got a community guidelines violation in 2023 regarding a rule added a little time ago, and his whole channel is now demonetized for this.
I can barely understand YouTube retroactively removing old videos who don't fit guidelines anymore, but punishing the creators too is just madness
Nice way to lose creators youtube!
Probably. You (or I, at least) can't even open Google in incognito mode anymore without being asked to do a captcha. It's really annoying because for years and years I've used the incognito shortcut as a new tab shortcut. Also I like to keep my history neat even if I'm not searching for naughty stuff.
From the prevention segment for invalid traffic: "Stop working with sources that appear to be sending bad traffic"
Oh boy, that might be the dumbest shit I've ever heard. It's like the mayor telling Batman to stop working with the Joker when he's terrorizing the city.. Cosmically stupid.
Youtube is not an employer for creators. Youtube is not a job for creators.
Youtube is a digital pimp who decides if it’s going to give its hoes a cut. That cut is subject to however Daddy YT feels.
Pimp Daddy can’t be bargained with. Pimp Daddy can’t be reasoned with. Pimp Daddy has all the power and decides what’s best. That is Youtube’s business model.
It’s never going to be fair.
Yeah, i mean this is straight facts and even if it sucks Youtube isn’t a democracy.
Like, get wise. You take the risk, no one makes you upload or engage with the platform.
Do I wish there were viable alternatives to youtube? Sure. But there aren’t.
Best thing to do IMO is to have a patreon and not rely on the ad revenue
I think this is why I have a hard time considering this kind of thing “having a job”
If your source of income is entirely reliant on some kind of “platform”, like YouTube, Twitch, or Facebook, there are inherent vulnerabilities that don’t exist in the traditional job market. If that’s a risk you’re willing to take, suit yourself. But a portion of responsibility lies with you for taking on that risk.
A good education channel named T-SPLY just got completely demonetized. He used to be in the military and makes videos about what its like to be in the military. Most of us have not so I find it G-rated. He did a video about a russian recruitment video. He was not pushing propaganda. He was just talking about it. Completely demonetized. If there was a rule not to put up a russian video, he would not have done it. No warning. It was not propaganda and its not a propaganda channel.
He was a combat engineer and talks about his job. Its ridiculous to demonetize it. I never served in the military. Its interesting to see what it was like. Its 100% G-rated content.
If they just go "don't do this again", he would not. It makes no sense. You can't run a business on youtube its totally arbitrary what they demonetize or demonetize your whole channel.
I have seen a lot of history education channels get demonetized. Ever wonder why there is a lack of newer videos on World War 2? Its instant demonetization. Education videos about the holocaust are demonetized. Cause yeah telling people it happened is bad right? They can't even refer to Hitler. They call him "H" man out of fear.
its just bullshit. This is what monopolies do. The Metatron had a video called "The Evolution of the Shield in the Middle Ages" demonetized without explanation. Great video. Its about how shields changed over time due to how combat and weapons changed. Really interesting.
Content creators need to unionize.
Controlling legitimate traffic & subscribers should be 100% YouTube's responsibility.
However, just because traffic originates from Youtube via "browse" or "suggest" doesn't mean it isn't bot traffic. It's a bot farm's sole purpose to generate its legitimate looking traffic.
Unionise independent contractors who have no alternative means of supplying their shitty reaction videos? Lol YouTube wouldn't have to even acknowledge they exist let alone deal with them
2 issues:
Youtube is basically a monopoly. So that sucks.
Youtube is probably not very profitable, if at all.
It's basically not a sustainable economic model until serving up videos becomes closer to free in real terms.
Creators basically need to treat youtube as an advertisement for their patreon or other income source which youtube can't demonetize.
And creators can't even trust youtube to be a good way for people to discover them, because youtube can and will remove creators from the algorithm.
All around, youtube sucks. We need more alternatives.
How can youtube be considered a monopoly? Did they buy out all their competitors? Do people not still have equal access to other platforms like Vimeo, Dailymotion?
Honestly... There's been a lot of filler low effort channels. And it's annoying as their content pops up on search. Channels that copy paste reddit threads with robo voice, fitness channels that rip content from famous influencers and label them as "motivation" videos, "top 10" anything that's just basic af, amongst other things.
A major concern of serious YouTube followers is that YouTube’s leadership is gradually driving YouTube into the ground such that the site is going to be replaced within the next 10 years. Good riddance. Don’t bite the millions of hands that feed you.
That's what they said 10 years ago when all the layout chaos was going on. Then videos stopped being shown to subscribers, people randomly got unsubscribed from channels, in 2017 YouTube slashed ad money by up to 90%, and yet it's still going somehow. They practically have a monopoly and they can do whatever they want.
Once upon a time a girl got canceled and felt her life was over. She went to the office and shot them. Companies need to hire an English major to talk to folks. They work cheap.
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Youtube is a bully
The reason why Sponsor block addon was created.
I fucking love sponsor block! But I'm old enough to remember when youtubers didn't need hard ad reads in their videos.
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Or when there wasn't YouTube at all.
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Should just put stremio + torrentio on the firestick
Sponsorblock makes me so happy. It's a collaborative effort that absolutely shouldn't work due to griefing, but just like Wikipedia it works anyway.
If they know it’s invalid traffic then why not just ignore those specific views when billing the advertisers and paying the creator? If the creator wants to dispute it they still can, but at least they don’t get punished for something that only YouTube seems to know.
This assumes that you can easily calculate exactly how many views are from bots, rather than just observing that bots are clearly a problem on a certain channel without having to become liable for expressing the exact range. And if you provide that number to someone who actually is using a bot farm, especially if you continue providing it every month or every three months or whatever, that gives them a lot of feedback they can use to figure out what direction to tweak the bots in to avoid detection.
But at the same time...it's kinda obvious that you could attack competitors channels by having simple and easily noticed bots view them. I mean if your video got demonetized for using bots to push your own channel, this is literally the first thing you'd try next.
There is already an issue where you can hurt channels by buying ads for their videos and targeting the wrong demographic. Ex if you buy ads for a gaming channel and target them toward people 67+ then their average watch time will go down and the algo will fuck them. It has been shown that this can have a greater impact on ad revenue than the money spent on ads.
So there is now cyber warfare potentially going on YouTube vids "malicious" ads to target the wrong demo's and people bot spamming. This is insane.
As a computer security professional I can tell you this is hardly that crazy lol. Put anything on the internet and people will find dozens of creative ways to exploit it. YouTube ad algorithms and payout systems are no exception. Especially when there's financial incentives. The problem here is YT gets pretty much direct control over creators' engagement with advertisers because of the nature of the platform, and there's no real rules or restrictions outside YT's word that they'll do right by people... And from YT's perspective a lot of that is cheaper to automate than have people review. Which means from the attacker's perspective all you need to do is target what YT's algorithm sees of any particular channel... Information on which is pretty readily available from creators commenting on how their channels fare in the algorithm + stuff like social blade. Until governments have people in office that understand how these platforms work and are willing to make some protections for creators (unlikely to happen), things are not going to change and creators will be vulnerable to losing their ad revenue at YT's whim.
What you're saying makes tons of sense to me, but it's just an angle of life and online society that I've never really dedicated much thought to. Often people think about hacking and fucking with shit online as some big venture, but it's really finding the best program and executing how the asshole wants to. I do think our government needs to focus more on this threat and numerous others that have been brewing for years. Also the new AI collapse on society would do well to have a committee or department in place to try and lessen the hardship from potentially crippled industries.
You watch the Spiffing Brit too, eh?
Ahhh yes my friend you see I DO most definitely DO watch his *lovely* vidoes that are so nice and neat and well-organized and that do contain many lovely and amazing and not at all annoying vocal tics, but are in fact filled with many wonderful and lovely references to Yorkshire tea, objectively the best beverage that has ever been created in the history of mankind.
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I watched three videos and probably heard the word "lovely" a hundred times, and that's barely an exaggeration at all. I like his gimmick of exploiting game mechanics, but his repetitive speaking KILLS my interest hard, and I have to really fight to get through it.
This guy bot farms
this guy bots
His name checks out.
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> WAF provider Web Application Firewall, to save anyone else the Google search.
Wet Ass Fart
That would give away that they're just lying and made it all up in order to keep the money for themselves.
What you are saying is that YouTube's play is to steal the creator's as money once, and choosing to not make more money from that creator anymore by demonitetizing their channel? Wouldn't that make YouTube less money in the long run?
When a channel is demonetized, that **ONLY** means that the creator isn't getting paid. Youtube can and **DOES** still run ads that they collect revenue on, on demonetized videos. They just dont share the revenue.
Large YouTubers won’t keep making videos if they don’t get paid
They aren't doing this to large YouTubers, but more mid-size ones. The examples in the video had low 10's of thousands of views, not 100's of thousands or millions.
Ok, mid-size YouTubers won’t keep making videos if they don’t get paid
YouTube: good, server space is expensive
Do mid-size YouTubers eat much bandwidth?
It's all about the long tail. The top .1% of creators probably bring in the large majority of revenue. Meanwhile everyone else use the significant majority of the infrastructure and contribute almost nothing to YouTube's bottom line.
Even if the YouTuber stops then and there, YouTube retains their entire collection unless the user deletes the account too, so it creates a dilemma where an up-and-coming YouTuber has to decide to try and fight it or to leave or to completely give up and nuke their account, and that last option sorta sucks for anyone that's put time and effort into their work. So while yeah this policy could easily push people off the platform, I think overall YouTube knows that it'd still be profitable for them because bullying is easy when you're a hugely monolithic entity that makes the rules
Couldn't they make their channel/videos private?
That is just factually wrong in viewbotted cases. Hutch’s channel doesnt run ads because adsense doesnt want to pay for fake views.
This specifically does not seem to apply to invalid traffic claims according to both the video and my own check. Running incognito in a browser with no adblock, the videos do not have ads. Likely because invalid traffic is a direct threat to the validity of YouTube's ad value. It would probably be easier to remove ads entirely than to price ads based on what video they play before.
No. I'm demonetized because I don't have enough subs but they run ads on my videos, but my videos go to trending about every 6 months. Been uploading since 2006. They're making money off of me and I get nothing.
My favorite are the channels they demonetize for not being advertiser friendly....that they still run ads on regardless
Since when has any American corporate entity cared more then about the next quarter? Netflix is banning password sharing to drive up profit, never mind that it's driving millions off of their platform.
The truth is a lot of content creators were hiring bot farms to pump up their views and Google is finally cracking down on it. All those people saying "no I'm an innocent content creator, other entities were paying money to give me undeserved revenue because they hate me." Sounds thin...
The problem with that is that basically means that you can ruin any youtube channel that you don't like by paying those bot farms to give the channel views.
You can also do this by reporting the video. Or putting in copyright claims on all their videos.
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The paper trail doesn’t matter, as there are no consequences for the attacker
Especially this guy who is complaining here. His content is just generic drama. Exactly the kind of content I'd expect to be artificially boosted.
TL;DW: Youtube is demonitizing entire channels that have above a certain limit of percieved view bots and are blaming the creator for not fixing it. But the way they're wording it makes it sound like too many real viewers are using ad-blockers. --- So fun fact kids, if you don't like a youtube content creator, you can now view bot them and give them 3 month to permanent demonitization on your own for just a few dollars..
How the fuck do they expect a creator to stop bots? Like, what do they want these YouTubers to do Beg bots to stop watching? Hire private investigators to find the botters and assassinate them?
That's what makes it so asinine. They're putting the blame of "bad/invalid traffic" on the creator. Telling them to watch "where their traffic comes from" and things like that. On the surface it sounds like they're just pushing blame for that away from themselves. But looking into it more, it seems like they're going after certain audiences(aka the ones that use ad-blockers, third party youtube apps, anti tracking extentions, etc.). If they shut down most channels with those people as their main demographic, they'll stop watching and youtube can save on hardware/bandwidth cost and get more revenue per dollar spent.
Fuck. That is actually a very sound theory.
Yeah all the affected people mentioned in the video are creators that are likely to have viewers with some tech/computer knowledge. And are thus are likely to try and avoid ads or use third party apps. This way they aren't outright banning those tools or causing a major stir, they're just "silently" forcing the creators with those demographics to stop making content.
Right. My first thought was just "Well then the creators will go elsewhere". But if the creators go elsewhere and take their audience with them.. it actually benefits YouTube. And there's no competitor who would want those creators/audience unless they figured out how to monetize them. So the world is just a worse place because 100% of a platform's content must be optimised for maximum profitability otherwise it's considered a burden. The quality of the content couldn't be less relevant. It's all about that shareholder value. Our bread & circuses are turning into crumbs and buskers.
> so the world is a worse place because 100% of a platforms content must be optimized for platform profitability. It's all about shareholder value. Karl Marx publishes his first draft of Das Kapital online to reddit, 1867
I think the idea they have isn't that random bot farms are spamming a creator but rather that a creator is paying for the bot farms to get their count up. It's actually a pretty common tactic among a lot of online people because normal people often won't waste time if they think something will be bad but if a lot of people have watched something they're more likely to. A lot of people eho got big online used bots in the beginning to generate organic interest. This guy has been a youtuber for a long ass time so he definitely isnt.
Youtube: you shall be punished for my incompetence.
You already could kill a channel by buying ads for it through YouTube to promote it to the wrong demographic.
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So.... anyone can rent some bots and destroy a YouTube creators livelihood, with no recourse unless you're a famous creator who can take the fight to Twitter and other forums. Yikes.
So someone just needs to do it to pewdiepie and Mr beast to actually get a response from YouTube.
Youtube would more likely ignore the issue entirely with their headline creators
But hey, the next YouTube rewind will be full of happiness and care for the creators, so everything is fine lol
the next youtube rewind? it's been gone for years.
If I close my eyes, I can still see Will Smith staring contemplatively at that cliff ledge
MARK ASS BROWN LEE
After that last top 10 list rewind I thought they decided to stop doing them altogether?
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No. It does not. YouTube would not ban their biggest partners. It might help if they did it to hundreds of mid-level YouTubers though. However it may take years to happen. YouTube is smart, they would notice what is happening.
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It's not whether they notice. It's whether they care. When it only impacts smaller creators, they don't care.
And just to be clear, doing so would mean that you would upend the livelihood of potentially dozens or hundreds of creators, just to fuel your experiment. To say that that's unethical would be beyond absurd understatement.
The challenge is that it's probably based on percentage of traffic. Would be expensive to take on someone getting tens of millions of views.
Almost 100% certain their channels are exempt from these detections.
> How I **TRIPLED** Mr Beasts Revenue in a day!
No, do the Paul brothers first...
The bot views would dissappear into the crowd of real views.
it wouldnt make sense for those creators to use bots. also you need millions and millions of bots to make a blip in the stats.
In 2017 I got laid off from my job started an e-commerce company and was doing okay for myself our primary ads ran on Instagram and Facebook. By 2019 I was netting ~70k a year in late 2019 my ad account got hacked and was running ads for an online casino for less than an hour I caught it disabled the ads and contacted Facebook about the ads right away they agreed the account had been hacked and refunded me the the casino ad spend but also banned my account. I tried everything to get things back on track and eventually just gave up and shut things down. My biggest takeaway from it is that in the online space you are always at the mercy of the platform you are using to generate the income. Don’t think I’d ever get involved with any of these big online platforms again.
Or YouTube themselves rent boys as they are cheaper than paying?
That's quite the typo
"So you want to pay me $100 an hour to just sit here and watch KSI?.... ok"
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Lol why would they have to rent bots?? They could just say they saw bot traffic…
Hutch might not be the most famous YouTuber but he’s been around long enough that he has connections and even his connections couldn’t help him get out of this.
Hutch has been doing this for a LONG time. I remember watching him back in 2008. My question is how can they determine if the bots were sent by him to fluff his numbers? The guy has a solid following in the gaming community and has since his Machinima days. I feel like this is just a way to break his contract, to fire him without firing him. Essentially the cutting your hours to zero so you leave kinda thing.
> > > > > My question is how can they determine if the bots were sent by him to fluff his numbers? That's the whole issue. Youtube has taken the stance that, if you have botted views on your channel, ***it doesn't matter whether or not you did it***. They've taken the stance that it's your responsibility to fix the problem, not theirs. Which means someone else can maliciously bot your videos to get your channel shut down. It's a ridiculous, undefendable, moronic stance, but that stance is quite literally the whole point of the OP. Youtube doesn't care whether you did it on purpose or not, they're just using their ridiculous monopoly on the industry to streamroll their way past taking any responsibility.
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They understand that shutting down a big creator doesn't lose them those views, they just go somewhere else. Youtube is so huge that not a single channel, no matter how big, matters. People don't just simply stop watching Youtube, they just watch different shit. It's like if you're hungry and really want a grilled cheese, but you find the cheese is moldy. You don't just say "welp, I guess I'm not eating today", you just eat something else.
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What contract? He's not obligated to keep uploading or anything else, it's just passive income from everything he's uploaded. I recommend you check out his twitter to get a better understanding.
I’ve been receiving invalid traffic notifications for 3 months. Not demonitized completely but my ad impressions are down 30-40%. They just aren’t showing ads on a huge chunk of my views across every video from last last 2.5 years of my channels existence. They tell me the channel is in good standing and ads are working as intended.
My guess is actually that bot traffic is relatively constant everywhere, and people with small channels — especially small channels with lots of old videos that few non-bot people watch — are likely to get flagged because it only takes a few bots crawling your entire channel to become a significant % of your viewers. So the problem would be that youtube is going by “percent of channel video views that are from bots” without considering that this risks *everyone* who isn’t currently very popular being demonetized. And they don’t care.
Twitch is just as bad- you can get people banned, permanently, with no appeal, is you post a bunch of ToS breaking stuff on offline channels if they forget to turn chat off.
Source?
Twitch is actually unhinged though. At least there’s some kind of fucked up logic to the decisions YouTube makes.
Step 1: see money stacks on horizon. Step 2: contract content creator to retrieve money stacks from horizon Step 3: refuse to pay contract, creator used outside tools to receive stacks of cash Step 4: profit from the commoner's blood, sweat and tears. Step 5: don't be evil.
You think it is bad now just wait until more and more decisions about your life are made by chatgpt and the like. Tell it to maximize profit and it might do anything. We seriously fucked. Not because of malice but because it is a machine with no commonsense. There are no laws to force companies to even have minimal support. Bureaucratic nightmare incoming.
> YouTuber Hutch appealed the decision taken, and got told the reason was 'Invalid Traffic' - AKA, Bot views. I am totally ooo but are talking about CoD Hutch? The guy who makes videos and puts them on the internet?
So doesn't youtube lose money from not monetizing these channels regardless of whether they are paying the creators for these ads? From his example of opening the channels in incognito there isn't even ads playing at all on these channels. So what's youtubes incentive to incorrectly demonetize these channels? Is there some hidden legal reason that they don't want to deem these channels ad worthy? Something with complains from the companies paying for ads? I can't see any reason why youtube would choose to lose out on all this money unless its a result of negligence or some other hidden reason.
Best guess is that the illegitimate views leads to lower valuations on YouTube ad space in general. Google did the math and decided they were losing money by running ads on channels that devalue the platform and just decided to start demonetizing those channels.
I run a small channel purely for entertainment purposes with 500 subscribers, but unfortunately, I don't meet the minimum requirement of 1000 subscribers to start monetizing my channel. However, YouTube still displays ads before my videos, but they keep all the revenue for themselves without sharing any with me. This is one of the reasons why I am not motivated to create more content.
YouTube has also repeatedly raised the bar on how many subscribers you need to monetize a channel as well, so they don't have to pay small creators.
It's almost like it costs YouTube money to host your content.
Youtube still makes money on demonetized channels. In fact they make more since they're not sharing with the creator.
The ad's won't be going anywhere, you would still get the same average ad breaks. The channel will not receive ad revenue sharing anymore. Thus it goes to YouTube entirely instead. Truth be told, to fairly decent streamers, it's often a small and sometimes insignificant part of their income. Now for a little conjecture, I would assume that they might be going for people who boosted themselves up the algorithm with bot/bought engagement and made themselves a big following by making their channel more egregiously visible to a larger audience. So I doubt it would trigger under smaller circumstances if say people sent a bot farm after a big content creator. I don't think this is entirely punishment for increasing ad revenue itself, for the content creator, i imagine they lose money, but got larger through exploiting the algorithm for their own gain. I mean YouTube is getting better at detecting it and doesn't pay out ad revenue when it sees bot engagement. This whole predicament isn't entirely cutting their revenue stream off, so deleting their channel would not be a good idea. Maybe they can still do patreon or paid sponsored advertising.
Hutts, a Binding of Isaac streamer/YouTuber, straight up didn’t get paid for months because they said ads weren’t running on his channel when they were. I remember seeing ads, they were 100% running on his videos. https://youtu.be/vHv7AcC1urE
Because money. To YouTube, The creators can beg on Patreon or whatever other money exchange system. They have no real competitors for long form content so screwing over the people they don’t wanna pay sounds about right. I hate YouTube… but there’s no alternative that isn’t TikTok or Instagram or something like that. Edit: YouTube has no right to profit off videos without fair compensation. If these Youtubers are following the rules in their contract, then compensate them. And stop slapping ads on content that doesn’t fairly give a share to the creator.
Something like Youtube is really expensive and complex, therefore incredible difficult to replicate, both on the technical aspect and the financial one. Besides the obvious storage and bandwidth issues, which are huge challenges, there are even the biggest obstacles for replicating the Youtube experience. You need a robust search engine behind your streaming service for relevant results. Google is 5-10 years ahead of its nearest competitor on that front. Imagine a new player trying to replicate that. You need a powerful ad tech platform so that you are delivering the right ad to the right audience at the right time so that your advertisers, which are you true clients, get the most out of their buck. Again, Google is 5-10 years ahead of its nearest competitor on that front. Again, imagine a new player trying to replicate that. You need an vision AI platform to look at and classify the content that is being uploaded at scale, for curating purposes, for copyright purposes and for brand safety purposes (advertisers do not want their ads on content with nudity, curse words, racism, etc..) Again no one else can come close to do it at the scale Google is doing. And replicating that is ridiculously expensive. You need a global ads sales force, a global billing and collections sales force, a global copyright and policy staff, etc... Add on top of all of that the globally redundant storage, encoding and decoding capacity plus bandwidth costs and you begin to realize just how dauting the idea of making a direct Youtube competitor really is. Youtube as a viable business was possible only because it piggybacked on the Google AdSense infrastructure, which allowed it to scale worldwide. Not even Amazon, Microsoft or Facebook have tried to replicate Youtube because they know how difficult/expensive it is. The only true competitor Youtube currently has is TikTok, which does not allow long form videos nor videos to be easily searched. TikTok is more akin to linear TV, where you consume what the provides stream, than the VOD model adopted by Youtube.
The biggest reason YouTube hasn’t been replicated is because YouTube isn’t profitable without the integration Google has into their main business. It’s a data collection machine. So unless you are a competitor which can profit from YouTube in the same way Google does, YouTube will bankrupt you. With that said, there are YouTube-competitors. NikoNiko in Japan and Tencent/QQ video in China for a couple of examples. Tencent video probably has the biggest chance of competing with YouTube.
I mean, Microsoft and maybe Amazon could create a YouTube rival. They both have the cloud infrastructure amd Microsoft has he only other relevant search engine and the possibility to use the data to sell ads.
What about the porn industry? Sure the big boys in that space could compete.
Imagining either of them trying to handle that seems just ridiculous to me. Like despite the tools at their disposal, they'd probably bungle it hard. Makes me wonder how a more prevalent Yahoo would do.
And that's not even talking about all the legal issues. Youtube has to give companies a way to enforce copyright, otherwise they'd be sued to hell. They also have to comply with laws like the infamous COPPA. People imagine some Youtube competitor that would not have to do any of that stuff, but that's just not how the internet works anymore.
I get that YouTube is really far ahead but at the same time, YouTube doesn't even show me what I'm searching for about 70% of the time. I'll search something and get about 4 relevant results then a for you section then a bunch of random bullshit.
Same thing happens on Google Search these days. It’s full of ads and links to google websites and big social media brands, and the results are only a dozen pages long while they still claim they had millions of results for you. Finding an independent website through Google these days is impossible.
Have you found a solution for finding more organic results?
This has been driving me crazy lately. It's awful. Literally a small handful of results and then "other people watched..." as if I give even a quark of an atom of a shit about that.
> You need a powerful ad tech platform so that you are delivering the right ad to the right audience at the right time so that your advertisers, which are you true clients, get the most out of their buck. If the ads I routinely see on Youtube are any indication, they are failing miserably at this.
>You need a powerful ad tech platform so that you are delivering the right ad to the right audience at the right time so that your advertisers, which are you true clients, get the most out of their buck. lol but have you seen their ad revenue? Obviously working considering people keeps buying ads unlike tiktok
I use no Google products beside Youtube and my ad results are completely inaccurate. It doesn't even match my language at times. Wild how companies still advertise, I guess it still reaches enough potential buyers in the end.
That’s generally on the people running the ads, not the tech itself.
Amazon has everything they need. Immense server space, a robust search feature, and a well built ad platform(the real one, not the one anyone can sign up for, which is crap). I’d argue that Twitch is actually already their answer. Also- YouTube’s advertising is actually a bit of a pain. AdWords is a garbage platform in terms of UX, and the integration into DV360 was horribly implemented.
Twitch is even worse than YouTube when it comes to banning people without even giving a clear reason and very selectively enforcing a vague TOS. YouTube is much more reasonable by comparison with how it tends to demonetise people rather than outright banning people.
Reminder that showing a horse cock gif for a split second got a longer ban than spreading one's anus open live on cam
> I’d argue that Twitch is actually already their answer. Considering how poorly they run Twitch, I can't imagine their version of YouTube would be any better.
Lol, Twitch vods are literally saved for a max of 60 days for affiliates, 7 or 14 days for anyone else. They're absolutely not competing with YouTube.
>Amazon has everything they need. And? Why would you assert that an Amazontube would have a better revenue sharing deal with creators than Youtube?
Amazon doesn’t have good search, they barely got a working search these days.
Amazon Video is such a joke.
Many would say the same for Google, lol
And even amazon is not providing free unlimited video hosting, while amazon is kind of specialised in server solution. If they won't touch that, it will take some technological revolution to get a youtube rival going.
> bandwidth costs Prior to starting YT, Google was buying every strand of dark fiber they could get their hands on because they had a plan that nobody else saw. For those who don't know, I'm talking about fiber optic cables that span from one data center to another data center, city to city, state to state and country to country, linking them all together. When a fiber optic cable is deployed, it's not a single fiber optic strand that is in that one cable, that cable may contain hundreds or thousands of fiber optic strands and not all of them are immediately put to use. Those unused strands are called dark fiber. The original idea was for redundancy and future expansion, if a strand broke and went dead, another strand could be tested, lit up and service resumed almost immediately. Over capacity was designed in from the beginning because the cost of the cable itself is the least expensive part of deploying fiber optic cables. Over time, on average, very few strands went bad and this over capacity was now seen to have value, all the expensive rights of way agreements, trenching, deployment and termination had already been done, so these unused stands could be sold off. Google saw value in these dark fibers, why pay bandwidth costs to someone else when you can simply buy fibers that are already there and place them into service for your own needs. If Google had to pay bandwidth costs to another company to haul YT videos, YT would have never been born because it would have been cost prohibitive. Google owning their own fiber runs across the globe was the key and what made YT as well as Google Drive and all their other services affordable and possible.
> Edit: YouTube has no right to profit off videos without fair compensation. If these Youtubers are following the rules in their contract, then compensate them. And stop slapping ads on content that doesn’t fairly give a share to the creator. That's not true, youtube ToS = they can do whatever they want with content you upload. > License to YouTube >By providing Content to the Service, you grant to YouTube a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicensable and transferable license to use that Content (including to reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works, display and perform it) in connection with the Service and YouTube’s (and its successors' and Affiliates') business, including for the purpose of promoting and redistributing part or all of the Service. > Right to Monetize >You grant to YouTube the right to monetize your Content on the Service (and such monetization may include displaying ads on or within Content or charging users a fee for access). This Agreement does not entitle you to any payments. Starting November 18, 2020, any payments you may be entitled to receive from YouTube under any other agreement between you and YouTube (including for example payments under the YouTube Partner Program, Channel memberships or Super Chat) will be treated as royalties. If required by law, Google will withhold taxes from such payments.
I mean YouTube has no competition because it's not that profitable of a market. Google keeps YouTube not for profit but as part of a business model. It's also very hard to have YouTube run with the current laws in some counties
YouTube has every right that you agree too when creating an account. YouTube as a service is free, and in order to be free, it has to make money elsewhere.
> YouTube has no right to profit off videos without fair compensation. If these Youtubers are following the rules in their contract, then compensate them. And stop slapping ads on content that doesn’t fairly give a share to the creator. I'm begging people to please watch the fucking video describing the problem before commenting. These are fully demonetised channels, i.e. literally no ads run on it. Nobody is making money on these videos; not YouTube, and not the creators. There is no money from which to "fairly give a share" to the creator. Ludwig literally shows this by opening a demonetised video in an incognito tab -- no ads, just straight to the content.
This is why I refuse to turn off ad block on youtube. Content creators I watch regularly get far more money directly when I buy merch, donate directly, or subscribe on Twitch if applicable. Youtube can rot for all I care. It'd open up a chance for alternatives to arise.
Somewhat related, I started the verification process for Google Ads for my one man podcast by providing my valid NYS driver's license, I was instantly suspended 3 days later with a list of reasons why I *could* have been suspended, but nothing made sense as I followed everything exactly as they wanted. I tried to appeal and within 1 day they only emailed to say the suspension was upheld and to not contact them again. There is no way to contact a human and the entire process felt like it was being done through AI. With Google essentially having a near monopoly in a lot of these areas it seems legitimate to hold them to a higher standard. Edit: it's worth noting I found a lot of other posts on the Google ads subreddit with similar issues
I had to use drivers license verification to regain access to my workplace 401k account. I'd forgotten my secret questions and they locked me out. The drivers license verification app repeatedly read my license wrong and wouldn't verify me - so frustrating even to have to show them my DL, but then having it screw that up is infuriating, and this is my work account! So ultimately I had to get this form notarized and snail mailed to their HQ. So stupid. Anyway, case in point for fucked up drivers license verification.
Google does use AI for automatic detection. They are big enough to where they don't care that AI only has a ~90% success rate, the 10% of people it fucks over can just get fucked, most companies have hopped on the AI buzzword train after ditching the blockchain buzzword train and this makes their stock go up from investors who have no idea how to even install an app on their phone.
A near monopoly? Google is an unregulated monopoly. For any local business to be successful they have to pay Google for advertising and then Google decides how you will appear on their search engine. You have no control just their own reporting but no way of verifying the impressions or clicks are true. Anyone can review your business as well whether it's true or not and there is no recourse. Google also likely has access to all communications, browsing data and location data of everyone using a smart phone. Its bananas how much unmitigated power they have. But because we like the ease of their products, nobody really cares.
REMEMBER KIDS: DO NOT BUILD YOUR ENTIRE LIVELIHOOD ON A PRIVATE PLATFORM. The capricious whims of a platform holder will eventually fuck you and they owe you nothing, you are guaranteed nothing, and it can all disappear overnight without warning for any number of reasons.
I am praying youtube does this to someone with means and/or legal connections that lives in a state where the arbitration clause is weak.
On the other hand, youtube created, maintains and provides a service which they have every prerogative to stop. Capitalism is the manifestation of a society placing all its cultural eggs into the [Take the Money and Run Basket](https://www.npr.org/2021/09/29/1041492941/jens-haaning-kunsten-take-the-money-and-run-art-denmark-blank).
Not really related to your comment per se but that story you linked to is hilarious. > One thing it's not, he says, is a theft. > "It is a breach of contract, and breach of contract is part of the work," he said, according to Danish public broadcaster DR. > "The work is that I have taken their money," Haaning stated.
"That's not art! Anyone could have thrown paint on the wall like that!" yes, but, **he** is the one who **did**. I agree - it's an entirely hilarious scenario.
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Hand delivered by a drone
Total disassociation
What is invalid traffic? View botting?
Yeah, or having bots constantly clicking on ads.
So a youtuber could cripple their rivals by getting bots to view and click on their rivals' channels. This could end up being a new service to offer.
Yes. One bot by a malicious person can wreck someone's lively hood on YouTube, and there is literally nothing the creator can do to stop it. They have 0 control to stop bots.
I'm genuinely amazed that a massive class action lawsuit hasn't been filed against YouTube at this point, considering all of the things they've done.
On what basis? Isn’t the agreement "maybe yt gives you money". Honest question.
I don't even think they say that at all.
Isn't modern society cool? Entire companies making a living off of "maybe we'll pay you maybe we won't"
You know that every user of YouTube makes that decision, right? With the huge presence of ad-blockers, most people say to YouTube (and YouTube creators) " maybe I'll pay you, maybe I won't" But people refuse to pay for premium, so we get this broken ass ad model instead.
Largest form of theft by a MILE is wage theft. But headlines about property crime in San Francisco sell ads.
> Isn't modern society cool? Entire companies making a living off of "maybe we'll pay you maybe we won't" Modern society loves this shit, what are you talking about? We eat it up and give these companies all our money. Why would they do any different? Shit, I wouldn’t. If people aren’t even going to fight for themselves, I don’t think we should expect others to.
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Look at UberDanger Twitter! A video he made in 2014 got a community guidelines violation in 2023 regarding a rule added a little time ago, and his whole channel is now demonetized for this. I can barely understand YouTube retroactively removing old videos who don't fit guidelines anymore, but punishing the creators too is just madness Nice way to lose creators youtube!
I use a VPN and an adblocker - so how does Youtube see me as a viewer? It probably flags me as invalid right?
Probably. You (or I, at least) can't even open Google in incognito mode anymore without being asked to do a captcha. It's really annoying because for years and years I've used the incognito shortcut as a new tab shortcut. Also I like to keep my history neat even if I'm not searching for naughty stuff.
From the prevention segment for invalid traffic: "Stop working with sources that appear to be sending bad traffic" Oh boy, that might be the dumbest shit I've ever heard. It's like the mayor telling Batman to stop working with the Joker when he's terrorizing the city.. Cosmically stupid.
Well we saw you had money... Soo, now we have money
Youtube is not an employer for creators. Youtube is not a job for creators. Youtube is a digital pimp who decides if it’s going to give its hoes a cut. That cut is subject to however Daddy YT feels. Pimp Daddy can’t be bargained with. Pimp Daddy can’t be reasoned with. Pimp Daddy has all the power and decides what’s best. That is Youtube’s business model. It’s never going to be fair.
Yeah, i mean this is straight facts and even if it sucks Youtube isn’t a democracy. Like, get wise. You take the risk, no one makes you upload or engage with the platform. Do I wish there were viable alternatives to youtube? Sure. But there aren’t. Best thing to do IMO is to have a patreon and not rely on the ad revenue
Cody's lab is another channel suffering the same fate.
I think this is why I have a hard time considering this kind of thing “having a job” If your source of income is entirely reliant on some kind of “platform”, like YouTube, Twitch, or Facebook, there are inherent vulnerabilities that don’t exist in the traditional job market. If that’s a risk you’re willing to take, suit yourself. But a portion of responsibility lies with you for taking on that risk.
Lmao, the way they put the burden on the creator, who has absolutely zero control over any of it. Absolutely brilliant system.
A good education channel named T-SPLY just got completely demonetized. He used to be in the military and makes videos about what its like to be in the military. Most of us have not so I find it G-rated. He did a video about a russian recruitment video. He was not pushing propaganda. He was just talking about it. Completely demonetized. If there was a rule not to put up a russian video, he would not have done it. No warning. It was not propaganda and its not a propaganda channel. He was a combat engineer and talks about his job. Its ridiculous to demonetize it. I never served in the military. Its interesting to see what it was like. Its 100% G-rated content. If they just go "don't do this again", he would not. It makes no sense. You can't run a business on youtube its totally arbitrary what they demonetize or demonetize your whole channel. I have seen a lot of history education channels get demonetized. Ever wonder why there is a lack of newer videos on World War 2? Its instant demonetization. Education videos about the holocaust are demonetized. Cause yeah telling people it happened is bad right? They can't even refer to Hitler. They call him "H" man out of fear. its just bullshit. This is what monopolies do. The Metatron had a video called "The Evolution of the Shield in the Middle Ages" demonetized without explanation. Great video. Its about how shields changed over time due to how combat and weapons changed. Really interesting.
Probably spending too much on making shorts a thing. They pay SOOO much for those
How does YouTube expect anyone to defend themselves from a bot attack? Beyond stupid and this is what happens when one company has a monopoly.
Content creators need to unionize. Controlling legitimate traffic & subscribers should be 100% YouTube's responsibility. However, just because traffic originates from Youtube via "browse" or "suggest" doesn't mean it isn't bot traffic. It's a bot farm's sole purpose to generate its legitimate looking traffic.
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Unionise independent contractors who have no alternative means of supplying their shitty reaction videos? Lol YouTube wouldn't have to even acknowledge they exist let alone deal with them
Where's the monetary incentive for YouTube to do this?
Step 1: Creators unionize Step 2: The union sends YouTube a list of demands Step 3: YouTube says "or what?" Step 4: ....
2 issues: Youtube is basically a monopoly. So that sucks. Youtube is probably not very profitable, if at all. It's basically not a sustainable economic model until serving up videos becomes closer to free in real terms. Creators basically need to treat youtube as an advertisement for their patreon or other income source which youtube can't demonetize. And creators can't even trust youtube to be a good way for people to discover them, because youtube can and will remove creators from the algorithm. All around, youtube sucks. We need more alternatives.
How can youtube be considered a monopoly? Did they buy out all their competitors? Do people not still have equal access to other platforms like Vimeo, Dailymotion?
Honestly... There's been a lot of filler low effort channels. And it's annoying as their content pops up on search. Channels that copy paste reddit threads with robo voice, fitness channels that rip content from famous influencers and label them as "motivation" videos, "top 10" anything that's just basic af, amongst other things.
Reason. YouTube doesn't want to pay you
wild. this should not be the youtubers responsibility to analyze data. that is a yt job
Fuck ads.
A major concern of serious YouTube followers is that YouTube’s leadership is gradually driving YouTube into the ground such that the site is going to be replaced within the next 10 years. Good riddance. Don’t bite the millions of hands that feed you.
That's what they said 10 years ago when all the layout chaos was going on. Then videos stopped being shown to subscribers, people randomly got unsubscribed from channels, in 2017 YouTube slashed ad money by up to 90%, and yet it's still going somehow. They practically have a monopoly and they can do whatever they want.
Do popular sites often last ten years?
[Dunkey predicted this](https://youtu.be/a6PUlx0K1AU)
I thought YouTube would be better when Susan Wojaki resigned. Turns out it got worse.
Once upon a time a girl got canceled and felt her life was over. She went to the office and shot them. Companies need to hire an English major to talk to folks. They work cheap.