YouTube creators are less likely to lose ad money

joe1946

joe1946

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This doesn't completely solve problems for creators, but it's a start. YouTube riled its community when its effort to automatically demonetize offensive videos led to an "adpocalypse" that stripped innocent creators of revenue, and it's taking one of its first big steps toward making amends. The service is pushing an update that should reduce the number of misclassified videos. All told, YouTube expects 30 percent fewer videos that have to make do with limited ads on their way to becoming fully monetized. This should lead to "millions" more videos raking in full income, according to the streaming media giant.

The company knows this won't necessarily solve everyone's issues, and that the update might accidentally limit ads on some videos. You should appeal (and thus get a human to review your clip) if that happens, YouTube said. A video's fate is only final if an appeal fails.

The update comes after YouTube used appeals over the summer to refine the machine learning system that automatically categorizes videos. In theory, the system should continue to improve both as more appeals come in and YouTube itself gets better at determining what constitutes an offensive video. The problem, of course, is that this isn't much consolation to creators who depend on YouTube for income and lost a significant chunk of money.

Imagine if an algorithm accidentally deprived you of an important paycheck, and you were never going to get all of that money back even with a successful appeal. Wouldn't you be upset? This underscores the risks of not only relying on AI technology for content screening, but of basing your livelihood around someone else's video service. A change in code could do real damage to people's lives, and they may not have much choice but to live with the consequences.
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https://www.engadget.com/2017/10/27/youtube-update-reduces-chances-of-videos-losing-ad-money/

I only had one video so far to go over 100,000 views on youtube and get a check from Google (AdSense) .
 
The original system was extremely conservative, and would flag anything remotely resembling skin. Luckily, the appeal system works for those cases, and it's fast (at least in my limited experience of just one appeal).

An issue still remains for people who uploaded, say, videos with explicit violence or language, and for years have been getting checks for them. In their case, it's not a matter of "the filter is too conservative" but "the guidelines have changed and I can't alter what's inside my old video". I guess it sucks, but if most advertisers don't want to appear tied to those videos, well, it's their money.

Maybe a solution would be to have separate flags for different issues: many advertisers would be fine with language but not with gore, or sex, or drugs. Right now I think they can just block all, or none.
 
IMO, the future is more niche based Tubes - let the YT have their cat and music videos - while charging small fees to the visitors to watch content. I see it as a bunch of mini-Hulu types - a Gamer Tube for $2/mo; a Sports Tube for $2/mo, a Politics Tube for $2/mo - with the additional revenues also coming in from the ads. Fewer but better eye balls.
 
I have few videos flagged by youtube which are supposed to be not suitable for all advertisers. One of them is a video of wild animals suckling from their mother. I wonder which dumb AI has flagged it. This is the video: https://youtu.be/HQIX7_PCZdg

And to make it worse sometime ago they had stopped advertisements saying that they want to have proof whether I have copyright for the music. I had to give the copy of the contract that I had with my composer. Youtube is such a pain. Still it is better than Vimeo, as I don't want to pay a dime to host my videos.
 
I never had a chance of making a cent from the video (it has like 6300 views) but something I submitted to monetize YEARS ago just recently was rejected for having content unsuitable for blah blah. It's my claymation short about Jewish ninjas. So screw them.
 
Wall Street Journal has just released a piece called "Who will rein in Facebook". It's behind the paywall, so I only saw the opening paragraph (now I can reveal that I am not a WSJ subscriber). However, if one scours the Net, he can find similar articles not only about Facebook but Google and YouTube as well.
 
FB is quickly becoming irrelevant for most people. If you're a content creator, whatever you post on FB will only be seen by your followers if you pay to make sure they see it. Which means lots of content creators have abandoned it and are promoting their work somewhere else (mainly TW and IG). And kids are moving away from it for their social stuff too (which at certain ages is the common response when your family comes to your playground).

Edit: A friend was complaining about FB a few days ago, so I just checked: she has 13500 followers on FB, 5000 on TW, 4000 on IG. Same pic, posted everywhere on the same day, got 200 likes and 10 comments on FB, 1050 likes and 50 comments on TW, 1050 likes and 30 comments on IG. She says she used to get work and collaboration offers on FB a couple of years ago, now the only people who write here there are creeps. The last two projects she posted on TW and IG are not on FB.
And that's for someone who posts pics. If you post anything that brings people out of FB (e.g. a link to youtube), it's basically invisible.
 
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I agree with Samuel. I have some 7k+ followers in facebook. And facebook wants me to pay for my content to reach them. So these days I hardly post in facebook.
 
interesting. Are you guys talking about the FB fan/biz pages or personal feeds or both? I have a band and we post content on there and we have always just assumed that the 25-35% of our "friends" that allegedly see everything you post were seeing it and simply didn't care (hell I still mass email a few select folks certain content/announcements and get the same lack of response so doesn't seem out of the question).
 
What I said is about fan pages, the ones that have followers, not friends. People just don't see what you post there anymore, unless you pay FB to show it to them.
 
Gotcha. We promote our content on our personal pages as well. I wonder if anyone out there makes a personal page to use exclusively like a fan page. Obviously FB is not at all cool with that but when has that ever stopped people? And of course the name would be an issue. You'd have to call yourself Joe "Bloodlust the Web Series" Smith or something.
 
My personal facebook account got some 5000 "friends" so I was told that the only option was to convert into a page, which I did. Then the numbers went up to 7100+. After that the page has remained stagnant ever since. When I check the statistics, curiously every week, 7-8 people become new fans and an equal number get removed. This has been going on for a long time and the numbers have remained stagnant. Now my posts in the fb page reaches only a handful of people. Handful of likes and shares to my posts. Links most of the times don't reach people. You are always prompted to advertise. I don't advertise because I refuse to waste "good money" for announcements or content which don't make me money. And I don't carem much for facebook these days.
 
Yeah, I feel like that's the way it's been for a long time. Unfortunately I don't feel like what we do (band or movie stuff, frankly) really fits the extremely short form world of Twitter or the wordless world of Instagram.
 
I had a car review flagged by YouTube last month. The entire video was G-Rated, but it still flagged it. I appealed and won, but like the earlier posts said -- those are views I never got back. Same thing happened years ago, but using their manual reporting system: DC Shoes flagged one of my videos that went viral because they thought it was one of theirs that I reposted. In fact it was original material shot at a journalist engagement with Ken Block, arranged by DC and Ford PR. Luckily, I had an inside contact at DC and was able to get the flag removed (they blamed the mistake on an intern) but the video never recovered. It went from 50,000 views a day to about 100 after it was restored. The whole YouTube ecosystem is designed and built by sociopaths. I'm pretty sure they would replace all the partners with algorithms if they could.

PS: I've been a production partner with YouTube since 2006. I have a long, bitter relationship with them.
 
But Facebook still pushes content uploaded directly to it's platform and buries stuff from youtube. I posted a video on FB and without any advertising, I got 30,000 views in 3 days. On youtube? I got I think 73. I reposted the youtube link all over as well. They purposely bury links outside FB and they ramp up traffic on videos hosted by FB. You need a strategy for FB as well as everything else. It depends on what your goals and audiences are.

Meanwhile, I pay for music for my original content, and it gets flagged and can;t be monetized but the owner of the music will let me use it and just get the ad revenue or some ****. So I have to go to the audio outfit and get them to whitelist the video. But by then, momentum is dead.
 
indiawilds said:
You are always prompted to advertise.
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Agreed. I get constant notifications trying to get me to advertise. And what's worse, on a FB page I had for a show I'm producing, I made the host an editor so he could post stuff to it and reply. But you can't limit someone to posting only, and the guy got bombarded with ad bot pitches. He ended up buying a bunch, but didn't target them, so instead of getting positive traffic from fans who know his name, he got a bunch of negative **** on his page. I spent a ton of time doing damage control and trying to kill the ads, which was tough because he created them under his name.
 
^ What a nightmare

This is moving towards FB talk and therefore a bit off-topic, but anyway...

* FB number of views is very misleading. I haven't uploaded anything there for a couple of years already, but my last experiment looked something like this: my cosplay event videos on YT were getting ~2K views in the first day, then I posted a similar video on FB, and got ~20k views. Very similar video, and I promoted it on other social networks in the same way. Great, right? Well, no: 95% of the FB views were less than 10 seconds (on YT it's around 30%, at least for me). The number of minutes watched on both platforms was approximately the same. FB was just counting people who scrolled over my video as "views". The higher number will make you happy in the short term, but in the medium term YT works a lot better: in FB everything dies after a few days, on YT most of my views are for stuff I posted months or years ago: YT is bringing traffic to them.

* Reach on FB pages has been basically dead for a year or more, unless you pay for your stuff to reach your followers. I have lots of friends with >10k fans on FB, they used to get >1k likes per photo a few years ago, now they are lucky to get 200 likes. Same for comments, and even worse for business talk: they used to get work and collaboration proposals through their FB fan pages, now they get basically no talk back (and if there's anything, it's always a creep). Most of them have given up on FB and moved most of their social network "investment" to TW or IG (yes: keeping a strong presence on social networks is a lot of work).
 
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