user 16756
Senior Member
- Joined
- Feb 5, 2015
- Messages
- 2,645
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- 3,940
So, as a young(er) and online person, I have been on youtube since the early days. I have felt that YouTube content had improved steadily over the years, and that recently there had been an explosion in good content.
But very recently I've noticed a hugely worrying trend. It feels like anyone making content regularly on YouTube is turning to sponsors. In fact, I dont think I'm alone in this opinion because Google recently announced changes to the YouTube advertising scheme that basically allows them to monetize your video for you, and **** you if you don't like it oh and if you aren't on a certain tier of use then they don't share that revenue. Which I think also confirms it's not the end user using adblockers to skirt ads because then the big GOOG would be looking for something outside of that system.
It can vary in its extremity, but IMO this is a fast track to bad content. And by bad content, there's the "why does this exist?" version such as beer sponsored Thanksgiving stand & stirs featuring suspect recipes, but there's also that dangerous and insidious early TV version where people are promoting garbage (anything to do with vaping, vitamins, loot-box based mobile games, etc) or perhaps engage in a bit of "imaginative" reviewing of the products featured on their channel to insure continued access.
This is in addition to Patreons, GoFundMes, Kickstarters, etc. Now look, most of these folks aren't making huge money. I know it's tempting to look at the views and Alphabet's market cap/profit numbers but the profit sharing with creators is small. They're doing this because they're getting squeezed. In fact, I'm friends with a content creator with several >500k view videos (so not huge, but not nothing either) and he's lucky to make a few grand a quarter, a far cry less than I make sitting at a desk smashing my head into a wall until my model metrics look good enough. But at any rate, the end result feels awful to me.
It seems to me that YouTube has devolved into shilling, Instagram is just 100 million ads + all the disingenuous influencer stuff, Facebook is an unusable hellsite that should be nuked off the face of the earth, Twitter is just who can be angrier than who, and we're getting pumped for every last cent by the horribly fractured streaming system where no one has enough content anymore and you're often asked to part with six times what you paid for a channel on cable to watch 1 show release 8 episodes over 2 months, plus some really badly made movies.
I dont know if my noticing this is more to being stuck at home, or if it really is worse recently. What do you all think?
But very recently I've noticed a hugely worrying trend. It feels like anyone making content regularly on YouTube is turning to sponsors. In fact, I dont think I'm alone in this opinion because Google recently announced changes to the YouTube advertising scheme that basically allows them to monetize your video for you, and **** you if you don't like it oh and if you aren't on a certain tier of use then they don't share that revenue. Which I think also confirms it's not the end user using adblockers to skirt ads because then the big GOOG would be looking for something outside of that system.
It can vary in its extremity, but IMO this is a fast track to bad content. And by bad content, there's the "why does this exist?" version such as beer sponsored Thanksgiving stand & stirs featuring suspect recipes, but there's also that dangerous and insidious early TV version where people are promoting garbage (anything to do with vaping, vitamins, loot-box based mobile games, etc) or perhaps engage in a bit of "imaginative" reviewing of the products featured on their channel to insure continued access.
This is in addition to Patreons, GoFundMes, Kickstarters, etc. Now look, most of these folks aren't making huge money. I know it's tempting to look at the views and Alphabet's market cap/profit numbers but the profit sharing with creators is small. They're doing this because they're getting squeezed. In fact, I'm friends with a content creator with several >500k view videos (so not huge, but not nothing either) and he's lucky to make a few grand a quarter, a far cry less than I make sitting at a desk smashing my head into a wall until my model metrics look good enough. But at any rate, the end result feels awful to me.
It seems to me that YouTube has devolved into shilling, Instagram is just 100 million ads + all the disingenuous influencer stuff, Facebook is an unusable hellsite that should be nuked off the face of the earth, Twitter is just who can be angrier than who, and we're getting pumped for every last cent by the horribly fractured streaming system where no one has enough content anymore and you're often asked to part with six times what you paid for a channel on cable to watch 1 show release 8 episodes over 2 months, plus some really badly made movies.
I dont know if my noticing this is more to being stuck at home, or if it really is worse recently. What do you all think?