The most impressive part is the creator gets to have a probably comfortable living from a channel that grew organically and still 100% depends on youtube’s algorithm.
I follow the channel for years now, anyone not familiar should have a look [0]. It’s not “viral” targeted videos with crazy face thumbnails, borderline clickbaity titles, ABtested through a week, no “I got to stick to the schedule” weekly videos etc.
The videos are really straightforward and focused, and derive all the entertainment from sheer viewer curiosity and the creator’s humor shining through. When I see the 100h average per video, It looks like they really nail down what actually matters and got to ignore the rest.
IMO there’s very few channels that stayed very basic and true to their form while enjoying a comfortable success, I think this is the kind Youtube probably wanted to encourage the most, and hope many more thrive in places I never heard of.
I personally dislike the “channelization” of YouTube. The whole point of the internet is that it doesn’t have the restrictions of linear media. Search solves that problem of content discovery.
Now YouTube won’t pay you unless you have 1000 subscribers. But a lot of content just isn’t subscribeable and that’s ok.
Pre-1000 sub requirement, I put up a video for a niche MacBook Air microphone issue and repair that wasn’t covered in any video. Made $3-4/month, then cut to zero.
Of course, that means I’m not going to go through the effort of other useful-to-a-few and more-useful-than-entertaining videos that I found no video on.
Like how the same issue and resolution applies on MacBook speakers. Or how I fixed my toilet (it wasn’t the flapper!!!). How I fixed my washing machine (don’t spend $100 replacing the mixing valve, here’s how I cleaned mine out). But no, not going to waste my time unless YT cuts me in on the revenue.
I feel bad for the excellent video I saw last night to repair my Neato vacuum cleaner, but the guy had 45 subs. Or the one and done massively useful video to repair my garage door opener, but few subs.
Meanwhile when I wrote disparate blog articles, I went from $2/month, to $20, to $200 to $2000 through adsense, and it’s because Google search sent you to me. Not because you bookmarked my topics that can be about banking one day, to renewing your passport in my city because the viewership groups don’t overlap.
> Of course, that means I’m not going to go through the effort of other useful-to-a-few and more-useful-than-entertaining videos that I found no video on...But no, not going to waste my time unless YT cuts me in on the revenue.
Why wouldn't you post something just because you won't make a bunch of money off of it? Was that your entire goal with the video you made about the mic issue you had?
What's the reason you post comments here? Is someone paying you to do that? A lot of my favorite things online were put there by people who were just creating and sharing useful things with others because they were passionate and helpful. A few dollars a month would be a nice bonus, but most people will continue to contribute to the internet without any expectation of getting anything in their bank accounts for their time. Production values might suffer for it, but for most people uploading a video to youtube does not require a huge investment in time money and effort.
I love that people are able to create content and make money on youtube, but the idea that people should/have/will stop sharing with each other unless they're getting paid is strange. It's the people who most concern themselves with how much money they can make on youtube that end up flooding the internet with the worst output. That's how we got things like clickbait, homogenized content, algorithm gaming, the nightmarish videos on Youtube Kids etc.
To some extent, it may be the messaging, not the amount. The limit being in place is labeling those creators as "value-less" (vs others, who do have value).
In theory, I see it much like the idea that putting a price of $0.01 on something makes it "appear" much more valuable to people than making it free in the first place. It's not about the actual amount, just the messaging of "this has value" vs "this has no value".
$2 isn't really the incentive to have a youtube channel though. People enjoy making something and sharing it with the world. Most people who do X as a hobby don't make even $2 for almost all X: art, music, fishing, whatever, and yet they still do it.
You usually have to go up to "serious amateur" level before you make even token amounts of money (which still doesn't cover your tools much less your time), and 1k subscribers for a video hobbiest is a low bar for that.
Lots of open source is either people doing it as part of their job, or people doing it as part of building up a portfolio to get a certain job.
But of course there are more intrinsic motivations like wanting to give back to the community, practising their hobby, etc. Those would be equally valid reasons to make youtube videos.
Depending on how philosophical you want to get, there'll be people who derive pleasure and purpose from sharing what they know or building something that is enjoyed by others. There'll be people who gain pleasure from being known for being helpful/useful/knowledgeable or even being recognized at all. Even if we can't call it altruism that's not necessarily a bad thing. I guess I just feel that there are, and likely will always be, plenty of incentives for people to create and share online besides financial ones.
You have a point, and of course not everything should live and die by its channel. In particular the incentives to have regular uploads and consistent videos should be fought back, it's crushing so much creativity, brings burnout and I'm sure we're missing on otherwise good videos that are nver made because to long to take, or shelved because it doesn't match the channel.
Then I also follow channels from which I want to see every single videos in priority, whatever they are, and it irks me that they don't pop up more prominently (or at all) in my main view.
> Meanwhile when I wrote disparate blog articles, I went from $2/month, to $20, to $200 to $2000, and it’s because Google search sent you to me. Not because you bookmarked me.
> Meanwhile when I wrote disparate blog articles, I went from $2/month, to $20, to $200 to $2000, and it’s because Google search sent you to me.
Imagine if Google trained an LLM on its index and started providing answers without ever sending users your way… Actually, we have a suitable example of just that being done. /s
I bookmarked this as a vivid illustration of my gripe with LLMs, and more specifically their creator/operators’ meticulous avoidance of the topic of attribution.
You’d think it’s fairly feasible: if training data had attribution, I can’t see how LLM would not be able to separate substance from style and some reflection on the former, so that if most of topical substance is found to come from only 1–2 sources it would just note those sources for the user. If you provide actually niche content, when ChatGPT answers relevant questions the substance may well come from your body of work alone.
Yet the asker pays LLM operator and is never informed you exist: you, in turn, stand to lose not only your ad revenue but also the potential ability to upsell something, engage with your audience, learn who that audience even is and how your work is sought, and just generally feel useful and valued.
Give it time and sufficient popularity of LLMs and no one will even be inclined to believe that you did the original work in the first place—since from anyone’s perspective you might as well have asked LLM.
The cynic in me says operators are particularly interested in public not asking the question whether it’s feasible to attribute LLM output because it may make them liable to pass to countless volunteer writers, turned involuntary training data providers, part of the profits made from running the model. Another reason might be that researching original authorship requires manual human labour proportionate to the size of training data, and who would ever want to pay for that? Definitely not a startup with millions in funding from Silicon Valley investors.
It is just me or all incentives to openly share useful information (as opposed to pure entertainment) are in jeopardy now?
Your prediction seems depressing but I can't think of a solid argument against it. Already there are sites that pay people to copy content from other sites or scrape & paste it. They rank higher than the original site by combining relevant data from multiple sites. AI that can copy-paste articles will make that business infinitely scalable and harder to detect.
What you describe could also be considered copyright laundering, but critically it is understood to be such—it is frowned upon and is penalized by the likes of Google. If we apply the same understanding to LLM design it might actually be half the battle.
Largely, specialized sites that provides objectively better info+experience largely dropped that revenue a lot, but also Google search favours corporate content a lot more nowadays, to put a nail in the personal blog coffin.
It’s probably because advertisers demand that their ads are not placed on “bad” content. By limiting ads to 1000+ subscriber channels, it’s much more likely the content isn’t in violation of the YouTube rules.
Exactly. My bet is it's simple greed, and that it shuts enough people (and revenue) out to make Google a pretty penny.
Likely it was a decision based on analytics that Google, and no one else, has.
Imagine we are talking a cable TV platform instead, and your analytics show that most people flip through channels most of the time, as opposed to actually watching something specific. You make a rule to only share revenue with channels if the viewer is engaged longer than 120 seconds. People are still watching TV, you are still monetizing, but the channels aren't getting fully paid and only you know the money involved.
Making people feel they need to earn the right that their earnings be shared with them is just icing on the cake.
> Making people feel they need to earn the right that their earnings be shared with them is just icing on the cake.
That's not even the half of it. Unless your channel is big enough to be considered a "partner", you are basically fucked when it comes to content strikes, DMCA, AI/contractor driven "community standards" issues, random demonetization, etc. There's no real "support".
The demonetizing thing is particularly funny, I know of channels where their videos get demonetized for content guidelines violations, but viewers still see advertisements. Happens a lot with firearms related content.
I imagine it's more to do with reducing the administrative burden of processing payments for $3 to thousands of people who have one vaguely useful video.
I think YouTube now puts ads on basically everything though... (I don't know for sure, I have had Premium for a little more than a year now, and before that uBlock Origin took care of things).
> If your channel covers certain taboo topics it can be "demonetized" which means no revenue from Google.
That almost never happens. Rather, individual videos are demonetized- or deemed unsuitable for all advertisers. In fairness, that can easily happen to an overwhelming majority of a channel’s videos, but it is important, IMO, to speak accurately about what is going on.
Source: I have been a full-time YouTuber for the last seven years. I publish content that often toes the line between suitable for advertisers and not.)
I believe they don't put ads on most demonetised videos, since they are typically demonetised because (YT's algorithms think that) advertisers don't want their ads associated with the content.
Hey, any chance your robot went from base, turns on, then turns off? Then cycles on/off again... I have mine D75 here which I started to fix by cleaning but no luck.
Nope, mine was persistently saying it’s stuck. The brush was jammed. Turned out you can pull off the non-drive side of the brush, dis-assemble with a pick and clean out the disk of internalized gunk that has starting to roll over itself.
> Now YouTube won’t pay you unless you have 1000 subscribers.
I wonder if there is an opportunity for a syndication cooperative. Let's say you find relatively related content, like niche MacBook fixes that get views but not subscriptions. The content owners combine their videos into one channel to get over the 1k revenue hump. The back catalog is used as the start of a funnel to gain subscriptions.
We're just going back in time. Back in the days when I was making YT content, you wouldn't make any money until you reached certain views / subs thresholds. You could then apply for partner, setup an AdSense account, and monetize videos. Before I had the numbers, I became a partner with Maker Studios and monetized videos through them. They ended up getting bought by Disney for $500M.
The current problem + your proposed solutions are literally what we had ~10 years ago :)
Hearing that an off the cuff idea has been proven out before is such a pleasant feeling, thank you!
I suspect that coordination also occurs on the in-video ad placement side as so much of the content I enjoy pimps rapid PCB services or online learning. If a cooperative works on the YT money-side, it could also work from the opposite side for videos with great SEO but where the author's content isn't right for "Subscribe Now!"
> The most impressive part is the creator gets to have a probably comfortable living from a channel that grew organically and still 100% depends on youtube’s algorithm.
That's scary. After all this time and effort, the creator is totally dependent on YouTube's whims. If the platform chooses to stop promoting his videos, the earnings will drop to nearly 0. And the creator has no recourse.
Then you can presumably go to another company. There isn't another YouTube.
More generally, unlikely as it is to hit even this comfortable but modest in the grand scheme of things success, it almost certainly won't last indefinitely. Whether because YouTube changes something or because audience tastes change.
None of those are really substitutes for YouTube. But I agree that if someone has stumbled into a somewhat sustainable business that they decide they want to do full-time as long as they can, they should diversify both their content and their channels.
That's the scary part. He spends years building a channel and it can be wiped out in a day. He needs to diversify. Sponsorships/ads won't help, they'd die with the channel.
I'm not in this space, but maybe patreon? Does onlyfans do non-porn? Vimeo?
How does one minimize risk to this $150k/year revenue stream?
I get the feeling that the day it gets wiped away he'll move to another job (he's been a software engineer for a while apparently) and not look back.
The way it's managed currently is too laid back to be accidental, there's so many things that could have been done to increase revenue and secure side channels. I can only assume he has no interest in making it more complicated for the sake of safety.
Patreon works, but only as a monetization platform; while it's a channel that can offer early access to e.g. new videos, in practice the vast majority of views will still be on youtube and unless it's something critical, patrons will wait until it's on youtube anyway (citation needed).
Onlyfans doesn't do porn, nu-uh, where did you even get that idea? It doesn't market specifically to adult content, is what I mean, lol. Its current home page does not appeal at all though; it currently shows me a dull kitchen / food channel, some real estate agent, and some model eating caviar.
Anyway, patreon, merchandise and in-video sponsorships are common ways to diversify income. Some big players have expanded to clothing brands or, weirdly enough, doing wrestling / boxing matches.
I think the current biggest alternative to Youtube is Twitch, but that's mainly aimed at gaming channels and live broadcasting.
I’m following a few creators on patreon who have a two/three steps approach.
The video will be on youtube from the start, but as a private video. From there a part of their patreons might get very early access (e.g. CGP Grey has a tier for spell checking and gross errors spotting), and then all patreons get access to the final video. But still private (and/or exposed to channel paying members)
After a short time (a day at most) the video gets public and is fully dispatched to everyone on Youtube.
> It’s not “viral” targeted videos with crazy face thumbnails, borderline clickbaity titles
I do wonder how much more he would bring in if he did all that. I personally hate it, but when Youtubers talk about it they always say how _it works_ for both the younger, and surprisingly, older crowds.
Yes, many prominent youtubers are pretty explicit about how they’re not happy with it, but tweaking thumbnails and titles gives an actual boost to their videos that doesn’t just translate to people clicking, but actual views and “engagement” throughout their content.
For this channel in particular, the calculation might be different because of the type of content, and in particular the complete lack of temporality. Some videos from two to three years ago are probably still doing pretty well to new viewers discovering the channel, and I’d imagine it would be more difficult with dated types of thumbnails or titles that would make it look less evergreen.
There’s an interesting video digging into the way these copycats are fake too [1] - if you watch them you can often see things like excavator tracks that haven’t been hidden well enough, and they found somebody involved who talked about how the buildings are built by teams of people on leased land and then just abandoned when the video is done…
But I think they do cater to a different audience. You need a fairly long attention span to watch the real, not-faked Primitive Technologies videos, whereas the copycats not so much. And the real channels is always pretty interesting, whereas the copycats are all the same thing, so they’re probably not really taking that many views away. But yeah, they should definitely have to come up with less similar names to the real thing!
You seem to be against this idea of 'copycating' but our society has put a lot of thought into what's Trademark-able and what's not.
In particular, his name is incredibly descriptive - it's just a plain description of what the thing is: primitive technology. We specifically disallow that when it comes to trademarking because it would basically give you an extremely wide monopoly right away.
Consider that "Corn Flakes" is not trademarked because it's just a literal description of what the food is. It would be dumb if people couldn't call their product "corn flakes". Compare that to say a product called "Cheerios" which is just a made up term, and it would be very unjustifiable for people to copy this.
Which is rather weird in how it tries to feed us one channel per topic. I'm not into lego but it seems informal productions if done well can be just as entertaining as professional production.
The weirdest to me are the channels that have tons of reasonably good videos with a tiny number of views. Those exist in popular topics too. The algo isn't even trying?
I've been thinking about that after I ran into a channel where I was pretty much the only viewer. Some kid around 15 build a news studio in his parents basement, put on his dads way to large suit and covered the news from a reasonable number of sources. The format was truly hilarious. He pushed the mainstream narrative in such a completely unconvincing way I must have died laughing a thousand times. Hold his ear piece and looked to the side to ask: "why are we in Afghanistan? uhh never mind that! On to the next subject!" The show was densely packed official mainstream nonsense. I think he kept up the act for 3 months. I send the links around and the response was that it was completely hilarious.
I've taken a look at the videos. The editing, angles and camera quality tell me that this guy has done quite a bit of research on making good videos and fully intended to make money from them. If you were on YouTube pre-monetization, that's what it looks like when people just put up videos with no financial motivation
> kind Youtube probably wanted to encourage the most
I would caution against anthropomorphizing YT. I have been a Premium user for probably as long as the program has been out. YTA only cares about behaviors that drive engagement. That is it, it is just a skinner box.
I follow the channel for years now, anyone not familiar should have a look [0]. It’s not “viral” targeted videos with crazy face thumbnails, borderline clickbaity titles, ABtested through a week, no “I got to stick to the schedule” weekly videos etc.
The videos are really straightforward and focused, and derive all the entertainment from sheer viewer curiosity and the creator’s humor shining through. When I see the 100h average per video, It looks like they really nail down what actually matters and got to ignore the rest.
IMO there’s very few channels that stayed very basic and true to their form while enjoying a comfortable success, I think this is the kind Youtube probably wanted to encourage the most, and hope many more thrive in places I never heard of.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/BrickExperimentChannel