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Comment by l33tbro | Hacker News Reader

Downvote me to coach, but I've never understood why people assert that Youtube owes their users advertising dollars, where other social media platforms are exempt.

Youtube has for years run at a loss, providing free high-quality video streaming with no bandwidth restrictions. These "creators", who are actually a very tiny portion of users, pay zero overheads to have a worldwide broadcasting platform where they're unrestricted to promote third-party products and monetise their content in countless ways.

If people are going to complain about Youtube, then surely you've got to go after other social networks first who aren't sharing revenue with users who are bringing engagement to their platform (Reddit, Instagram, Snapchat, etc).

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People are scared. A few companies have the power to censor and promote what we see and do not see. This is a tremendous power and we all want the companies entrusted with this power to do so morally and consistently. Pointing out that other social networks are behaving badly as well does not address the fear that people feel.

One gets the sense that many people working at places like YouTube really are living in a bubble and are totally oblivious to the intensity of the fear that people feel about their power to censor and promote. I sincerely hope that this changes. It would be horrible for everyone if government had to step in to regulate this medium.

Sharing ad revenue has probably made a net profit for them. My guess is that the ad revenue incentivizes users to create compelling (and unfortunately sometimes controversial) at a far greater rate then it would if it were not sharing revenue.

They are essentially paying for "quality" content the same way Netflix and HBO do only they have a brilliant model because they only have to pay if the video is successful. Whereas Netflix, HBO, and the like need to pay even if the show is a flop.

If anything, they should be investing seed money into professional (Hollywood type) content creators. I'm sure they already are.

YouTube has competition now. Twitch, owned by Amazon, splits advertising revenue with their content creators, as well as direct audience contributions through paid channel subscriptions.

I believe Facebook also offers monetization for video, along with paying certain publishers/influencers directly to use their livestreaming tech.

The issue is not whether people can make money off of YT or not, but if they have an equal chance to do so. As GP mentioned there have been blatant inequalities regarding which rules are applied to whom in 2017 (for example the popular channel 'h3h3productions' now barely publishes any videos anymore).

Exactly! I can't remember if h3h3productions also takes Patreon, but either that or moving over to Twitch seems the common response from the people hit the hardest (while h3h3 don't upload many videos, they are quite active with their podcast!).

Perhaps YouTube should 'demonitize' all content creators and just take the ad dollars for themselves.

I think I'd prefer that as it might skew YouTube back to its origins of "here's a cool video I want to share" instead of the current trend of "here's a video I made for the purpose of making money"

After all it is YouTube and not ChannelTube.

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