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Comment by Scoundreller | Hacker News Reader

tl;dr: Unless you have 4000 hours of watch-time AND 1000 subscribers, you're getting axed from monetization.

1000 subscribers is going to be impossible if your content is niche.

That guy who put together that excellent 40 minute step-by-step video on fixing my garage-door opener (plastic gears, seriously?)... why would I subscribe?

Youtube is pivoting to being a TV-replacement.

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> 1000 subscribers is going to be impossible if your content is niche.

Yeah the subscriber part is going to shut down my partner status. I'm not an active youtuber by any means, but I do have one long video which last year generated 10000 hours of watchtime and $100 as my ad revenue share. However because I don't pump out new videos I only have around 150 subs. Fortunately I don't depend on this income, but it does feel unjust. Especially if it's only about stopping paying me my share and the ads will still appear.

If you're making <$100/year out of your videos (99% of the channels affected) it is highly unlikely that you were making new videos because of the money anyway.

So only <1% of impacted channels might be materially affected.

Maybe so, but won't there be less incentive for someone new to post some obscure repair video later on, to help the few people who might benefit from it and make a few dollars?

Sure, there'll be somewhat less incentive, but it's reasonable to assume that it'll still be enough to get a sufficient amount of obscure repair videos. If there was never much of a financial incentive, then pretty much all such videos were produced for other reasons and will still get produced even without that financial incentive.

Good luck getting subscribers though.

sadly we'll probably just see mini networks where people will buy obscure repair videos in the same way they buy ebooks to sell as part of a brand, for virtually nothing, and then monetize though other people's content, huffpo style.

Yay, the de-democratizing of online video.

It's how I started with Adsense. The $10 a month I started making motivated me to create more and more. Over a few years, I learned what worked and didn't, then started making $1500/month.

$25/year for a video that took <1 hour to make is an excellent investment.

Even a trickle is an incentive for some people. But now they are completely disincentivized.

For sure some people will continue regardless but there will be a few who also won't pursue the growth curve [making more quality fixit videos, for example] because getting the traction is getting too hard for their niche.

Yeah, but that 1% how-do-I-do-this video is a big reason to come to YouTube. Auto repair and some construction videos are life savers. I think they missed the boat on fixing their problem by pulling up the drawbridge and cutting down on the utility of their service.

You are right. I mainly commented because your last sentence has 3 metaphors in it which made my brain explode:

1. missing a boat

2. pulling up a drawbridge

3. cutting down (like a tree)

Now I am confused if the boat they missed was actually in the moat over which their drawbridge was positioned, and the tree they cut down was actually their boat mast?

Or have I got it wrong?

If the creator of that "that 1% how-do-I-do-this video" got $10 or $100 per year for this, then money wasn't the reason for uploading that video - so it means that demonetizing it won't cause such videos to stop being produced, they'll still get created and you (as a viewer) won't even notice the difference.

I find it funny that a lot of people don't seem to think $100 per year would motivate someone to upload a video. A couple of monetized videos can really make it for some folks.

Think about it this way. You start by earning enough to pay for a website, which grows your channel. Then enough to upgrade your equipment, which grows your channel. Maybe then you're earning enough to cover travel to an interesting site for filming, which grows your channel.

This change removes that bootstrapping mechanism.

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