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Comment by dmix | Hacker News Reader

What's the motivation here then? To stop paying money to one-hit wonders and funnel it only to the professional/serious content producers? I don't really understand why that'd be necessary.

Youtube makes some strange choices with their monetization. I really wonder why they are so obsessed with finely controlling who can profit from producing good content on their platform. Why not let a) the users and b) the advertisers decide this? Who is losing out here, absent their preemptive interventions?

If they keep this up it might highly incentivize a decentralized video platform with a built-in monetization scheme.

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No idea. I just met their new criteria for 10000 views before monetization, which should mean I've already been vetted?

Does a company like Google really need human review on videos? With 10k views, their AI/ML should detect what's risky content or not based on what they know about users.

Here's a great video that we'll see less of: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDB2QVEuy60

A well-produced 36 second video on replacing your Corolla's brake light, rather than a 5 minute video going blah blah blah. And I'll never subscribe.

Again that level of AI/ML means being able to state what the intent of a comment or document is. If we ever get close to that point, that programs can reliably mark something as "risky" content, human thought is in big trouble.

"Risky" material is subjective. Something even humans can't make out reliably very often.

I think, this is the result of the tech firms putting content creators of old out of business, but not investing in the necessary editorial power, subscribing instead to the "wisdom of the crowds" school of thought.

They have not paid for (and will not be able to afford) the distributed human editorial power which was lost.

It doesn't need to be perfect, just reliable enough to determine what needs more thorough review.

A 2 minute video titled "How to fix your computer's _______", that is linked from fixit forums, that is universally liked with comments stating "Wow, that worked, thanks!" shouldn't even need human review to determine risk.

The comparison alone to other videos with similar characteristics should do it.

How, all human activities have adversarial components to it- especially when there’s a financial pay off involved. People will just got the comments.

And that’s over the naturally noisy data set of human behavior.

Not to mention cultural norms across all nations in the world - I know many Indian user forums where even mildly helpful or unhelpful videos/posts will receive “thank you, could you help with...” posts.

if you go to youtube for the corolla video, you see one ad, see the video and be done with it.

the average bla bla bla video instead has a much higher chance of driving multiple view per user via the suggestion mechanism, giving a multitude of views on each video and ads.

of course that strangles quality, focused content in favor of generalist episodic blogs/devs, but a single view video will earn them many times more than a video with a strong network effect trough past/previous episode suggestion, watch again, see this other blogger on the same topic etc.

As a guess, they are moving to implement a much more stringent manual review of monetized channels, and the change to the eligibility criteria is an effort to reduce the number of monetized channels to a number that's more feasible to review. But if that's the case, I wonder why they don't just say it.

>Why not let... the advertisers decide this?

The advertiser's have been pretty clear they want YouTube to be the content police. That's what the big advertiser revolt a few months ago was about.

That's an interesting take when you start factoring in the broader landscape. Video is no longer about just the short form, and increasingly attention is pulled away from Youtube by services like Netflix, Amazon Prime, and FB's video play.

I wonder how much video CPMs (particularly mid-roll) and the premium big brands are willing to pay plays a role in this vs something like a desire to growing engagement. If you incentivize creators to attract subscribers, and you have more direct ability to control messaging channels to subscribers as a platform, you might gain some levers in driving revenue that may not have existed or had as large an impact before. You also nurture desirable user-base behaviors.

Just multi-tier it.

You can pay more if you only want your ads against thoroughly vetted content.

Or pay less if you don't care.

Less video to bid against will raise ad costs for everyone.

The motivation is obvious when you look at it from youtube's perspective. They do not value content creators much, but they lick the boots of advertisers. They want to create a system that is as smooth for advertisers as possible, regardless of the impact on any other aspect of the platform. They want to reduce the risk of bad PR (which causes advertisers to run away). All they care about is the product of eyeball counts and ad impressions yielding dollars, they don't understand at all the goose that lays the golden egg or how easy it is to kill it.

> What's the motivation here then?

I'd guess it's some sort of legal/accounting move, something beneath the surface. Doesn't really make much sense otherwise.

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