Comment by robertelder | Hacker News Reader

Comment by robertelder | Hacker News Reader

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I just got an email that my channel will de-monetized by this. I thought it was pretty funny actually. There are all these huge content creators losing out on their livelihoods because of Google's unpredictable de-monetization behaviour, and then Google even decides to demonetize even my tiny channel with only a few videos (that are over 9 years old).

I turned on monetization a few years ago and I think I've made maybe $20 so far. For a while, I actually considered investing time in making more videos with the idea that the present value of a large number of videos might be pretty considerable over the long term (say 30 years or so).

A few years ago one of my most popular videos (tens of thousands of views) was flagged as being 'not family friendly'. The video was a screen capture of me scrolling through a notepad.exe list of documentary titles with no audio. It was just a list of nature/space documentaries that were already on YouTube. Nothing offensive or controversial.

I guess this is the final nail in the coffin for my YouTube career.

This is why one should not entrust their livelihood to any company. I'm a fan of the Patreon model. If I was starting a video publishing enterprise (say something like Primitive Technology or Computerphile or a music band channel) I'd definitely use all the most popular subscription services available, and a newsletter & blog with proper RSS. I'd upload to YouTube to drive viewers, than take them to my blog, show them where else I upload stuff and where to pay to take active part in the community, which allows for pre-releases or access to live programs after some videos where they can ask questions. I'd earn less than PewDiePie, but nobody would be able to challenge my enterprise. Though certainly to earn with such model, you need to be publishing high quality stuff (or of a quality too low for the decent peope), that is, high quality content.

Except for when Patreon updated how they collect payments about a month ago and that made it very expensive for patrons to donate to a large number of different people small amounts so they started cancelling their $1 and $2 donations because of the extra fees involved. So all of a sudden if you were getting 20% of your income from these smaller patrons you would lose that.

Now they did eventually reverse it, but it just shows you that when you are dependent on X, you are dependent on X. It could be better or worse, but it's still a middle man in the system.

You could go to a straight donation model like using Paypal, but that limits your global subscriber network since Paypal isn't used everywhere and you will also be missing out on the platform benefits. Meaning if someone is donating already on Patron they will more likely donate to someone else. Likewise if someone is subscribed to one channel on Youtube they will more likely subscribe to a second.

I think ultimately there is a trade off here where you have to understand what you are exchanging in terms of freedom, control, and dependence, with the platform you choose to use.

Quoting myself:

>> I'd definitely use all the most popular subscription services available

I have about five of them bookmarked. There definitely exists more.

You need to rely on someone at some point, but redundancy and decoupling can make the potential backstab less hurting.

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