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> 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".

> Why wouldn't you post something just because you won't make a bunch of money off of it?

Why does anyone do anything? There needs to be an incentive.

Guess we should shut down open source then.

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.

$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.

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.

I kinda want it both ways to be honest.

> 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.

What methods did you use to monetize your blog?

I made an edit: just Adsense.

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.

> 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?

/thread hijack

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.

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.

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. Those channels often have other sponsors.

> 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.)

They do demonetise videos, yes, but I believe they still put ads on them (just they take the money, not the creator).

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.

All content is advertised on by YT, they just don't start sharing revenue with you until you have 1k subs.

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.

Not really, content in violation of YouTube’s (largely vague) rules can be wildly popular.

If they can keep spam out of my inbox, I’m sure they can figure out what’s objectionable to advertisers beyond “unpopularity”.

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.

If I'm not mistaken they set a minimum payment amount either way to avoid that issue.

100%. Min payment is something like $100.

> repair my Neato vacuum cleaner

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!"

Since when has the internet not been channelized?

Gopher was channelized. IRC was channelized. Usenet was channelized. Early websites even tried to channelize via webrings and blogrolls.

The entire "search" thing sans channels is a fairly new phenomenon.