Alcun Atirutan BBS

Please tell me why I seem to have a contra-view to most on here about the ad blocker / youtube thing? I generally sit left-of-centre about most things. Basically, why this view is wrong?

1. Youtube has huge costs of hosting.

2. Youtube provides a service I (and many others enjoy)

3. Youtube's platform facilitates a living being made; or a partial living being made, by many others.

4. Their revenue is

a) advertising
and
b) subscription.

5. Youtube is entitled to make a profit.

1/2

2/2

6. Youtube, as the owner of its platform, just as any company may look to defend its income, has made technical changes to detect advert blocking. Their alternative was to look the other way and rip off their advertisers.

7. If you do not like adverts, you can subscribe, and pay a bit of money. By all accounts creators are actually better rewarded this way, too.

I subscribe to Youtube Premium, for advert and convenience reasons. It seems acceptable value for what it is.

@ahnlak @bloor @dysfun @steve @ben There are more and more tools, though! I turned on Super Thanks on YT, and it works much like a tip jar.

YT's cut is a lot bigger than Patreon's (it's 70/30 vs. around about 90/10, depending on Patreon tier and legacy and yadda yadda) so I'd rather steer people there, but Patreon is also resistant to offer one-time tip services.

But - the fact that YouTube is building those tools is yet another reason most people want to put their stuff there.

@ahnlak @bloor @dysfun @steve @ben Everybody loves to shit on YouTube but they do seem to genuinely care to invest in the creator ecosystem.

Of course they have fuckups, and the nature of what content is "friendly" is always contentious. But, imo, that's just a matter of their scale and popularity. I don't judge them for it and I play by the rules, but I know full-well others are bothered by them.

@TechConnectify @ahnlak @bloor @dysfun @ben I'm honestly amazed that Patreon has been going so long - it seemed a really obvious thing for Google to buy out years ago and integrate into YouTube themselves.

@steve @ahnlak @bloor @dysfun @ben Patreon's got about the same moat that YT does - everybody knows about it, it's one place to support multiple creators, and they've built lots of good tools to connect creators and audiences.

I do worry VC money will make them too growth-oriented, though. Already they've made some... weird choices.

@TechConnectify @ahnlak @bloor @steve @ben one thing i have noticed is you haven't done that awful thing everyone else is doing - shorts. i assume you're being penalised for that relative to people who do and you're mostly making up views numbers on subscriptions?

@dysfun @ahnlak @bloor @steve @ben Nah, I'm not doing them out of a combination of laziness and knowing from other creators that their CPM is poop.

There's a technical reason for that - it's really hard to monetize a feed (as we've seen time and again). Ads are placed /between/ content and not against a single piece of content, so the accounting gets really really messy and ads are less effective.

So I just don't bother.

@steve Buuuttt... YT memberships are kind of challenging them.

Again, YT's cut is much bigger, and there are things they really need to tweak (for instance they should absolutely kill ads for you on any channel you have a membership for but don't as of now). If they were more generous and fixed some of its more glaring flaws, I'd probably turn that feature on. But as of now I'm more invested in Patreon, plus it's a different basket to put some eggs in.

@TechConnectify @steve @bloor @dysfun @ben I love Patreon as a concept, but it *still* has the problem that because of the way payments are structured, it's not realistic to pay someone a cent or two - which is what you need if you want it to be wide-spread and semi-automatic as an ad-alternative.

@ahnlak To be honest, I think the reason they don't do this is that they want creators to have a sense of stability.

Patreon income is extremely reliable - while there is some churn, of course, you know how many members you have and what you'll be earning from them.

If they offered a way for someone to, say, make a Patreon budget of $20 and divvy that up between X number of creators, that would make payment processing easier but it would mean what goes to each individual is harder to track.

@ahnlak YT Premium actually does this, with the caveat that the revenue sharing is much more opaque AND, from my end, how much money I make from Premium depends on how well my videos perform.

I think that right now, Patreon wants to avoid any strategy that would make your expected income murkier. So while the structure is less appealing to many, for those that want to support individual creators, it's explicitly clear that A) they are doing that and B) how much they want to support you.

@TechConnectify but that's what you need, to render advertising less attractive.

Let me put my $20 in a Patreon Pot, and let me click a button when I visit a website to drop a cent into that site's jar our of my Patreon Pot.

I get one bill at the end of the month for the $20. The creators get all those cents gathered up into a single payment at the end of the month. Everyone wins.

(I suspect the reason this isn't done is because that would make them a financial institution?)

@ahnlak You were probably writing this while I was writing my second reply, but the cost here is that, without an explicit pledge, income isn't stable.

And, functionally, when you use Patreon and pledge $1 to 20 people, it's one payment of $20. So it's much the same thing, except the minimum pledge is a dollar and you have to commit quasi-regularly to who you're pledging to.

Also, remember Patreon isn't really a content hosting platform (it kinda is, but... complicated). It's its own thing.

@ahnlak Also, I just realized I'm not entire sure how the payment happens anymore.

I charge up-front because it became clear a LOT people people were making a pledge, getting access to paywalled stuff (which to be fair is quite minimal for me), and cancelling before their pledge even processed. And now, people are charged on their anniversary date of the pledge rather than in a lump because folks didn't like that.

Long story short: this is all very hard!

@TechConnectify it becomes more stable as you have more supporters though, and by facilitating micropayments you should drastically increase that pool - so yes, it might not be super predictable for new creators, it probably wouldn't be *that* bad compared to ads (and would many creators care?)

I'm pretty sure not all my Patreon pledges get rolled into a single payment, although maybe it's split based on creator locations for tax reasons?

@ahnlak Eh. To be honest I'm not sure how big the market is for "I've got $20 I want to spread between 50+ creators"

And if you want to kills ads from the platform, Patreon's got nothing to do with that.

I see YT Premium as a wholly different idea. I know my money's going to the people I watch, but it's inconsistent because it's based on watch time. That's really the only automated way to do it - and if you're making explicit pledges, honestly a $1 minimum doesn't seem unreasonable.