Realistic YouTubers?

[IanD]

14 minutes ago, MtB said:

 

For some actual figures, watch the Mary Spender video I posted above! 

 

 

Very informative and well-presented 🙂

 

What was horrifying -- but unsurprising -- was the fact that one video reviewing a carbon-fibre guitar made more money than all 66 of her music and other original videos... 😞

 

And that the sum in each case was around £5000, for those who think this is a path to immediate riches...

[Guest]

The annoying thing I find is even if you subscribe to You Tube premium and go ad. free (I do by virtue of being a You Tube Music premium subscriber) the vids are often still interrupted by details of a product being promoted by a you tuber.

 

It happens a lot on the the motoring related ones. Less so with the boaty ones, though I note C the C has started doing it.

 

Luckily you can at least fast forward past the sponsorship blurb.

[magnetman]

I dislike the dishonest advertising on youtube. It seems to me to be a dodgy situation to be feeding masses of people with the false idea you can heat a house with a small fan heater. 

 

At one time there were adverts for a torch which could burn through things. Obviously false. 

 

Why is there no regulation? Most people can presumably work out when something is a blatant scam but the principle of normalising what is actually mildly fraudulent advertising seems to me to be rather dangerous. 

 

 

 

People are being conditioned to think this is normal. Its well dodgy what is going on here. 

[IanD]

7 minutes ago, magnetman said:

I dislike the dishonest advertising on youtube. It seems to me to be a dodgy situation to be feeding masses of people with the false idea you can heat a house with a small fan heater. 

 

At one time there were adverts for a torch which could burn through things. Obviously false. 

 

Why is there no regulation? Most people can presumably work out when something is a blatant scam but the principle of normalising what is actually mildly fraudulent advertising seems to me to be rather dangerous. 

 

 

How do you regulate a platform with 4M posts per day -- 700k hours of video! -- of user-generated and user-posted content?

 

The whole point of all social media platforms is that they work on the principle of post now, review/regulate later if/when there's a complaint -- and many do this badly, there's simply too much content to police effectively and quickly. Which is kind of the whole point of them, there's so much content -- drivel and good -- because it's so quick and easy to get out there.

 

I can't see how tight/effective regulation can be put in place without effectively destroying them. Which I expect is something quite a few people would undoubtedly approve of, especially on CWDF... 😉

 

Edited December 27, 2023 by IanD

[Tony1]

24 minutes ago, MtB said:

 

For some actual figures, watch the Mary Spender video I posted above! 

 

 

I have watched some of her stuff, but I don't need to watch that one, because no canal vlogger will ever get 5 million views.

Not unless they perform a live boat sinking on youtube- no, make that a live drowning.

Spender's earnings from 5 million views are totally irrelevant to canal vloggers, who are considered pretty big time if they get more than 10k views.  

It is a very small, very niche pool that our fish swim in, and apart from the very best of them, the earnings are microscopic! 

 

[magnetman]

2 minutes ago, IanD said:

 

How do you regulate a platform with 4M posts per day -- 700k hours of video! -- of user-generated and user-posted content?

 

The whole point of all social media platforms is that they work on the principle of post now, review/regulate later if/when there's a complaint -- and many do this badly, there's simply too much content to police effectively and quickly. Which is kind of the whole point of them, there's so much content -- drivel and good -- because it's so quick and easy to get out there.

 

I can't see how tight/effective regulation can be put in place without effectively destroying them. Which I expect is something quite a few people would undoubtedly approve of, especially on CWDF... 😉

 

 

Ah. I thought the adverts were made by advertisers. I did not realise the content creater also made the adverts! 

 

Right. Got it now. 

 

 

[Guest]

If people think You Tube is crap just try 10 mins. on TikTok..........

 

It makes YouTube look like a broadcaster of high quality video......

[magnetman]

I've seen people on trains looking at TikTok. Now that really -is- dumbing down par excellence. 

 

To me it looks like a clever form of cyber warfare. Turn your enemy into idiots. 

 

Remember when that Bulley woman fell in a river in Lancashire. Loads of TikTok ghouls turned up to film the area. It was crazy. Like an invasion literally. All this driven by social media algorithms. 

 

They could start a war this lot. 

[Tony1]

12 minutes ago, MJG said:

The annoying thing I find is even if you subscribe to You Tube premium and go ad. free (I do by virtue of being a You Tube Music premium subscriber) the vids are often still interrupted by details of a product being promoted by a you tuber.

 

It happens a lot on the the motoring related ones. Less so with the boaty ones, though I note C the C has started doing it.

 

Luckily you can at least fast forward past the sponsorship blurb.

 

I watch a lot of youtube, and I felt I had to go premium to avoid those endless ads.

I now skim past the ads that the presenters put into the fabric of the video itself, in the form of 'reviews'. 

Apparently the bigger channels are paid maybe 5 or 10k to include a positive review for a given product (aka an advert)- so for a creator who gets say 100k views, that can become a major source of income.

A year or two ago, there was an endless stream of canal and vanlife vloggers reviewing clever batteries by companies like Jackery.  I got heartily sick of seeing these things being talked about by vloggers,

More recently it was something athletic greens (which of course all of the youtube presenters were suddenly lifelong fans of).

The big US channels are rife with these sorts of ads, and I suspect it is google removing their old-style ad revenue that encourages them to basically sell out and become full-on advertisers.

 

[IanD]

19 minutes ago, magnetman said:

 

Ah. I thought the adverts were made by advertisers. I did not realise the content creater also made the adverts! 

 

Right. Got it now. 

 

It sounded like you were complaining about "advertorial" posts, where "influencers" tell everyone how brilliant something is that they're being paid to promote.

 

Still, good to see you don't understand how online adverts work either... 😉

 

(there are huge numbers of them, and they're not reviewed or checked before release, only if there's a complaint -- same as user posts)

[George Shardlow]

34 minutes ago, magnetman said:

There must be a 'holy grail' which is a video that everyone watches

Sadly it seems to involve boobs. If you look at a lot of the big hitters they feature thumbnails with scantily clad females.... it would appear a large percentage of YT viewers are teenage males. My wife who has a Gravel Cycling chanel calls it 'Tits for Hits'. 

However hidden amongst the dross, are some great gems. As I am at the start of fitting out a boat it is a great resource.

[magnetman]

1 minute ago, IanD said:

 

(there are huge numbers of them, and they're not reviewed or checked before release, only if there's a complaint -- same as user posts)

I don't watch any youtube videos with presenters. Snooker matches, zombie films, some factual Boat content. 

 

So I have no idea how presenters may promote items. Never seen it happen.

 

I did, however, think that advertising was somehow regulated. It clearly isn't. 

 

 

 

 

So basically an advertiser can present a completely fraudulent product and thats viewed as acceptable. 

 

I'm sure back in the days when I had a telly 20 yars ago there were not blatantly false adverts.

 

 

 

People are being conditioned to think it is normal. This is dodgy. I am simply a messenger. 

[George Shardlow]

4 minutes ago, magnetman said:

So basically an advertiser can present a completely fraudulent product and thats viewed as acceptable. 

When you upload a video, you are supposed to declare if it features a promotion. At the start of the video it will state that it 'Contains promoted material'. If you feel it is fraudulent you can report it. However this will usually be ignored 🙁 

 

[Tony1]

30 minutes ago, magnetman said:

I dislike the dishonest advertising on youtube. It seems to me to be a dodgy situation to be feeding masses of people with the false idea you can heat a house with a small fan heater. 

 

At one time there were adverts for a torch which could burn through things. Obviously false. 

 

Why is there no regulation? Most people can presumably work out when something is a blatant scam but the principle of normalising what is actually mildly fraudulent advertising seems to me to be rather dangerous. 

 

 

I think when a video is uploaded, there is some sort of check done on it. That will weed out certain key words or phrases (and maybe images).  And AI will make that a bit more effective in future. 

I recall that during covid, many creators were loath to even say the phrase 'covid-19' out loud, as it would garner extra checking/attention, and probably a ban on the video. 

Creators now have to mute any bits of footage where a copyrighted song is audible in the background, as that can get their video banned.  

 

But in terms of misinformation, the real damage is not done by ads. And it is being completely ignored by youtube. 

There are countless videos that purport to prove that the earth is flat, for example. Or that the royal family are alien lizards, or that the Q anon cult is totally legit. Etc, etc etc. 

There are any number of insane rabbit holes that people can fall into once they start browsing youtube. And tragically, all too many people do exactly that, and have their lives and families damaged by the fallout. There were many prominent US youtubers who persuaded hundreds of thousands of their followers not to accept a covid vaccine, and so indirectly caused many deaths. 

I've spoken to a number of people who even now think that the govt put something into the vaccine in order to help them control the population somehow. Go back a few years and it was 5G allegedly doing all this stuff. 

But here's the thing- where do you draw the compromise between allowing freedom of expression, versus stopping vulnerable people being damaged by toxic misinformation and mad conspiracy theories?

 

 

[magnetman]

4 minutes ago, mshakeshaft said:

When you upload a video, you are supposed to declare if it features a promotion. At the start of the video it will state that it 'Contains promoted material'. If you feel it is fraudulent you can report it. However this will usually be ignored 🙁 

 

 

I've never seen a promoted product. Its standard advert breaks like the temu crap and the one about the fan heater which heats a whole house and the torch which burns through things. 

 

I think these are google adverts (I am not signed in to an account) which is why I thought they might be regulated somehow. 

 

They aren't. 

[IanD]

16 minutes ago, magnetman said:

I don't watch any youtube videos with presenters. Snooker matches, zombie films, some factual Boat content. 

 

So I have no idea how presenters may promote items. Never seen it happen.

 

I did, however, think that advertising was somehow regulated. It clearly isn't. 

 

So basically an advertiser can present a completely fraudulent product and thats viewed as acceptable. 

 

I'm sure back in the days when I had a telly 20 yars ago there were not blatantly false adverts.

 

People are being conditioned to think it is normal. This is dodgy. I am simply a messenger. 

 

Why do you think video ads are any different to any other online ads?

 

There are huge numbers put up every day, and many of them are fake or scams, they're only pulled if someone complains -- and the platform takes notice and does something about it.

 

Welcome to the internet -- if you don't like it, go somewhere else... 😉

Edited December 27, 2023 by IanD

[Higgs]

If there's anything worth watching, like a maintenance series, I'll record it and watch at leisure, without ads. 

 

 

[George Shardlow]

There are ways of filtering out ads. It depends on which device or browser you are using. The easiest is to  download the 'Brave Browser' this is based on Google Chrome, but is a lot more secure and blocks YT adds and a lot of cookies (that share info about your browsing habits). It completely changes the YT experience.

[Higgs]

My internet is none too brilliant most of the time, If I happen to end up in a good spot, and rarely do, it makes sense for me to take advantage of that and record stuff for anytime-use. 

[Arthur Marshall]

You do have to remember that anything you get for free has to be paid for somehow, as somebody somewhere has to make a living out of it. And if there's a monopoly supplier, which YouTube is of this sort of thing, then the money is going there rather than to the poor buggers who provide the content. When only a few people were doing it, they mattered to YouTube and so they got paid. Now everyone's doing it, the stuffs pouring in, why should they bother?

The only way a vlogger is going to get any money now is via sponsorship, so you'll either get honest ads that look like ads, or just embedded stuff in the content that you hardly notice. As a hobby, it's simply too time consuming - if it takes me virtually two days to produce a three minute music video, I hate to think what it takes in time and effort to produce a decent boaty one, so it's only fair that , if you do watch any particular channel on a regular basis, you at least subscribe (which is free) to keep YouTube happy or click on an ad to give the bloke some revenue.

[Guest]

3 minutes ago, Arthur Marshall said:

You do have to remember that anything you get for free has to be paid for somehow, as somebody somewhere has to make a living out of it. And if there's a monopoly supplier, which YouTube is of this sort of thing, then the money is going there rather than to the poor buggers who provide the content. When only a few people were doing it, they mattered to YouTube and so they got paid. Now everyone's doing it, the stuffs pouring in, why should they bother?

The only way a vlogger is going to get any money now is via sponsorship, so you'll either get honest ads that look like ads, or just embedded stuff in the content that you hardly notice. As a hobby, it's simply too time consuming - if it takes me virtually two days to produce a three minute music video, I hate to think what it takes in time and effort to produce a decent boaty one, so it's only fair that , if you do watch any particular channel on a regular basis, you at least subscribe (which is free) to keep YouTube happy or click on an ad to give the bloke some revenue.

 

 

For decent You Tube content' Absolutely - also comment on the vid. as apparently comments generate income too, which is why they will often ask you to 'comment below'. Even if it's just to say good video enjoyed that.

 

Also watch to the end if you enjoy it as my understanding is that viewing stats are generated by complete views. Obviously do the opposite if the vid is pants. When I'm watching they get about 15 secs for me to decide if I will watch it or not. 

[Tony1]

 

I really sympathise with the smaller YT creators, and I really dislike that YT has taken almost all of their ad revenue for itself. 

But the dilemma is that YT is only really watchable via premium, which is how I watch it- and that money goes direct to YT, and I bet the creators get none of it. 

And the premium YT service removes ads altogether, so I don't even get the option to click on an ad (in an effort to help the creator a bit). 

And I would bet that if I did watch an ad, YT would take 90% of any revenue earned from that ad being played.

So I'm not sure even watching the ads helps the creators all that much.

And maybe that's why they all set up patreon and kofi accounts. Tbh, I think this has made me reconsider making contributions- which I've so far not done.

I think when I do watch a video that I enjoy/learn from, I'll maybe give a small donation via kofi- because it seems like YT gives them bugger all these days. 

As consumers though, we do have to also watch our own purse strings. With many people already having subscriptions for things like netflix, amazon, Sky sports or similar, and who knows what else- its not a welcome thought that we will feel encouraged by conscience or sympathy to spend even more for video or other entertainment. 

But it does feel like the right thing to do, for really good videos. 

 

Edited December 27, 2023 by Tony1

[MtB]

8 minutes ago, Tony1 said:

 

I really sympathise with the smaller YT creators, and I really dislike that YT has taken almost all of their ad revenue for itself. 

But the dilemma is that YT is only really watchable via premium, which is how I watch it- and that money goes direct to YT, and I bet the creators get none of it. 

And the premium YT service removes ads altogether, so I don't even get the option to click on an ad (in an effort to help the creator a bit). 

And I would bet that if I did watch an ad, YT would take 90% of any revenue earned from that ad being played.

So I'm not sure even watching the ads helps the creators all that much.

And maybe that's why they all set up patreon and kofi accounts. Tbh, I think this has made me reconsider making contributions- which I've so far not done.

I think when I do watch a video that I enjoy/learn from, I'll maybe give a small donation via kofi- because it seems like YT gives them bugger all these days. 

As consumers though, we do have to also watch our own purse strings. With many people already having subscriptions for things like netflix, amazon, Sky sports or similar, and who knows what else- its not a welcome thought that we will feel encouraged by conscience or sympathy to spend even more for video or other entertainment. 

But it does feel like the right thing to do, for really good videos. 

 

 

Just by way of balance I'd point out the YouTube platform itself must cost an absolute mint to run and to exist at all in the first place, and that needs to be funded just like CRT if we want it to continue to exist. So the quibble is actually about what proportion of the advertising income YT are entitled to keep. I'd suggest they are entitled to keep ALL of it. But then the richness of the content would (probably) fade away so they have a constant balance to maintain. 

 

And YT doesn't have a monopoly. Any YTer can switch to Vimeo if they don't like the YT deal. Or start their own equivalent to YT. 

 

 

 

They must still be doing something right as 

[Tony1]

42 minutes ago, MtB said:

 

Just by way of balance I'd point out the YouTube platform itself must cost an absolute mint to run and to exist at all in the first place, and that needs to be funded just like CRT if we want it to continue to exist. So the quibble is actually about what proportion of the advertising income YT are entitled to keep. I'd suggest they are entitled to keep ALL of it. But then the richness of the content would (probably) fade away so they have a constant balance to maintain. 

 

And YT doesn't have a monopoly. Any YTer can switch to Vimeo if they don't like the YT deal. Or start their own equivalent to YT. 

 

 

I think any fair minded person would agree that YT need a slice of the revenue to keep the platform going and make some profit.

But as you say, the debate is around how much they take. 

I think they are not giving creators enough at the moment. But it doesn't matter how badly they treat creators, because there are so many around that more will always gain higher profiles as the old ones recede and stop making videos. 

And with so many creators effectively competing for views (certainly in small niche segments like boating), it is YT who hold all the power. 

 

BUT in the longer term, if YT becomes non-rewarding for videos of less than say 20k views, then enough creators will stop/remove their work that there will be an impact on YT's profit. 

If the ad revenue is the golden egg, then the creators are the goose that is laying that egg. YT are providing the barn and the straw. 

I would contend that encouraging creators to actually pay to publish videos is a step too far, and that approach might eventually kill off 50% of the YT viewer numbers. 

 

Re alternatives like vimeo: I've looked at it a few times but from what I've seen it doesn't have anything like the volume of videos that YT has. 

For example, on YT I found several videos showing how you can do an engine service on a canaline 38, but I doubt I'd find one on vimeo.

Likewise when I needed a video showing how to replace my cracked laptop screen. 

 

The other worry about the smaller platforms is they are apparently becoming a home for mad conspiracy theorists, nazi sympathisers, various cults, and other sorts of people who get banned from YT itself.

And you have to be pretty bloody bad to get yourself (and/or your videos) banned from YT.

 

But if YT continue down their current path, then one can imagine Vimeo growing hugely, absorbing most of the creators, and then taking all the viewers. 

 

 

Edited December 27, 2023 by Tony1

[Arthur Marshall]

27 minutes ago, Tony1 said:

 

I think any fair minded person would agree that YT need a slice of the revenue to keep the platform going and make some profit.

But as you say, the debate is around how much they take. 

I think they are not giving creators enough at the moment. But it doesn't matter how badly they treat creators, because there are so many around that more will always gain higher profiles as the old ones recede and stop making videos. 

And with so many creators effectively competing for views (certainly in small niche segments like boating), it is YT who hold all the power. 

 

BUT in the longer term, if YT becomes non-rewarding for videos of less than say 20k views, then enough creators will stop/remove their work that there will be an impact on YT's profit. 

If the ad revenue is the golden egg, then the creators are the goose that is laying that egg. YT are providing the barn and the straw. 

I would contend that encouraging creators to actually pay to publish videos is a step too far, and that approach might eventually kill off 50% of the YT viewer numbers. 

 

Re alternatives like vimeo: I've looked at it a few times but from what I've seen it doesn't have anything like the volume of videos that YT has. 

For example, on YT I found several videos showing how you can do an engine service on a canaline 38, but I doubt I'd find one on vimeo.

Likewise when I needed a video showing how to replace my cracked laptop screen. 

 

The other worry about the smaller platforms is they are apparently becoming a home for mad conspiracy theorists, nazi sympathisers, various cults, and other sorts of people who get banned from YT itself.

And you have to be pretty bloody bad to get yourself (and/or your videos) banned from YT.

 

But if YT continue down their current path, then one can imagine Vimeo growing hugely, absorbing most of the creators, and then taking all the viewers. 

 

 

YouTube is owned by Google. I don't think we have to worry about them going broke.