Speaker 1: Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production of I Heart Radios,
Speaker 1: How Stuff Works. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff.
Speaker 1: I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with
Speaker 1: How Stuff Works and I heart Radio and I love
Speaker 1: all things tech. And one thing I do a lot
Speaker 1: of these days but actually planned to reduce in the
Speaker 1: future is that I watch a lot of online web series,
Speaker 1: particularly on YouTube. I watched series about video games, pop culture,
Speaker 1: film criticism, and vlogs a s MR Videos. I watch
Speaker 1: a lot of stuff on YouTube, and one thing I've
Speaker 1: seen a few times is how YouTube's monetization policies can
Speaker 1: have a really big impact on the channels that I watch.
Speaker 1: So today I want to talk a bit about the
Speaker 1: business side of YouTube and how things have changed for creators,
Speaker 1: particularly fairly recently. Now to understand what's been going on,
Speaker 1: it's good to think of the story involving three major
Speaker 1: groups or factions. First, you've got YouTube itself. This is
Speaker 1: the publishing platform that enables users to share their videos
Speaker 1: and have those videos paired with advertisers. YouTube takes a
Speaker 1: percentage of the ad fees generated by videos, and generally speaking,
Speaker 1: at percentage is pretty high. You know. You might have
Speaker 1: heard that Apple in the iTunes store takes something like
Speaker 1: thirty of all apps sales that goes to Apple itself.
Speaker 1: YouTube does better than that for them, they do forty,
Speaker 1: so nearly half of all the money generated by a
Speaker 1: video goes to YouTube. More in that later. Then you've
Speaker 1: got the creators. These are the people actually making the videos.
Speaker 1: They run the range of no budget creators who rely
Speaker 1: heavily on their own appeal to attract viewers, or upon
Speaker 1: acular strategy for the type of content that they provide,
Speaker 1: and it goes all the way up to highly produced
Speaker 1: videos from established studios. If the creator meets a certain threshold,
Speaker 1: they can choose an option to monetize their videos, which
Speaker 1: allows YouTube to pair those videos with ads. A change
Speaker 1: in monetization policy can have a dramatic impact on a creator.
Speaker 1: And the third group or faction would be the advertisers themselves. Typically,
Speaker 1: these are ad companies with many clients that offer up
Speaker 1: different goods and services, so you'll have a dozen or
Speaker 1: so ad companies that represent hundreds of different brands. Rarely
Speaker 1: will such a company like McDonald's or Levi's interact directly
Speaker 1: with a platform like YouTube, but it can happen more frequently,
Speaker 1: they will rely upon a third party advertising firm to
Speaker 1: hash all this out, And so the business of YouTube
Speaker 1: depends upon these three prongs working together. The more views
Speaker 1: a monetized video gets, the more it earns. Longer videos
Speaker 1: can also have mid role ads, which creates a revenue
Speaker 1: generating stream for creators and for YouTube itself. For that reason,
Speaker 1: the platform began to encourage YouTube creators to make longer
Speaker 1: videos a few years back. This was in stark contrast
Speaker 1: with the early days of YouTube and which most videos
Speaker 1: had a hard ten minute limit for running time. You
Speaker 1: couldn't go beyond that. These days, YouTube would rather have
Speaker 1: longer videos that encourage more activity on the platform, meaning
Speaker 1: that after someone watches one video, they're likely to watch another. Now,
Speaker 1: I didn't include viewers in those three prongs because we
Speaker 1: don't have quite as much to do with the business
Speaker 1: side of it. We generate the views that pull the
Speaker 1: levers on those advertising dollars, but other than that, we
Speaker 1: don't really have much involvement in the business. That stuff
Speaker 1: lies more with the platform and the creators. Now, let
Speaker 1: me give you a quick rundown on the history of
Speaker 1: monetization on YouTube. So we can kind of understand where
Speaker 1: we came from and where we are now. When YouTube
Speaker 1: launched in two thousand five as an independent service before
Speaker 1: it was part of Google, there was no monetization on
Speaker 1: the platform. Now that changed in August two thousand six,
Speaker 1: when YouTube launched its first ad concept, called participatory video ads,
Speaker 1: along with brand channels. Brand channels are exactly what they
Speaker 1: sound like, channels that are owned by specific companies and
Speaker 1: meant to act as a type of marketing towards customers.
Speaker 1: So you could have Nike having a Nike channel, for example.
Speaker 1: The participatory video ads would appear in the upper right
Speaker 1: corner of the screen among video choices, so you could
Speaker 1: think of the right rail having a list of videos,
Speaker 1: and the top one would be an AD, but there
Speaker 1: are others would just be other YouTube videos. So YouTube
Speaker 1: had yet to introduce a method for content creators who
Speaker 1: weren't representing brands to monetize content. The only money that
Speaker 1: was really going anywhere was going to YouTube. Google Goal
Speaker 1: purchased YouTube for more than one point five billion dollars
Speaker 1: in October two thou six, just a couple of months
Speaker 1: after the rollout of this initial ad strategy. A year later,
Speaker 1: YouTube launched in video ads. This would be August two
Speaker 1: thousand seven. Instead of a commercial running before or during
Speaker 1: a show, these were overlay ads that were flash based
Speaker 1: and appeared on top of the video, so the lower
Speaker 1: twenty percent part of a video could have an ad
Speaker 1: appear after fifteen seconds of the video had already played.
Speaker 1: The goal was to make the overlay transparent and to
Speaker 1: have them run for only around ten seconds, so you'd
Speaker 1: have a little message upp here on that bottom that
Speaker 1: would somewhat obscure that portion of the video and would
Speaker 1: be an ad for something. Again, YouTube restricted these ads
Speaker 1: to run on content from a select group of partners,
Speaker 1: and individual content creators were generally not eligible for this. So,
Speaker 1: in other words, if you were Joe Schmo and you
Speaker 1: were creating your own vlog and it was getting a
Speaker 1: good following, you still weren't eligible to uh to have
Speaker 1: ads run on your your videos. In December of two
Speaker 1: thousand seven, YouTube launched the Partner program, in which individual
Speaker 1: creators could apply to become partners, which would enable advertising
Speaker 1: on their videos. It did require that they meet certain criteria.
Speaker 1: We'll talk more about that a little bit later. By
Speaker 1: November two thousand eight, YouTube would launch pre roll ads,
Speaker 1: making videos more like television programs. Pre roll ad is
Speaker 1: just what it sounds like, you have an ad that
Speaker 1: runs before the video that you've selected to watch. But
Speaker 1: YouTube ads work a little differently from television ads. See
Speaker 1: on TV, and advertiser pays for a specific time slot.
Speaker 1: Advertisers might say I want to run an ad during
Speaker 1: this sporting event or during this show. On YouTube, Google
Speaker 1: can target ads to people who appear to have interests
Speaker 1: that align with particular brand. By analyzing user behavior, Google
Speaker 1: can predict which brands will resonate the most and match
Speaker 1: those up to a viewers experience. So, rather than Coca
Speaker 1: Cola saying I really like those let's play videos, put
Speaker 1: us on those, it's Coca Cola saying, show us to
Speaker 1: people who really like soft drinks. And this would end
Speaker 1: up being part of the problem because there's a whole
Speaker 1: lot of folks out there who likes stuff like soft
Speaker 1: drinks who also like to watch some pretty questionable content,
Speaker 1: and thus Coca Cola's ads would show up against stuff
Speaker 1: that maybe Coca Cola wasn't so crazy about. Now, at
Speaker 1: this point, it became possible to actually make a living
Speaker 1: off of YouTube if you were just a regular person,
Speaker 1: if you were a creator with an engaged, large following,
Speaker 1: you could conceivably have enough views to earn decent money,
Speaker 1: and eventually this would grow beyond decent money to a
Speaker 1: metric crap ton of money if you were one of
Speaker 1: a few mega popular creators. As still sort of the
Speaker 1: wild West at this point. You two grew largely as
Speaker 1: an alternative to classic television services, and in the earliest days,
Speaker 1: people were uploading a lot of copyrighted work that would
Speaker 1: land YouTube in hot water with various publishing companies, particularly
Speaker 1: music labels and movie and television studios, But that gradually
Speaker 1: gave way to more user generated stuff, which is what
Speaker 1: the platform was envisioned as. Now. It's interesting to point
Speaker 1: out that in the early days of YouTube, a lot
Speaker 1: of the popular videos were unauthorized uploads of more traditional media,
Speaker 1: because if you go to YouTube today, you're going to
Speaker 1: see a lot of authorized uploads of that same sort
Speaker 1: of traditional media up on YouTube. So everything comes full
Speaker 1: circle eventually, and here's where we run into the first
Speaker 1: points of friction. YouTube is primarily a publishing platform. The
Speaker 1: company does produce some of its own content, but it's
Speaker 1: mostly known as being the place where creators can publish
Speaker 1: their works, so YouTube is the video store, not the
Speaker 1: studio producing the videos. Generally speaking, the video producers developed
Speaker 1: their own voice, their own style, their type of content.
Speaker 1: They find what works and they build an audience on that.
Speaker 1: Some content creators do music, some tutorials, some do let's
Speaker 1: play videos, some do scripted works like sketches, and some
Speaker 1: incorporate pretty edgy material in their videos. Or sometimes they
Speaker 1: might include intentionally offensive material knowing that controversy will result
Speaker 1: in more views and that results in more money. Now,
Speaker 1: initially that benefits YouTube because YouTube only makes money as
Speaker 1: videos earned views, So as those videos rack up the views,
Speaker 1: advertisers fork over more cash and YouTube takes that healthy
Speaker 1: slice of all those revenues. Now. One example YouTubers pointed
Speaker 1: to as a problem of this kind of philosophy, this
Speaker 1: idea of YouTube being totally cool with controversial material as
Speaker 1: long as it was bringing money in was a channel
Speaker 1: that was run by Mike and Heather Martin. The couple
Speaker 1: created a series of videos in which they would pull
Speaker 1: what they called pranks on their young kids, but others
Speaker 1: saw these pranks as borderline or sometimes beyond borderline abuse.
Speaker 1: And it was this that the parents were profiting from.
Speaker 1: In other words, they were mistreating their children, at least
Speaker 1: in the eyes of these critics, and they were using
Speaker 1: that as a form of entertainment through which they were
Speaker 1: making money. Um Rose Hill, who was the biological mother
Speaker 1: of two of the children in the Martin household says
Speaker 1: that she had been flagging videos as being in violation
Speaker 1: of YouTube's standards as early as October two thousand sixteen,
Speaker 1: and yet little appeared to be done about it. YouTube
Speaker 1: did not seem to take any of the videos down
Speaker 1: or demonetize them or anything. It was only after the
Speaker 1: channel made the news and a massive negative backlash mounted
Speaker 1: against the Martins that things seemed to be set in motion.
Speaker 1: It reinforced the perception that YouTube was loath to move
Speaker 1: against a creator that's getting a lot of views because
Speaker 1: those creators are a healthy source of revenue for the company. So,
Speaker 1: at least initially, there's very little incentive for YouTube to
Speaker 1: do anything about offensive or questionable content if it's driving views,
Speaker 1: because that would hurt its revenue. But then we have
Speaker 1: the third point of that triangle, and I'm going to
Speaker 1: use a lot of different metaphors for things with three components.
Speaker 1: Maybe at some point I'll use tricycle. The third part
Speaker 1: is the advertisers. Now, advertisers are understandably sensitive about the
Speaker 1: types of content they run ads against, the association of
Speaker 1: the advertiser with questionable content could be harmful for the brand.
Speaker 1: Protecting a brand is an important part of advertising. So
Speaker 1: if a soft drink company executive suddenly finds out then
Speaker 1: add for their company's flagship product is running against a
Speaker 1: video that contains racial slurs or hate speech, calls for
Speaker 1: violent or other objectionable material, there's a good chance someone's
Speaker 1: about to get fired. So we've got YouTube and creators
Speaker 1: pushing the envelope and driving lots of views to videos
Speaker 1: of questionable content. This powder keg just needed a spark
Speaker 1: to set it off. The spark first arrived in late
Speaker 1: two thousand sixteen, and the powder keg blew in February
Speaker 1: two thousand seventeen. That's when advertisers began to take note
Speaker 1: that their ads were running against videos that had hate
Speaker 1: speech and extremist content in them, particularly in the UK.
Speaker 1: The advertisers, in an effort to protect their clients and
Speaker 1: mitigate the fallout of such associations, began to pull ads
Speaker 1: from YouTube. Their main objection was that they had no
Speaker 1: control over what types of videos could run their ads,
Speaker 1: and so they could end up being associated with ideologies
Speaker 1: and messaging that was in conflict with their public image.
Speaker 1: And that was just the beginning. I'll explain more in
Speaker 1: just a second, but first let's take a quick break.
Speaker 1: I mentioned before the break that advertisers were pulling their
Speaker 1: spots from YouTube. They represented some really big clients, including
Speaker 1: Coca Cola, The Guardian, Johnson and Johnson, and the Government
Speaker 1: of the United Kingdom. Their move began to create sort
Speaker 1: of a domino effect, and one domino to fall was
Speaker 1: a reassessment of Google itself. Analyst Brian Weezer moved Google
Speaker 1: stock from a buy recommendation to a hold recommendation based
Speaker 1: off the February two, seventeen scandal. He pointed out that
Speaker 1: Google had quote a serious issue in the UK with
Speaker 1: brand safety issues end quote, and that they could end
Speaker 1: up devaluing the company. Now. Suffice to say, this was
Speaker 1: a lot of incentive for YouTube to do something about
Speaker 1: all this. One high profile case where YouTube did act
Speaker 1: involved Felix Kilberg, better known by his screen name as
Speaker 1: Beauty Pie, Kilberg published a video that showed two men
Speaker 1: holding up a reprehensible message written on a sign and
Speaker 1: I'm not going to repeat it here. This prompted Disney
Speaker 1: Maker Studios, which had been producing Pautie Pie shows, to
Speaker 1: cut all ties with the creator. YouTube canceled a YouTube
Speaker 1: red series called Scared Pauti Pie. YouTube Read is a
Speaker 1: subscription service that, in return for a monthly fee unless
Speaker 1: you watch videos without ads and view special content. Just
Speaker 1: for those subscribers, Google removed kale Berg from the preferred
Speaker 1: premium ad tier as well, which cut back how much
Speaker 1: he could make on his videos. It was a pretty
Speaker 1: pretty extreme punishment. UM, I don't know if it was
Speaker 1: completely unwarranted. I have some pretty strong feelings about it
Speaker 1: in general, but there were other YouTubers who felt like
Speaker 1: that was a particularly harsh judgment against another creator, and
Speaker 1: other people said no, he got exactly what he deserves.
Speaker 1: So it kind of runs the gamut. Now. I've placed
Speaker 1: a lot of the responsibility for how things have shaken
Speaker 1: out at YouTube on the platform and the creators, but
Speaker 1: I want to make it clear that advertisers were also
Speaker 1: somewhat responsible, with some pretty bad choices of their own.
Speaker 1: In April two thousand seventeen, PepsiCo had an ad featuring
Speaker 1: Kindall Jenner handing over a can of Pepsi to a
Speaker 1: police officer during a protest. This was at the height
Speaker 1: of the initial protests in the Black Lives Matter movement,
Speaker 1: and so PepsiCo was widely criticized for trying to exploit
Speaker 1: a social movement for the purposes of advertising a soft drink.
Speaker 1: Pepsi would pull the ad after just a few days,
Speaker 1: including pulling it from YouTube. The move of a major
Speaker 1: company pulling more advertising from YouTube fueled even more companies
Speaker 1: to follow suit. Even without the public image issues that
Speaker 1: Pepsi faced. The sudden departure of numerous big money advertisers
Speaker 1: prompted YouTube executives to make some pretty hasty and broad decisions,
Speaker 1: leading to what was called the ad PoCA lips. Now essentially,
Speaker 1: YouTube effectively demonetized any channels that were not considered to
Speaker 1: be family friendly, but the definition of family friendly was
Speaker 1: left rather vague, and YouTube began to rely heavily on
Speaker 1: algorithms to determine whether or not a channel's content qualified
Speaker 1: for the tag family friendly or not. Now, to be
Speaker 1: fair to YouTube, the company had little other choice than
Speaker 1: the hand things over to an automated protocol. Today, around
Speaker 1: four hundred fifty hours of video are uploaded to the
Speaker 1: platform every single minute. The site racks up a billion
Speaker 1: hours of you time every day. With that much content
Speaker 1: being added every minute, it's impossible to put human beings
Speaker 1: in charge of vetting all of it and making sure
Speaker 1: none of it contains material that violates YouTube's policies or
Speaker 1: will upset advertisers. For that reason, the company has developed
Speaker 1: programs that try to do that automatically. Part of this
Speaker 1: depends upon the metadata that's connected to the videos in question.
Speaker 1: A metadata is data about data, so YouTubers build out
Speaker 1: metadata like tags and descriptions so that their videos will
Speaker 1: show up in search results. That way, when you pop
Speaker 1: into YouTube search and you're searching for a specific thing,
Speaker 1: like the other day, I search for Gauntlet to play
Speaker 1: through because I was feeling nostalgic, then it gives you
Speaker 1: the results that are relevant. It helps boost the video's
Speaker 1: visibility and makes it more likely that people will find
Speaker 1: the video. And since you only make money if a
Speaker 1: lot of people are viewing your stuff, it's important to
Speaker 1: include the information and your metadata. If you don't your
Speaker 1: video is not likely to be seen by very many
Speaker 1: people at all, so the algorithms look for the tags
Speaker 1: that could indicate whether or not a video contains objectionable material,
Speaker 1: and again, the term objectionable isn't terribly well defined here.
Speaker 1: YouTube did create a checklist for advertisers in an effort
Speaker 1: to win them back, and the checklist would allow companies
Speaker 1: to select the types of material they did not want
Speaker 1: their ads to support. Categories include stuff like profanity and
Speaker 1: rough language or sexually suggestive content, which is stuff similar
Speaker 1: to what you would see in a film's m p
Speaker 1: A A rating description. But there were other categories as well,
Speaker 1: such as tragedy and conflict or sensational and shocking that
Speaker 1: raised questions and it could mean that people doing valuable
Speaker 1: work in fields that need coverage would find themselves without
Speaker 1: a means of earning enough money to pay for production costs.
Speaker 1: And you do painted with a pretty broad brush. People
Speaker 1: who had never had an issue with demonetization found themselves
Speaker 1: hit hard by it. YouTube pointed out that the company
Speaker 1: had an appeals process that creators could follow if they
Speaker 1: felt that their work had been unfairly targeted, and there
Speaker 1: were a lot of people who definitely felt that way.
Speaker 1: For example, people advocating for human rights for people in
Speaker 1: the LGBTQ community saw some of their videos demonetized, and
Speaker 1: the message seemed to be that their goal, that of
Speaker 1: extending human rights to a vulnerable population of people, was
Speaker 1: somehow not add friendly or it was taboo, which is
Speaker 1: a pretty crappy message to get. It reinforces the idea
Speaker 1: that the world is against you when your video series
Speaker 1: that's all about trying to extend human rights to people
Speaker 1: is demonetized because the people in question somehow fall into
Speaker 1: a category that isn't advertiser friendly. Uh. It's dehumanizing, really,
Speaker 1: And that's just one example of the types of videos
Speaker 1: that were targeted. YouTube was seen as being overly cautious
Speaker 1: in order to appease the advertisers that were pulling out
Speaker 1: of the platform, and the appeals process wasn't exactly a
Speaker 1: smooth one. Creators who had a flagged video would get
Speaker 1: a notification that their video was in a sort of
Speaker 1: limbo in which it was not currently counting towards monetization,
Speaker 1: but an appeal could, in theory, overturn that, and the
Speaker 1: flagging process was based on machine learning, which also meant
Speaker 1: that the appeals process was effectively part of the training
Speaker 1: model for the system. You have a computer system that
Speaker 1: identifies what it believes to be a video that has
Speaker 1: objectionable material, It flags the video. The videos immediately demonetized,
Speaker 1: and then by appealing the decision and having a human
Speaker 1: go over the result and either uphold it or overturn it,
Speaker 1: you train the machine learning model. That's great if you're
Speaker 1: doing it in a lab, but when you're doing it
Speaker 1: out in the real world, where it's actually affecting people's
Speaker 1: ability to earn money, it's less great. So the content
Speaker 1: creator was meant to send an appeal request, and in theory,
Speaker 1: that would push the video to a human staffer at
Speaker 1: YouTube whose of it was to manually review the video
Speaker 1: to see if in fact the demonetization was justified. That
Speaker 1: was the theory. However, that could not really work in
Speaker 1: practice because the number of videos being uploaded each day
Speaker 1: and the number getting flagged would have made that almost
Speaker 1: as impossible as having humans view all the videos in
Speaker 1: the first place, and so YouTube put in some additional rules.
Speaker 1: Appealed videos would only go to human reviewers if those
Speaker 1: videos had more than one thousand views in the most
Speaker 1: recent seven days, or if you had a subscriber base
Speaker 1: of at least ten thousand people, then a human would
Speaker 1: review a flag video even if it hadn't yet met
Speaker 1: the metric of one thousand views in seven days. Besides
Speaker 1: the fact that YouTube was having to deal with an
Speaker 1: enormous number of appeals, the company also wanted to make
Speaker 1: sure it was addressing the concerns of the big earners first,
Speaker 1: the most popular channels on YouTube. Many videos performed best
Speaker 1: in the short term after uploading to the site, no
Speaker 1: big surprise there. Right a new video goes up, people
Speaker 1: flocked to it. There are fan bases who eagerly anticipate
Speaker 1: the next video or episode, and so you see the
Speaker 1: vast majority of activity hit those videos right away. YouTube
Speaker 1: wanted to prioritize those videos over ones that might get
Speaker 1: a lot of views over a very long span of time,
Speaker 1: you know, the sort of stuff that tends to do
Speaker 1: well on search. It might be more evergreen, so the
Speaker 1: earnings month to month may be low but consistent. So
Speaker 1: if I did a video that was sort of a
Speaker 1: how to guide on something that would remain relevant for years,
Speaker 1: I might not have a ton of traffic to that
Speaker 1: video on any given month, but I would have consistent
Speaker 1: traffic throughout the whole run of the lifetime of the video. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: someone else who's posting a new episode of a web series,
Speaker 1: they're going to see the vast majority of activity on
Speaker 1: their video in the in the near immediate fall health
Speaker 1: of uploading it. So those first few days are critical
Speaker 1: for those kind of series. And worse, there was a
Speaker 1: growing concern among creators that this would mean a really
Speaker 1: big drop in revenue, since the time they need monetization
Speaker 1: would be shortly after the video goes live. So if
Speaker 1: you upload a video, algorithm decides its objection it's got
Speaker 1: objectionable material in it, flags it, and then you're not
Speaker 1: You're demonetized and your video is just now live. It
Speaker 1: could be the sweetest spot to earn money, and you
Speaker 1: can't earn anything because you've been demonetized. The longer you
Speaker 1: your video spins in limbo, the more money the creators
Speaker 1: would lose. And as for older videos, there was a
Speaker 1: concern that creators wouldn't even see that those had been
Speaker 1: demonetized because all the focus would be directed towards the
Speaker 1: latest videos that they're posting, So older videos typically don't
Speaker 1: earn a ton individually, but collectively they can still act
Speaker 1: as a pretty healthy source of revenue. So if you're
Speaker 1: a creator who has been active for several years and
Speaker 1: you have a big back catalog of videos, you might
Speaker 1: have a decent amount of money coming in from views
Speaker 1: on those videos, And if an older video suddenly becomes
Speaker 1: relevant again for some reason, you could stand to benefit
Speaker 1: from that. But if it's been demonetized, you never see
Speaker 1: that money, and there's a good chance you wouldn't even
Speaker 1: know about the demonetization because your focus is on what's
Speaker 1: going up next instead of what you uploaded years ago.
Speaker 1: This pushed many creators to consider leaving the platform altogether.
Speaker 1: Some looked at alternatives like Twitch, where they can live
Speaker 1: stream and use in platform features as a means of
Speaker 1: earning money. Others moved to Patreon, in which users could
Speaker 1: pledge a recurring amount of money to the creator, either
Speaker 1: on a scheduled basis such as a monthly payment, or
Speaker 1: on a per upload basis. But these methods meant the
Speaker 1: creators had to rely upon fans who were able and
Speaker 1: willing to pay for something actively. They were only passively
Speaker 1: paying for earlier asked in the fact that they were
Speaker 1: watching ads as opposed to actually handing over money to
Speaker 1: view videos. Now, if we are to believe some of
Speaker 1: the top creators on the platform, the initial fallout was
Speaker 1: pretty dramatic. Phil DeFranco said add earnings on his channel
Speaker 1: fell by eight percent following the flight of advertisers, though
Speaker 1: by mid April those earnings had leveled out to a
Speaker 1: thirty percent drop from the average. It's still not great, obviously,
Speaker 1: but better than others stated less extreme drops in revenue,
Speaker 1: but a lot of people said, yeah, it took a hit.
Speaker 1: Making things worse was an overall feeling that YouTube wasn't
Speaker 1: very good at communicating out the changes to creators or
Speaker 1: explaining how their work was falling into one of these
Speaker 1: categories that advertisers were opting out of, or presenting a
Speaker 1: sort of best practices approach so that they could make
Speaker 1: certain their work wasn't being demonetized. There seemed to be
Speaker 1: a lack of communication on YouTube's part, which made the
Speaker 1: creators feel truly abandoned. Then things got really crazy. I'll
Speaker 1: explain more after the break. In late two thousand and seventeen,
Speaker 1: yet another YouTube controversy made headlines. This time it was
Speaker 1: all about how several channels creating videos ostensibly for children
Speaker 1: had bizarre, disturbing, and sometimes blatantly inappropriate material in those videos.
Speaker 1: They inhabited YouTube Kids, which is a standalone app and
Speaker 1: it's marketed as a safe space for kids entertainment. The
Speaker 1: idea was that you, as a parent or caregiver, could
Speaker 1: download the app on a mobile device, hand that mobile
Speaker 1: device over to a kid, and feel safe in the
Speaker 1: knowledge that the child was only going to see family
Speaker 1: friendly content through that app. The general belief was that
Speaker 1: YouTube would have a system in place to block any
Speaker 1: material that didn't meet the app's family friendly standards, but
Speaker 1: that's not what happened. Some people made really disturbing videos
Speaker 1: using popular characters to lure kids into watching popular trademarked characters,
Speaker 1: a lot of them Disney characters, and tricking kids to
Speaker 1: watching them, and these videos were trending. They were popular
Speaker 1: enough so that they were showing up on related videos
Speaker 1: or recommended videos when kids were watching other stuff, and
Speaker 1: kids tend to watch a lot of stuff, and they
Speaker 1: will often watched the same thing many times, so these
Speaker 1: videos were racking up views, which meant more ad dollars
Speaker 1: for YouTube. Now the videos were getting flagged. There wasn't
Speaker 1: much activity to show for it, not much response from YouTube,
Speaker 1: at least in the early days. But then these stories
Speaker 1: broke about these videos and YouTube had another pr disaster
Speaker 1: to deal with. This is the same year when the
Speaker 1: apocalypse thing had started, so creators throughout their hands and
Speaker 1: essentially said they're preventing us for making money while you're
Speaker 1: also allowing this kind of stuff to go on on
Speaker 1: your kids app. It wasn't a good look. It made
Speaker 1: YouTube look like hypocrites. Now. Adding to that scandal was
Speaker 1: one in December two thousand and seventeen when Logan Paul,
Speaker 1: who was is an extremely popular YouTuber. He had really
Speaker 1: made his fame on Vine and then when Vine closed down. Uh,
Speaker 1: he had already done some stuff on YouTube, but he
Speaker 1: managed to kind of leverage his popularity over to YouTube's
Speaker 1: platform anyway. In December two thousand seventeen, he posted a
Speaker 1: video that showed a hanging corpse in it. Uh. Logan
Speaker 1: Paul was walking through an area in Japan known as
Speaker 1: the Suicide Forest and encountered this corpse and caught it
Speaker 1: on video and uploaded it. The video received millions of views.
Speaker 1: It ended up trending on YouTube. It became the focal
Speaker 1: point for a huge blowback from the YouTube community. Here
Speaker 1: was a video that clearly violated YouTube's policies. Numerous people
Speaker 1: had flagged it for review. YouTube didn't remove the video.
Speaker 1: Logan Paul or someone on his staff removed the video,
Speaker 1: but YouTube, the platform, seemed to do nothing, and that really,
Speaker 1: in many people's minds, cemented the idea that YouTube's rules
Speaker 1: didn't apply to people if they were at a certain
Speaker 1: level of success and were seen as the future of YouTube. Moreover,
Speaker 1: advertisers didn't pull their spots from Logan Paul's videos, which
Speaker 1: seemed to suggest that it was the financial aspect of
Speaker 1: the platform's rules that matter, not the ethical ones. So
Speaker 1: there's a lot of blame to go around here. Advertisers have.
Speaker 1: They have some of the blame, a lot of the
Speaker 1: blame because while they reacted strongly to Beauty Pie, they
Speaker 1: did not react strongly to Logan Paul, and so YouTube
Speaker 1: was given a very strong incentive to react to the
Speaker 1: Pauti Pie scandal by punishing Pauti Pie. But because the
Speaker 1: advertisers didn't freak out, YouTube didn't have a whole lot
Speaker 1: of incentive to uh, punish logan Paul because they were
Speaker 1: making money. No One, no one on the let me
Speaker 1: give you a check side of the equation was complaining.
Speaker 1: Video viewers and other content creators were complaining. But since
Speaker 1: they're not the ones handing checks over to YouTube at least,
Speaker 1: as is the way the argument goes, YouTube just didn't care.
Speaker 1: One thing YouTube did do, though, was to restrict its
Speaker 1: Partner program, which allows content creators to opt into monetization
Speaker 1: in the first place. This is the criteria you have
Speaker 1: to meet in order to be considered in a part
Speaker 1: of the partner program. So you have to meet these uh,
Speaker 1: these requirements first before you can actually join. Before the
Speaker 1: new restrictions were put in place, the general rule was
Speaker 1: that a channel had to hit ten thousand views to
Speaker 1: qualify as a YouTube partner across the channel. So if
Speaker 1: you had a thousand videos and they each had ten
Speaker 1: views each, you hit ten thousand views, that's It may
Speaker 1: be that you only have ten people watching, but you
Speaker 1: still have ten thousand views across your entire channel. That
Speaker 1: would be enough for you to qualify as YouTube partner
Speaker 1: under the previous rules, but the update changed that. They
Speaker 1: changed it to four thousand hours of watch time over
Speaker 1: the previous twelve months, which clearly favored longer videos over
Speaker 1: shorter ones, since you could create very short videos and
Speaker 1: rack up ten thousand views relatively quickly. But if you
Speaker 1: have short videos, accumulating four thousand hours of view material
Speaker 1: would take a lot longer. If your average video is,
Speaker 1: you know, two minutes long, just getting an hour makes
Speaker 1: mean that you have to get a whole lot of
Speaker 1: views on that one video. But if your average video
Speaker 1: is an hour and a half long, then it doesn't
Speaker 1: take as many full views to hit that four thousand
Speaker 1: hour water mark. Now, in addition, a channel would need
Speaker 1: to have at least a thousand subscribers before it could
Speaker 1: be considered for the Partner program. Existing channels that had
Speaker 1: previously qualified for the Partner Program under the ten thousand
Speaker 1: views rule but had not yet hit the four thousand
Speaker 1: hours one thousand subscriber benchmark would end up being demonetized.
Speaker 1: So there were people who had been qualified under the
Speaker 1: Partner program previously, they did not get grandfathered in when
Speaker 1: these changes were made, they were affected to Now YouTube
Speaker 1: claimed that of those affected by these changes them were
Speaker 1: making less than a hundred bucks a year on videos
Speaker 1: that it was a very small amount of money that
Speaker 1: wasn't being paid out and therefore was not having a
Speaker 1: meaningful impact on people. Fast forward to February two thousand nineteen.
Speaker 1: That's when Matt Watson, a former YouTuber, posted a video
Speaker 1: showing that there was a disturbing trend on the platform
Speaker 1: in which Skivie people were uploading videos showing kids doing
Speaker 1: just stuff like nothing bad, just kids being kids. But
Speaker 1: in the comments section, people were posting time stamps of
Speaker 1: specific moments of the video that, out of context, would
Speaker 1: sexualize the content, and that was where the huge issue was.
Speaker 1: Watson demonstrated that YouTube's recommendation algorithm could quickly pull up
Speaker 1: one of these videos, and he started with a bikini
Speaker 1: hall video in which a woman was showing off bathing
Speaker 1: suits she had purchased, and using only the recommended videos
Speaker 1: that appear alongside the one you're watching, Watson quickly navigated
Speaker 1: to a seemingly unrelated video of a young girl playing
Speaker 1: in two clicks, and the comments were full of disturbing,
Speaker 1: awful content that was enabling some truly hideous behavior. Watson's
Speaker 1: point was that YouTube's algorithm was actually facilitating this sort
Speaker 1: of behavior, making it easier for predators to seek out
Speaker 1: each other and the content they wanted. The Verge ran
Speaker 1: their own test after seeing Watson's video post, and they
Speaker 1: used his methods, and they found that it took at
Speaker 1: most six clicks to get to one of those videos
Speaker 1: from the recommendation page, so they would start with a video,
Speaker 1: and it found that if they just followed enough times
Speaker 1: that being at most six, they would hit on one
Speaker 1: of these. While Watson was adamant that he didn't want
Speaker 1: another apocalypse and that he still had many friends who
Speaker 1: were dependent upon YouTube for their living, he did want
Speaker 1: something done about this problem, and he urged people to
Speaker 1: reach out to the advertisers whose ads were being displayed
Speaker 1: against this sort of content to have that content or
Speaker 1: to have those ads pulled, because he was concerned that
Speaker 1: YouTube wasn't going to do anything. So essentially he was saying, hey,
Speaker 1: did you know that the ad for your product is
Speaker 1: showing up on videos that are sexualizing children and don't
Speaker 1: you think that's a bad thing? Then you want to
Speaker 1: have your your ads pulled. And since YouTube had developed
Speaker 1: a bit of a reputation for not responding to issues
Speaker 1: like this in a timely or consistent manner, Watson decided
Speaker 1: he'd go public with this discovery to create that pressure. Now,
Speaker 1: some YouTubers disagreed with that strategy. Many said that Watson
Speaker 1: simply should report incidents rather than try to get views
Speaker 1: out of the issue. Some feared that the publicity would
Speaker 1: prompt AD companies to pull out of YouTube altogether, creating
Speaker 1: another round of the apocalypse. Personally, I find it hard
Speaker 1: to figure out where I stand on this particular issue.
Speaker 1: I do think reporting the incidents is important. Posting a
Speaker 1: video about it could very well be in the best
Speaker 1: interests of the people using YouTube, particularly if the YouTuber
Speaker 1: chose not to monetize the video. So, in other words,
Speaker 1: if Onston comes forward and says there's this terrible practice
Speaker 1: that's going on and his video is not being monetized,
Speaker 1: then at least you remove the criticism of, hey, you're
Speaker 1: just trying to profit from this because you know it's
Speaker 1: going to be a big controversy. It's going to drive
Speaker 1: a lot of views, and therefore you can make money
Speaker 1: off of it, and it removes that criticism. But if
Speaker 1: the video pointing out the problem itself is monetized, then
Speaker 1: you're like, well, you're now you're just trying to stir
Speaker 1: up a hornet's nest for your own personal benefit. Even
Speaker 1: if that's not the case, it's enough to create the
Speaker 1: seed of doubt. On the other hand, YouTube definitely has
Speaker 1: a history of turning a blind eye to problematic behaviors
Speaker 1: on the platform, typically taking action only when the pressure
Speaker 1: is too gray to ignore, and so I can sympathize
Speaker 1: with Watson's point that this was something that needed to
Speaker 1: be brought to light to create that pressure necessary to
Speaker 1: enact change. At the same time, I also sympathize with
Speaker 1: all the creators out there who are depending heavily on
Speaker 1: YouTube for their living. They've spent countless hours shooting, editing,
Speaker 1: and uploading videos for their audiences. They face challenges like
Speaker 1: sweeping changes to monetization policies, which is sort of like
Speaker 1: coming into work and learning that your paycheck has been
Speaker 1: cut by and they can't tell you why or how
Speaker 1: you can fix it. That's how people who depend upon
Speaker 1: YouTube feel, and they face burnout as they try to
Speaker 1: create more videos to meet demand and to earn money.
Speaker 1: You know, knowing that each new video that comes out
Speaker 1: earns most of its money on its initial release means
Speaker 1: that for you to keep making money, you have to
Speaker 1: keep producing videos, and that takes its toll. As someone
Speaker 1: who makes his living creating content week to week, I
Speaker 1: can tell you it's not always easy. Sometimes it requires
Speaker 1: a lot of work to scrape up the motivation and
Speaker 1: energy to do the job. You can ask Tari sometimes
Speaker 1: pitch a fit before I come into the studio, and
Speaker 1: by sometimes I mean pretty much every time. Having a
Speaker 1: capricious platform doesn't make it any easier now. It also
Speaker 1: reminds me of what Bernie Burns of Rooster Teeth would
Speaker 1: point out pretty frequently. I've heard him say this in person,
Speaker 1: I've heard him say it on podcasts and videos, and
Speaker 1: I think it's a really important point. When you rely
Speaker 1: on someone else's platform, you are creating a recipe for
Speaker 1: things to go wrong sooner or later. So in other words,
Speaker 1: it's the old adage don't put all your eggs in
Speaker 1: one basket, because when that platform changes, you may find
Speaker 1: yourself a disadvantage with no recourse, no solution. It's much
Speaker 1: better to spread that risk around. Having your own platform
Speaker 1: is helpful too, if you can do it, because you
Speaker 1: have ultimate control over your own platform. So, for example,
Speaker 1: with the Rooster teeth. They have their own website and
Speaker 1: they host all their videos on their website. They also
Speaker 1: host them on YouTube because that's where the audience is.
Speaker 1: Then that's the flip side. Getting people to come to
Speaker 1: you remains a huge challenge. It's hard to get people
Speaker 1: to come to your owned and operated site. People go
Speaker 1: where the content is, and as YouTube gets hundreds of
Speaker 1: hours of content each minute, it's definitely that destination. So
Speaker 1: it's easy to say, don't put all your eggs in
Speaker 1: one basket, but it's also hard to build your own
Speaker 1: platform and then convince people to go to it, so
Speaker 1: it's not like there's a one size fits all solution. However,
Speaker 1: it does again reinforce the point that depending entirely on
Speaker 1: YouTube means that whenever there's a change, you're gonna be
Speaker 1: affected by it and there may not be much you
Speaker 1: can do about it. The same thing is true as
Speaker 1: certain and I've seen this in my actual professional career,
Speaker 1: where you might have articles that do really well in
Speaker 1: Google Search because of the algorithm, and then Google will
Speaker 1: change the algorithm and now those articles don't do so
Speaker 1: well in search anymore, and you'll notice as a result,
Speaker 1: traffic to your website drops dramatically. That impacts revenue and
Speaker 1: impacts how much money you make from advertising. And again
Speaker 1: it shows that if you're beholden to a third party
Speaker 1: for traffic to your stuff, for people to actually get
Speaker 1: their eyeballs on it and to consume it and thus
Speaker 1: to generate revenue for you, then you could be up
Speaker 1: the creek. And as The Verge points out, YouTube's own
Speaker 1: course doesn't seem to have original content creators in mind
Speaker 1: at all. YouTube seems to have kind of moved away
Speaker 1: from that d I Y you know, home video content
Speaker 1: creator model. When YouTube presents pitches to advertisers, they're not
Speaker 1: typically showing these individual content creators, even the really popular ones.
Speaker 1: More and more of the sizzle reel that the company
Speaker 1: shows off includes stuff like music videos and clips of
Speaker 1: television shows and movies, clips of celebrities, uh, stuff from
Speaker 1: popular late night TV shows. In other words, it's that
Speaker 1: stuff I was talking about at the beginning when YouTube
Speaker 1: first started and people were uploading pirated content and the
Speaker 1: industry was freaking out. Now that's what YouTube is relying
Speaker 1: on in their in their sizzle reels, because now they
Speaker 1: have these working relationships with these these big production studios
Speaker 1: it's no longer adversarial now it's you know, a sort
Speaker 1: of a symbiotic relationship, and the content is always more
Speaker 1: highly produced than what d I Y video content creators
Speaker 1: can do, even though YouTube build its business around those
Speaker 1: content creators. And so the feeling among a lot of
Speaker 1: creators is that they've been completely left out in the cold,
Speaker 1: that they've been abandoned by the platform they helped build.
Speaker 1: And so that's where we are right now, with content
Speaker 1: creators concerned about their livelihood and looking at possible ways
Speaker 1: to offset their dependence upon YouTube. Meanwhile, YouTube continues to
Speaker 1: court big names and entertainment and groups that can create
Speaker 1: highly produced content, and there's still the worry that another
Speaker 1: apocalypse could be coming. So it's, uh, it's kind of
Speaker 1: a concerning time if you're a content creator. UM. I
Speaker 1: know a lot of content creators who, even fairly recently,
Speaker 1: have expressed a lot of concern about this, some of
Speaker 1: whom have gotten out of the content creation business pretty
Speaker 1: much entirely. And it's a shame because they made really
Speaker 1: good stuff. But they were also affected by these moves.
Speaker 1: Some of them had content that wasn't at all objectionable,
Speaker 1: but for one reason or another it would get flagged
Speaker 1: that way, they'd have to go through the whole appeals
Speaker 1: pro sess and it would happen with all their videos.
Speaker 1: And if you've created you know, more than a hundred videos,
Speaker 1: going through that process again and again just to just
Speaker 1: to have monetization turned back on, I think it's demoralizing.
Speaker 1: So it's a pretty rough landscape out there for the independent,
Speaker 1: you know, small creators. There's some some of the big
Speaker 1: names who are still doing quite well. Um you know,
Speaker 1: they're they're big enough where they can operate on a
Speaker 1: level at least, you know, similar to the established studios.
Speaker 1: But for a lot of others, they feel like they've
Speaker 1: been completely abandoned and left out, so they're looking for alternatives.
Speaker 1: A lot of folks have moved to Patreon or to
Speaker 1: Twitch in the hopes that perhaps they can at least
Speaker 1: convince their audience to follow along with them. It's tough,
Speaker 1: and it's one of the reasons why I've never spent
Speaker 1: a huge amount of time trying to develop my own
Speaker 1: YouTube video series, because I know that at the challenges
Speaker 1: would be beyond just your average production challenges. You know,
Speaker 1: even after something has been produced and published, you still
Speaker 1: have challenges making sure that it remains monetized and that
Speaker 1: you recapture the costs of production. Anyway, that wraps up
Speaker 1: this episode about the apocalypse and YouTube's demonetization practices, and
Speaker 1: maybe they will change over the course of twenty nineteen.
Speaker 1: We'll have to take a look again in the future.
Speaker 1: If any of you have suggestions for future podcast topics,
Speaker 1: you can reach out to me by email the addresses
Speaker 1: tech stuff at how stuff works dot com, or you
Speaker 1: can drop on by our website that's text stuff podcast
Speaker 1: dot com. There you're gonna find an archive of all
Speaker 1: of our shows, links to our social media, as well
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