YouTube Rip-Off Inc.

[Warren Faidley]

PHOTOGRAPHER ABUSE ALERT!!! So what's with the new YouTube ads? There use to be 30 second ads that could be skipped after 15 seconds or so. Now there are ads that can run for minutes. I'm not about to pay them $12.00 a month to remove ads, especially when I have multiple clips with over 400k views and I don't make a cent because I don't qualify for their profit making system. F-them, I'll remove all my videos as I don't want them profiting from my work and get nothing in return.

 

[Dave C]

PHOTOGRAPHER ABUSE ALERT!!! So what's with the new YouTube ads? There use to be 30 second ads that could be skipped after 15 seconds or so. Now there are ads that can run for minutes. I'm not about to pay them $12.00 a month to remove ads, especially when I have multiple clips with over 400k views and I don't make a cent because I don't qualify for their profit making system. F-them, I'll remove all my videos as I don't want them profiting from my work and get nothing in return.

There are ad blockers that battle to stay ahead of these companies and their BS. You could check into that. Also, I am not sure how you are watching but I have seen few ads I cannot skip after 5 seconds. On your own clips you should have at least limited control on removing ads down to a minimum of 1-2 ads per so many minutes using YT studio. They keep adding more ad length and more clicks to skip them. The whole strategy is to see how much people will take, habituate them, and then push a little harder.

This should not be much of a surprise though, as YouTube / Google has become one of the most immoral and greedy companies on the planet, with nothing but revenue and power in their mind with each decision. Quality and treatment of users will continue to degrade until it affects their bottom line significantly. Sadly people seem to put up with endless BS and abuse from a lot of these large companies and keep paying for or being the product rather than enough people walking away. Many who work for such companies are clueless tech snobs who think they are innovators because they are overpaid and indoctrinated. Once this behavior is a permanent part of culture, which it is, it will take a lot to change it.

In the unlikely event YT starts to lose money, there will still be a long lag time for them to course correct and in my view they are so rotten now that it cannot be saved. The worst part is, they are still the best platform for many creatives to make any money and ads are part of that. In my mind, the market is very ready for a less greedy alternative for creatives to share and view content, but the monopoly prohibits it. FB, Google, Apple, Amazon, etc buy up and crush competitors before they can gain any momentum and the FTC does absolutely nothing about it since social media and tech giants will all do favors for politicians on other matters.

All I can say is, you either have to deal with it, walk away, or try to diversify on the smaller platforms.

 

[Warren Faidley]

Yep, well said. The algorithms they use for "compensation" are purposely designed to avoid paying most contributors. I have one video with 850k views and they have not paid a cent. They obviously want to prevent one-time viral videos (which accounts for a lot of videos), from making money. New contributors are totally screwed, as they will never reach the magical view numbers because a lot of people will now avoid viewing the clips because of long ads.

Thanks so much for your "AdBlock on Chrome suggestion. It worked perfectly. Does not work on Firefox, but I can live with that.

It's too bad a lot of newer contributors were not around during the golden age of photography, when hard work was rewarded. They have no baseline to understand just how much they are getting screwed.

 

[James K]

Thanks so much for your "AdBlock on Chrome suggestion. It worked perfectly. Does not work on Firefox, but I can live with that.

try uBlock Origin for FireFox. It should atleast limit the number of ads.

YouTube really is the only decent choice I see out there for posting/watching videos, I atleast for now plan to keep posting there.
I don't do Facebook or twitter (have no interest in them, especially the latter), and wouldn't touch TikTok with a 1000-foot pole
I looked at Vimeo at one time, and from what I saw it pretty much sucked (don't remember what, but there was something really stupid and/or very limiting about posting videos there)
I know there's probably other 'video' sites out there, but I've never looked at any of them.

 

[Sean Ramsey]

Youtube (and most other online outlets, media included) will push the boundaries of what they can get away with to squeeze out every last drop of profit that they can. What amazes me is what people are willing to put up with. Whether it's high as a kite prices for a fast food meal, 30 minutes of previews at a movie, extraordinary prices for concessions at venues for concerts, sporting events, etc. or even extra long ads on Youtube (not to mention the mid-video ad embeds), people just keep accepting it, which encourages the companies to push even further to find those boundaries.

It takes a lot these days for the consumer to push back and companies know it.

 

[Dan Robinson]

Your channel shouldn’t have any trouble reaching the threshold. You have a lot of good core content. Unfortunately most raw clips of storms don’t do well these days unless it is something really crazy and in the current news cycle. Compilations of your best shots and medium-to-long-form videos of either storytelling or something that is informative to the public perform the best. You have to gear your content to appeal to the general public rather than fellow chasers and peers, as the latter is too small to have an impact on your numbers. Once you get monetized, they give you control over what type of ads show. I haven’t seen my videos showing the long unskippable ads though, and I’ve kept my ad settings at the default.

In YouTube’s defense, they are the best platform right now in terms of revenue sharing and easiest to reach monetization thresholds. The others are much more difficult and pay a much smaller share of the windfalls they make on users’ content.

That being said, I don’t get the idea of long unskippables. I don’t see how those can be in the best interest of either the platform or the creator. I am also not sure how common those are. Are you using a VPN or are you logged into your account when you see those? I’ve never seen one in 15 years.

 

[JamesCaruso]

That being said, I don’t get the idea of long unskippables. I don’t see how those can be in the best interest of either the platform or the creator. I am also not sure how common those are.

I don’t know enough about it, but I assume the rationale is that if an advertiser is paying for the ad, YouTube needs to guarantee that it’s being watched? Maybe other ads are only paid for IF they are watched, but an advertiser can pay more to make it unskippable? Anecdotally, it seems like the videos with the most views are the ones with unskippables. They seem reasonably common on videos with a high viewer count.

Having said that, we can skip past ads on DVR-recorded programs or on podcasts, so why not on YouTube videos?!?

I agree with Sean, the ads embedded mid-video are the most annoying. It’s not like a commercial break on a TV or cable program, which usually comes at a pause in the show. YouTube ads pop up at the most inopportune times, usually when a speaker is mid-sentence, and you have to mentally hold the spot in your mind for when the video restarts…

 

[Dan Robinson]

The midroll ad’s placement can be set manually by the channel owner, if not, the system places them automatically. Creators can also manually add as many additional midroll slots as they want. If a video has frequent midrolls (more than every 5 to 8 minutes), those were likely manually added by the channel owner. In a long-form video, the channel owner needs to set the midroll slot at natural breaks so those don’t pop up at inopportune times in the video.

 

[Warren Faidley]

Your channel shouldn’t have any trouble reaching the threshold. You have a lot of good core content. Unfortunately most raw clips of storms don’t do well these days unless it is something really crazy and in the current news cycle. Compilations of your best shots and medium-to-long-form videos of either storytelling or something that is informative to the public perform the best. You have to gear your content to appeal to the general public rather than fellow chasers and peers, as the latter is too small to have an impact on your numbers. Once you get monetized, they give you control over what type of ads show. I haven’t seen my videos showing the long unskippable ads though, and I’ve kept my ad settings at the default.

In YouTube’s defense, they are the best platform right now in terms of revenue sharing and easiest to reach monetization thresholds. The others are much more difficult and pay a much smaller share of the windfalls they make on users’ content.

That being said, I don’t get the idea of long unskippables. I don’t see how those can be in the best interest of either the platform or the creator. I am also not sure how common those are. Are you using a VPN or are you logged into your account when you see those? I’ve never seen one in 15 years.

The unskippables are at least 30 seconds long. Some videos had longer ads. Not using VPN and don't have a subscription. They are obviously trying to pressure non-subscribers to join. Too bad for them ad blockers do work. Ha! Ha!

Like I noted, it's going to be really hard for new contributors to reach the thresholds if people are tuning away from YouTube because of unskippable ads, unless you subscribe. At $12.00 per month, I'll bet a lot of people will be completely turned off and go to other sites. I'm pulling all of my clips with over 100k views as I'm not going to make YouTube rich and get zero in return.

 

[Dan Robinson]

Youtube's threshold is 4000 watch hours and 1000 subscribers which is a trivial amount, it's less than 50 dollars of ad revenue that the platform would be getting with typical rates. If you're not hitting the thresholds, they're getting less than that in revenue. If your 400k view videos are still getting good traffic, they'd get your channel to the threshold in a day or two.

That's in contrast to Facebook/Instagram, which requires getting a large follower count and Twitter/X, which requires a very large number of video impressions before they'll even consider you for monetization. In those cases you'd need to post tons of good content and give thousands in ad revenue away to the platform to reach those thresholds, not to mention it taking many months or even years to get the required follower counts. A single video on Youtube can meet their threshold in a day. Youtube has issues, sure, but I wouldn't throw it away. I don't know of anything better unfortunately.

 

[Warren Faidley]

4,000 hours is a whopping 240,000 minutes, so it's best to have clips that are as long as possible. 30-second clips are not going to do it unless you have an established, massive fan base or a clip of a flying saucer hitting a tornado. I'm assuming the trick would be to close out older videos with higher counts and "re-submit" / package them to gain viewing hours.

 

[Dan Robinson]

It depends. Accumulated watchtime is lost for a video when you delete it. Check the analytics for each video to see what kind of traffic they've been getting in the past year. If they're still getting a good number of views, you'd want to keep them. If they've flatlined during that time, it's probably OK to delete as the only watch time that matters is recent.

 

[Warren Faidley]

I also believe the accumulated watch time is for one year.

 

[Jamie H]

Agree with the intrusive ad problems. I've noticed a big upswing in ads to the point some videos are unwatchable now. Sometimes for an eight minute MLB highlight, there'll be 30s at the top, 10s and a couple of 5s in the middle too, but of course sometimes you get unlucky and have multiple 20+s unskippable ads.

I have an adblock on Firefox at least, but YouTube often stays ahead of it and won't play a video.

 

[Warren Faidley]

I've been able to use ad blockers to remove all advertising. And yes, the ads are getting worse. I understand they need to make money, but their decisions are killing the business. In this economy, I cannot imagine an overwhelming number of people paying $12 a month for no ads, especially when ad blockers work.

They can still kiss my for making a lot of revenue off my videos that have hundreds-of-thousands of views, no matter what their stupid watch hours are. I now make sure to include ad blocking information on all my links to YouTube.