So as I understand it, Google’s using it’s monopoly market position to force web “standards” unilaterally (without an independent/conglomerate web specification standards where Google is only one of many voices) that will disadvantage its competitors and force people to leave its competitors.
I’m not a lawyer, and I’m a fledgling tech guy, but this sounds like abuse of a monopoly. Google which serves 75% of the world’s ads and has 75% of the browser market share seems to want to use its market power to annihilate people’s privacy and control over their web experience.
So we can file a complaint with FTC led by Lina Khan who has been the biggest warrior against abuse by big tech in the US.
https://www.ftc.gov/enforcement/report-antitrust-violation
We can also file a complaint with the DOJ:
https://www.justice.gov/atr/citizen-complaint-center
And there have to be EU, UK, Indian, Chinese, and Japanese organizations that we can file antitrust complaints to.
If I’m not mistaken Youtube creators get something like 1/10 of a penny per view of a video. Is that really favorable for creators?
I don’t know any of the youtubers that were cited in this, but this lines up with what other youtubers have said on podcasts and the like
https://www.businessinsider.com/how-much-do-youtubers-make
1.61 to 29.30 USD per 1000 views. That is going to vary based on how many ads they run but that does indeed come out to ~0.002 USD per ad play.
Which… is still really good compared to stuff like twitch. And that doesn’t include the youtube premium numbers which are a LOT more privately held but are universally acknowledged as a lot better… even by twitch streamers.
The twitch math gets harder due to a mix of twitch being a lot stricter about streamers sharing their revenue and it changing every five minutes. But going by the current 50/50 split on subscriptions: If you have 1000 subscribers in a given month (which is already amazing since having a couple hundred concurrents put you in the top 1% of streamers) AND it averages out to all at the 5 dollar tier (they aren’t, most are going to be using bezos bucks), you are getting 2500 USD. Per month. Considering that most streamers at this range are looking at 3-5 8 hour days per week (and many go MUCH farther), and let’s say 4 weeks per month:
2500 bucks/ (4 days per week * 8 hours per day * 4 weeks) = 19.5 bucks an hour.
Which… is still a lot better than minimum wage but that speaks to the US being a complete shitshow.
But let’s just do rough numbers on some youtubers. I watched a HowNOT2 on big walling last night. 74k views for a one hour video that was uploaded eight months ago. I have youtube premium so I have no idea how many ads that video had, but a quick google suggests people do 4 ads for a 12 minute video. Ryan is actively pushing away from ad based monetization, so let’s say that was 4 ads for a one hour video.
4 ads per video * 74 thousand views * 2 bucks per 1000 views = 592 dollars for a video.
Which is shit… except he has 457 videos uploaded. And they all (okay, a lot probably got demonetized, but roll with me) generate revenue. That adds up and is why people like NileRed can talk about NOT making videos for a year because people will keep watching his older ones and keep him going while he figures out what kind of experiments are worth filming.
Whereas, if you take a week off Twitch you take a week off getting paid (sort of. subscription models get weird).
Well, NireRed also has NileBlue and a bunch of patreon supporters (over 2k, apparently getting 250k/creation, which is insane). He’s not living off NileRed videos alone
That’s the point though. With the current state of youtube, you can diversify and benefit from your back catalog.
I didn’t watch the AOC stream the other night, but if that was on Hasan’s channel instead of hers: That is a nice sack of cash for Hasan (that he hopefully split with Poki and Rae et al). That means jack shit next month where he is back to Reacting to every youtuber’s content under the sun while he takes a piss break and gets confused over the parts he fast forwarded through. And it is a new hustle the month after that.
Sponsorships and patreons help a lot with that. But it doesn’t replace the benefits of just a ridiculously generous royalty model for VODs (pretty sure SAG would stop striking immediately if they could get even that out of “hollywood”). I forget who it was (it almost has to be William Osman?) but someone even talked about how they make a nice chunk of change every time OfflineTV uploads a video because they did a bunch of collabs with Michael Reeves back in the day and people seek out videos with him in it. And a lot of those videos are three or even five years old at this point. Whereas, unless you are in the AOC stream, you aren’t (directly) profiting from one of the biggest internet events of the year.
Which is why I specifically used HowNot2 as my example. Because I would be shocked if there are only 4 ads in that one hour video. And he is not a big channel (161k subscribers, so Silver play button that he has to pay for?). And I similarly used a very high end twitch channel because… even getting a hundred concurrents is a huge deal and the vast majority of them won’t be subscribed. So 1000 subscribers at pay tiers is very much a big deal.
Whereas, making the jump to full time youtuber is a lot more viable. Yes, you still have to play the sponsorship game and talk about raid shadow legends a bunch, but the actual subscriber counts to “make it viable” are shockingly low. I am too lazy to look it up, but Mortismal recently did a celebration stream and the number he cited as good enough for him was shockingly low.
And to bring it all back around: you know how youtube is able to run at a loss AND still pay creators enough to generate content? By stealing and monetizing all of our personal information from every single time you search for why it burns when you pee.