YouTube – The biggest video archive to ever exist is not only a platform for you to share your thoughts and ideas at, it’s also a business.
Recently YouTube has made some changes and has managed to piss off a lot of people.
Let’s break down the YouTube business first:
There are 3 major groups in the YouTube industry – Creators, Advertisers, and Viewers.
Creators – The ones creating content and uploading it to their channel, their online persona, for the viewers to watch. They make money using the YouTube platform by monetizing (allow showing ads) their videos, doing paid reviews, donations, merchandise, etc.
Advertisers – They pay YouTube to show their ads on/next to videos that comply with some criteria. They’re one of YouTube’s major sources of income.
Viewers – They can be none or any of the above. They watch the content of their favorite creators, and are exposed to the advertisements YouTube chooses to show them.
The process is as follows:
Creators create videos, upload them to YT(YouTube) and select to allow monetization.
The monetization will notify YT that the creator asks for his video to have ads shown on it, and the creator will receive a commission for every mile/click he gets on the ads shown.
The video then will go through a review by an automated process, deciding whether the video is valid for monetization, and if it does, the process tags the video with the fitting subjects it is related to for advertising.
An advertiser comes to YT and asks to show his ads on videos. He sets the content type which he requires, target audience, budget, and all the standard definitions for advertisements. There is an option for an advertiser to opt-in for his ads to show on inappropriate content, such as gambling, sexual content, etc.
Then, YT adds advertisements for the monetized videos and shares the revenue with the creators.
The changes YouTube made:
YT has always had a strict ad policy, but up until now, it wasn’t really enforced.
The policy is as follows:
Taken from YouTube’s help Although this policy has been there for ages, it seems like it wasn’t enforced up until they implemented an automated process to look for words like “rape”, “murder”, “war” and so on. That process then marks the videos with tags/titles containing those words with the opt-in requirement we’ve noted before.
This renders a lot of creator’s content not valid for advertisement, thus, cutting their income.
Why people are angry about this:
YouTube has made several mistakes about this.
First, they didn’t notify about the changes to their creators, which are basically the ones generating the money for them, since without the content the viewers won’t come and no one will pay them to advertise.
Second, the move was too quick and too broad, with no exceptions.
Creators had their videos demonetized if it had the above words in it, even ones that support rape victims for instance. It has no distinction between good and bad context.
Third, upon demonetization, the creators lose the possible revenue gained while requesting for an appeal, and if failed, the video will be demonetized forever.
What can we take from this:
* Be in tight contact with the ones making you money.
* Even if you take a tough decision to change policy, give the people influence by this some time to get used to the new changes (a grace period).
* Test things out before you roll them out to the world.
I hope this helped you,
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See you in the next post,
Dekel
