The YouTube Adpocalypse

film criticism, and vlogs a s MR Videos. I watch a lot of stuff on YouTube, and one thing I've seen a few times is how YouTube's monetization policies can have a really big impact on the channels that I watch. So today I want to talk a bit about the business side of YouTube and how things have changed for creators, particularly fairly recently. Now to understand what's been going on, it's good to think of the story involving three major

groups or factions. First, you've got YouTube itself. This is the publishing platform that enables users to share their videos and have those videos paired with advertisers. YouTube takes a percentage of the ad fees generated by videos, and generally speaking, at percentage is pretty high. You know. You might have heard that Apple in the iTunes store takes something like thirty of all apps sales that goes to Apple itself.

YouTube does better than that for them, they do forty, so nearly half of all the money generated by a video goes to YouTube. More in that later. Then you've got the creators. These are the people actually making the videos. They run the range of no budget creators who rely heavily on their own appeal to attract viewers, or upon acular strategy for the type of content that they provide, and it goes all the way up to highly produced

videos from established studios. If the creator meets a certain threshold, they can choose an option to monetize their videos, which allows YouTube to pair those videos with ads. A change in monetization policy can have a dramatic impact on a creator. And the third group or faction would be the advertisers themselves. Typically, these are ad companies with many clients that offer up different goods and services, so you'll have a dozen or

so ad companies that represent hundreds of different brands. Rarely will such a company like McDonald's or Levi's interact directly with a platform like YouTube, but it can happen more frequently, they will rely upon a third party advertising firm to hash all this out, And so the business of YouTube depends upon these three prongs working together. The more views a monetized video gets, the more it earns. Longer videos can also have mid role ads, which creates a revenue

generating stream for creators and for YouTube itself. For that reason, the platform began to encourage YouTube creators to make longer videos a few years back. This was in stark contrast with the early days of YouTube and which most videos had a hard ten minute limit for running time. You couldn't go beyond that. These days, YouTube would rather have longer videos that encourage more activity on the platform, meaning

that after someone watches one video, they're likely to watch another. Now, I didn't include viewers in those three prongs because we don't have quite as much to do with the business side of it. We generate the views that pull the levers on those advertising dollars, but other than that, we don't really have much involvement in the business. That stuff lies more with the platform and the creators. Now, let me give you a quick rundown on the history of

monetization on YouTube. So we can kind of understand where we came from and where we are now. When YouTube launched in two thousand five as an independent service before it was part of Google, there was no monetization on the platform. Now that changed in August two thousand six, when YouTube launched its first ad concept, called participatory video ads,

along with brand channels. Brand channels are exactly what they sound like, channels that are owned by specific companies and meant to act as a type of marketing towards customers. So you could have Nike having a Nike channel, for example. The participatory video ads would appear in the upper right corner of the screen among video choices, so you could think of the right rail having a list of videos, and the top one would be an AD, but there

are others would just be other YouTube videos. So YouTube had yet to introduce a method for content creators who weren't representing brands to monetize content. The only money that was really going anywhere was going to YouTube. Google Goal purchased YouTube for more than one point five billion dollars in October two thou six, just a couple of months after the rollout of this initial ad strategy. A year later, YouTube launched in video ads. This would be August two

thousand seven. Instead of a commercial running before or during a show, these were overlay ads that were flash based and appeared on top of the video, so the lower twenty percent part of a video could have an ad appear after fifteen seconds of the video had already played. The goal was to make the overlay transparent and to have them run for only around ten seconds, so you'd have a little message upp here on that bottom that would somewhat obscure that portion of the video and would

be an ad for something. Again, YouTube restricted these ads to run on content from a select group of partners, and individual content creators were generally not eligible for this. So, in other words, if you were Joe Schmo and you were creating your own vlog and it was getting a good following, you still weren't eligible to uh to have

ads run on your your videos. In December of two thousand seven, YouTube launched the Partner program, in which individual creators could apply to become partners, which would enable advertising on their videos. It did require that they meet certain criteria. We'll talk more about that a little bit later. By November two thousand eight, YouTube would launch pre roll ads, making videos more like television programs. Pre roll ad is just what it sounds like, you have an ad that

runs before the video that you've selected to watch. But YouTube ads work a little differently from television ads. See on TV, and advertiser pays for a specific time slot. Advertisers might say I want to run an ad during this sporting event or during this show. On YouTube, Google can target ads to people who appear to have interests that align with particular brand. By analyzing user behavior, Google can predict which brands will resonate the most and match

those up to a viewers experience. So, rather than Coca Cola saying I really like those let's play videos, put us on those, it's Coca Cola saying, show us to people who really like soft drinks. And this would end up being part of the problem because there's a whole lot of folks out there who likes stuff like soft drinks who also like to watch some pretty questionable content, and thus Coca Cola's ads would show up against stuff

that maybe Coca Cola wasn't so crazy about. Now, at this point, it became possible to actually make a living off of YouTube if you were just a regular person, if you were a creator with an engaged, large following, you could conceivably have enough views to earn decent money, and eventually this would grow beyond decent money to a metric crap ton of money if you were one of a few mega popular creators. As still sort of the

wild West at this point. You two grew largely as an alternative to classic television services, and in the earliest days, people were uploading a lot of copyrighted work that would land YouTube in hot water with various publishing companies, particularly music labels and movie and television studios, But that gradually gave way to more user generated stuff, which is what

the platform was envisioned as. Now. It's interesting to point out that in the early days of YouTube, a lot of the popular videos were unauthorized uploads of more traditional media, because if you go to YouTube today, you're going to see a lot of authorized uploads of that same sort of traditional media up on YouTube. So everything comes full circle eventually, and here's where we run into the first

points of friction. YouTube is primarily a publishing platform. The company does produce some of its own content, but it's mostly known as being the place where creators can publish their works, so YouTube is the video store, not the studio producing the videos. Generally speaking, the video producers developed their own voice, their own style, their type of content. They find what works and they build an audience on that.

Some content creators do music, some tutorials, some do let's play videos, some do scripted works like sketches, and some incorporate pretty edgy material in their videos. Or sometimes they might include intentionally offensive material knowing that controversy will result

in more views and that results in more money. Now, initially that benefits YouTube because YouTube only makes money as videos earned views, So as those videos rack up the views, advertisers fork over more cash and YouTube takes that healthy slice of all those revenues. Now. One example YouTubers pointed to as a problem of this kind of philosophy, this idea of YouTube being totally cool with controversial material as long as it was bringing money in was a channel

that was run by Mike and Heather Martin. The couple created a series of videos in which they would pull what they called pranks on their young kids, but others saw these pranks as borderline or sometimes beyond borderline abuse. And it was this that the parents were profiting from. In other words, they were mistreating their children, at least in the eyes of these critics, and they were using that as a form of entertainment through which they were

making money. Um Rose Hill, who was the biological mother of two of the children in the Martin household says that she had been flagging videos as being in violation of YouTube's standards as early as October two thousand sixteen, and yet little appeared to be done about it. YouTube did not seem to take any of the videos down

or demonetize them or anything. It was only after the channel made the news and a massive negative backlash mounted against the Martins that things seemed to be set in motion. It reinforced the perception that YouTube was loath to move against a creator that's getting a lot of views because those creators are a healthy source of revenue for the company. So, at least initially, there's very little incentive for YouTube to do anything about offensive or questionable content if it's driving views,

because that would hurt its revenue. But then we have the third point of that triangle, and I'm going to use a lot of different metaphors for things with three components. Maybe at some point I'll use tricycle. The third part is the advertisers. Now, advertisers are understandably sensitive about the types of content they run ads against, the association of the advertiser with questionable content could be harmful for the brand.

Protecting a brand is an important part of advertising. So if a soft drink company executive suddenly finds out then add for their company's flagship product is running against a video that contains racial slurs or hate speech, calls for violent or other objectionable material, there's a good chance someone's about to get fired. So we've got YouTube and creators pushing the envelope and driving lots of views to videos of questionable content. This powder keg just needed a spark

to set it off. The spark first arrived in late two thousand sixteen, and the powder keg blew in February two thousand seventeen. That's when advertisers began to take note that their ads were running against videos that had hate speech and extremist content in them, particularly in the UK. The advertisers, in an effort to protect their clients and mitigate the fallout of such associations, began to pull ads

from YouTube. Their main objection was that they had no control over what types of videos could run their ads, and so they could end up being associated with ideologies and messaging that was in conflict with their public image. And that was just the beginning. I'll explain more in just a second, but first let's take a quick break. I mentioned before the break that advertisers were pulling their

spots from YouTube. They represented some really big clients, including Coca Cola, The Guardian, Johnson and Johnson, and the Government of the United Kingdom. Their move began to create sort of a domino effect, and one domino to fall was a reassessment of Google itself. Analyst Brian Weezer moved Google stock from a buy recommendation to a hold recommendation based

off the February two, seventeen scandal. He pointed out that Google had quote a serious issue in the UK with brand safety issues end quote, and that they could end up devaluing the company. Now. Suffice to say, this was a lot of incentive for YouTube to do something about all this. One high profile case where YouTube did act involved Felix Kilberg, better known by his screen name as Beauty Pie, Kilberg published a video that showed two men holding up a reprehensible message written on a sign and

I'm not going to repeat it here. This prompted Disney Maker Studios, which had been producing Pautie Pie shows, to cut all ties with the creator. YouTube canceled a YouTube red series called Scared Pauti Pie. YouTube Read is a subscription service that, in return for a monthly fee unless you watch videos without ads and view special content. Just for those subscribers, Google removed kale Berg from the preferred premium ad tier as well, which cut back how much

he could make on his videos. It was a pretty pretty extreme punishment. UM, I don't know if it was completely unwarranted. I have some pretty strong feelings about it in general, but there were other YouTubers who felt like that was a particularly harsh judgment against another creator, and other people said no, he got exactly what he deserves.

So it kind of runs the gamut. Now. I've placed a lot of the responsibility for how things have shaken out at YouTube on the platform and the creators, but I want to make it clear that advertisers were also somewhat responsible, with some pretty bad choices of their own. In April two thousand seventeen, PepsiCo had an ad featuring Kindall Jenner handing over a can of Pepsi to a

police officer during a protest. This was at the height of the initial protests in the Black Lives Matter movement, and so PepsiCo was widely criticized for trying to exploit a social movement for the purposes of advertising a soft drink. Pepsi would pull the ad after just a few days, including pulling it from YouTube. The move of a major company pulling more advertising from YouTube fueled even more companies to follow suit. Even without the public image issues that

Pepsi faced. The sudden departure of numerous big money advertisers prompted YouTube executives to make some pretty hasty and broad decisions, leading to what was called the ad PoCA lips. Now essentially, YouTube effectively demonetized any channels that were not considered to be family friendly, but the definition of family friendly was left rather vague, and YouTube began to rely heavily on algorithms to determine whether or not a channel's content qualified

for the tag family friendly or not. Now, to be fair to YouTube, the company had little other choice than the hand things over to an automated protocol. Today, around four hundred fifty hours of video are uploaded to the platform every single minute. The site racks up a billion

hours of you time every day. With that much content being added every minute, it's impossible to put human beings in charge of vetting all of it and making sure none of it contains material that violates YouTube's policies or will upset advertisers. For that reason, the company has developed programs that try to do that automatically. Part of this depends upon the metadata that's connected to the videos in question.

A metadata is data about data, so YouTubers build out metadata like tags and descriptions so that their videos will show up in search results. That way, when you pop into YouTube search and you're searching for a specific thing, like the other day, I search for Gauntlet to play through because I was feeling nostalgic, then it gives you the results that are relevant. It helps boost the video's visibility and makes it more likely that people will find

the video. And since you only make money if a lot of people are viewing your stuff, it's important to include the information and your metadata. If you don't your video is not likely to be seen by very many people at all, so the algorithms look for the tags that could indicate whether or not a video contains objectionable material, and again, the term objectionable isn't terribly well defined here.

YouTube did create a checklist for advertisers in an effort to win them back, and the checklist would allow companies to select the types of material they did not want their ads to support. Categories include stuff like profanity and rough language or sexually suggestive content, which is stuff similar to what you would see in a film's m p

A A rating description. But there were other categories as well, such as tragedy and conflict or sensational and shocking that raised questions and it could mean that people doing valuable work in fields that need coverage would find themselves without a means of earning enough money to pay for production costs. And you do painted with a pretty broad brush. People who had never had an issue with demonetization found themselves

hit hard by it. YouTube pointed out that the company had an appeals process that creators could follow if they felt that their work had been unfairly targeted, and there were a lot of people who definitely felt that way.

For example, people advocating for human rights for people in the LGBTQ community saw some of their videos demonetized, and the message seemed to be that their goal, that of extending human rights to a vulnerable population of people, was somehow not add friendly or it was taboo, which is

a pretty crappy message to get. It reinforces the idea that the world is against you when your video series that's all about trying to extend human rights to people is demonetized because the people in question somehow fall into a category that isn't advertiser friendly. Uh. It's dehumanizing, really, And that's just one example of the types of videos

that were targeted. YouTube was seen as being overly cautious in order to appease the advertisers that were pulling out of the platform, and the appeals process wasn't exactly a

smooth one. Creators who had a flagged video would get a notification that their video was in a sort of limbo in which it was not currently counting towards monetization, but an appeal could, in theory, overturn that, and the flagging process was based on machine learning, which also meant that the appeals process was effectively part of the training model for the system. You have a computer system that identifies what it believes to be a video that has

objectionable material, It flags the video. The videos immediately demonetized, and then by appealing the decision and having a human go over the result and either uphold it or overturn it, you train the machine learning model. That's great if you're doing it in a lab, but when you're doing it out in the real world, where it's actually affecting people's

ability to earn money, it's less great. So the content creator was meant to send an appeal request, and in theory, that would push the video to a human staffer at YouTube whose of it was to manually review the video to see if in fact the demonetization was justified. That

was the theory. However, that could not really work in practice because the number of videos being uploaded each day and the number getting flagged would have made that almost as impossible as having humans view all the videos in the first place, and so YouTube put in some additional rules.

Appealed videos would only go to human reviewers if those videos had more than one thousand views in the most recent seven days, or if you had a subscriber base of at least ten thousand people, then a human would review a flag video even if it hadn't yet met the metric of one thousand views in seven days. Besides the fact that YouTube was having to deal with an enormous number of appeals, the company also wanted to make sure it was addressing the concerns of the big earners first,

the most popular channels on YouTube. Many videos performed best in the short term after uploading to the site, no big surprise there. Right a new video goes up, people flocked to it. There are fan bases who eagerly anticipate the next video or episode, and so you see the vast majority of activity hit those videos right away. YouTube wanted to prioritize those videos over ones that might get a lot of views over a very long span of time, you know, the sort of stuff that tends to do

well on search. It might be more evergreen, so the earnings month to month may be low but consistent. So if I did a video that was sort of a how to guide on something that would remain relevant for years, I might not have a ton of traffic to that video on any given month, but I would have consistent

traffic throughout the whole run of the lifetime of the video. Meanwhile, someone else who's posting a new episode of a web series, they're going to see the vast majority of activity on their video in the in the near immediate fall health of uploading it. So those first few days are critical for those kind of series. And worse, there was a growing concern among creators that this would mean a really big drop in revenue, since the time they need monetization

would be shortly after the video goes live. So if you upload a video, algorithm decides its objection it's got objectionable material in it, flags it, and then you're not You're demonetized and your video is just now live. It could be the sweetest spot to earn money, and you can't earn anything because you've been demonetized. The longer you your video spins in limbo, the more money the creators

would lose. And as for older videos, there was a concern that creators wouldn't even see that those had been demonetized because all the focus would be directed towards the latest videos that they're posting, So older videos typically don't earn a ton individually, but collectively they can still act

as a pretty healthy source of revenue. So if you're a creator who has been active for several years and you have a big back catalog of videos, you might have a decent amount of money coming in from views on those videos, And if an older video suddenly becomes relevant again for some reason, you could stand to benefit

from that. But if it's been demonetized, you never see that money, and there's a good chance you wouldn't even know about the demonetization because your focus is on what's going up next instead of what you uploaded years ago. This pushed many creators to consider leaving the platform altogether. Some looked at alternatives like Twitch, where they can live stream and use in platform features as a means of

earning money. Others moved to Patreon, in which users could pledge a recurring amount of money to the creator, either on a scheduled basis such as a monthly payment, or on a per upload basis. But these methods meant the creators had to rely upon fans who were able and willing to pay for something actively. They were only passively paying for earlier asked in the fact that they were watching ads as opposed to actually handing over money to

view videos. Now, if we are to believe some of the top creators on the platform, the initial fallout was pretty dramatic. Phil DeFranco said add earnings on his channel fell by eight percent following the flight of advertisers, though by mid April those earnings had leveled out to a thirty percent drop from the average. It's still not great, obviously, but better than others stated less extreme drops in revenue, but a lot of people said, yeah, it took a hit.

Making things worse was an overall feeling that YouTube wasn't very good at communicating out the changes to creators or explaining how their work was falling into one of these categories that advertisers were opting out of, or presenting a sort of best practices approach so that they could make certain their work wasn't being demonetized. There seemed to be a lack of communication on YouTube's part, which made the creators feel truly abandoned. Then things got really crazy. I'll

explain more after the break. In late two thousand and seventeen, yet another YouTube controversy made headlines. This time it was all about how several channels creating videos ostensibly for children had bizarre, disturbing, and sometimes blatantly inappropriate material in those videos. They inhabited YouTube Kids, which is a standalone app and

it's marketed as a safe space for kids entertainment. The idea was that you, as a parent or caregiver, could download the app on a mobile device, hand that mobile device over to a kid, and feel safe in the knowledge that the child was only going to see family friendly content through that app. The general belief was that YouTube would have a system in place to block any material that didn't meet the app's family friendly standards, but

that's not what happened. Some people made really disturbing videos using popular characters to lure kids into watching popular trademarked characters, a lot of them Disney characters, and tricking kids to

watching them, and these videos were trending. They were popular enough so that they were showing up on related videos or recommended videos when kids were watching other stuff, and kids tend to watch a lot of stuff, and they will often watched the same thing many times, so these videos were racking up views, which meant more ad dollars for YouTube. Now the videos were getting flagged. There wasn't much activity to show for it, not much response from YouTube,

at least in the early days. But then these stories broke about these videos and YouTube had another pr disaster to deal with. This is the same year when the apocalypse thing had started, so creators throughout their hands and essentially said they're preventing us for making money while you're also allowing this kind of stuff to go on on your kids app. It wasn't a good look. It made

YouTube look like hypocrites. Now. Adding to that scandal was one in December two thousand and seventeen when Logan Paul, who was is an extremely popular YouTuber. He had really made his fame on Vine and then when Vine closed down. Uh, he had already done some stuff on YouTube, but he managed to kind of leverage his popularity over to YouTube's platform anyway. In December two thousand seventeen, he posted a

video that showed a hanging corpse in it. Uh. Logan Paul was walking through an area in Japan known as the Suicide Forest and encountered this corpse and caught it on video and uploaded it. The video received millions of views. It ended up trending on YouTube. It became the focal point for a huge blowback from the YouTube community. Here was a video that clearly violated YouTube's policies. Numerous people had flagged it for review. YouTube didn't remove the video.

Logan Paul or someone on his staff removed the video, but YouTube, the platform, seemed to do nothing, and that really, in many people's minds, cemented the idea that YouTube's rules didn't apply to people if they were at a certain level of success and were seen as the future of YouTube. Moreover, advertisers didn't pull their spots from Logan Paul's videos, which seemed to suggest that it was the financial aspect of the platform's rules that matter, not the ethical ones. So

there's a lot of blame to go around here. Advertisers have. They have some of the blame, a lot of the blame because while they reacted strongly to Beauty Pie, they did not react strongly to Logan Paul, and so YouTube was given a very strong incentive to react to the Pauti Pie scandal by punishing Pauti Pie. But because the advertisers didn't freak out, YouTube didn't have a whole lot of incentive to uh, punish logan Paul because they were

making money. No One, no one on the let me give you a check side of the equation was complaining. Video viewers and other content creators were complaining. But since they're not the ones handing checks over to YouTube at least, as is the way the argument goes, YouTube just didn't care. One thing YouTube did do, though, was to restrict its Partner program, which allows content creators to opt into monetization

in the first place. This is the criteria you have to meet in order to be considered in a part of the partner program. So you have to meet these uh, these requirements first before you can actually join. Before the new restrictions were put in place, the general rule was that a channel had to hit ten thousand views to

qualify as a YouTube partner across the channel. So if you had a thousand videos and they each had ten views each, you hit ten thousand views, that's It may be that you only have ten people watching, but you still have ten thousand views across your entire channel. That would be enough for you to qualify as YouTube partner

under the previous rules, but the update changed that. They changed it to four thousand hours of watch time over the previous twelve months, which clearly favored longer videos over shorter ones, since you could create very short videos and rack up ten thousand views relatively quickly. But if you have short videos, accumulating four thousand hours of view material

would take a lot longer. If your average video is, you know, two minutes long, just getting an hour makes mean that you have to get a whole lot of views on that one video. But if your average video is an hour and a half long, then it doesn't take as many full views to hit that four thousand hour water mark. Now, in addition, a channel would need to have at least a thousand subscribers before it could

be considered for the Partner program. Existing channels that had previously qualified for the Partner Program under the ten thousand views rule but had not yet hit the four thousand hours one thousand subscriber benchmark would end up being demonetized.

So there were people who had been qualified under the Partner program previously, they did not get grandfathered in when these changes were made, they were affected to Now YouTube claimed that of those affected by these changes them were making less than a hundred bucks a year on videos that it was a very small amount of money that wasn't being paid out and therefore was not having a meaningful impact on people. Fast forward to February two thousand nineteen.

That's when Matt Watson, a former YouTuber, posted a video showing that there was a disturbing trend on the platform in which Skivie people were uploading videos showing kids doing just stuff like nothing bad, just kids being kids. But in the comments section, people were posting time stamps of specific moments of the video that, out of context, would sexualize the content, and that was where the huge issue was.

Watson demonstrated that YouTube's recommendation algorithm could quickly pull up one of these videos, and he started with a bikini hall video in which a woman was showing off bathing suits she had purchased, and using only the recommended videos that appear alongside the one you're watching, Watson quickly navigated to a seemingly unrelated video of a young girl playing in two clicks, and the comments were full of disturbing,

awful content that was enabling some truly hideous behavior. Watson's point was that YouTube's algorithm was actually facilitating this sort of behavior, making it easier for predators to seek out

each other and the content they wanted. The Verge ran their own test after seeing Watson's video post, and they used his methods, and they found that it took at most six clicks to get to one of those videos from the recommendation page, so they would start with a video, and it found that if they just followed enough times that being at most six, they would hit on one

of these. While Watson was adamant that he didn't want another apocalypse and that he still had many friends who were dependent upon YouTube for their living, he did want something done about this problem, and he urged people to reach out to the advertisers whose ads were being displayed against this sort of content to have that content or to have those ads pulled, because he was concerned that

YouTube wasn't going to do anything. So essentially he was saying, hey, did you know that the ad for your product is showing up on videos that are sexualizing children and don't you think that's a bad thing? Then you want to have your your ads pulled. And since YouTube had developed a bit of a reputation for not responding to issues like this in a timely or consistent manner, Watson decided he'd go public with this discovery to create that pressure. Now,

some YouTubers disagreed with that strategy. Many said that Watson simply should report incidents rather than try to get views out of the issue. Some feared that the publicity would prompt AD companies to pull out of YouTube altogether, creating another round of the apocalypse. Personally, I find it hard to figure out where I stand on this particular issue.

I do think reporting the incidents is important. Posting a video about it could very well be in the best interests of the people using YouTube, particularly if the YouTuber chose not to monetize the video. So, in other words, if Onston comes forward and says there's this terrible practice that's going on and his video is not being monetized, then at least you remove the criticism of, hey, you're just trying to profit from this because you know it's

going to be a big controversy. It's going to drive a lot of views, and therefore you can make money off of it, and it removes that criticism. But if the video pointing out the problem itself is monetized, then you're like, well, you're now you're just trying to stir up a hornet's nest for your own personal benefit. Even if that's not the case, it's enough to create the

seed of doubt. On the other hand, YouTube definitely has a history of turning a blind eye to problematic behaviors on the platform, typically taking action only when the pressure is too gray to ignore, and so I can sympathize with Watson's point that this was something that needed to be brought to light to create that pressure necessary to enact change. At the same time, I also sympathize with all the creators out there who are depending heavily on

YouTube for their living. They've spent countless hours shooting, editing, and uploading videos for their audiences. They face challenges like sweeping changes to monetization policies, which is sort of like coming into work and learning that your paycheck has been cut by and they can't tell you why or how you can fix it. That's how people who depend upon YouTube feel, and they face burnout as they try to create more videos to meet demand and to earn money.

You know, knowing that each new video that comes out earns most of its money on its initial release means that for you to keep making money, you have to keep producing videos, and that takes its toll. As someone who makes his living creating content week to week, I can tell you it's not always easy. Sometimes it requires a lot of work to scrape up the motivation and energy to do the job. You can ask Tari sometimes pitch a fit before I come into the studio, and

by sometimes I mean pretty much every time. Having a capricious platform doesn't make it any easier now. It also reminds me of what Bernie Burns of Rooster Teeth would point out pretty frequently. I've heard him say this in person, I've heard him say it on podcasts and videos, and I think it's a really important point. When you rely on someone else's platform, you are creating a recipe for

things to go wrong sooner or later. So in other words, it's the old adage don't put all your eggs in one basket, because when that platform changes, you may find yourself a disadvantage with no recourse, no solution. It's much better to spread that risk around. Having your own platform is helpful too, if you can do it, because you have ultimate control over your own platform. So, for example, with the Rooster teeth. They have their own website and

they host all their videos on their website. They also host them on YouTube because that's where the audience is. Then that's the flip side. Getting people to come to you remains a huge challenge. It's hard to get people to come to your owned and operated site. People go where the content is, and as YouTube gets hundreds of

hours of content each minute, it's definitely that destination. So it's easy to say, don't put all your eggs in one basket, but it's also hard to build your own platform and then convince people to go to it, so it's not like there's a one size fits all solution. However, it does again reinforce the point that depending entirely on YouTube means that whenever there's a change, you're gonna be affected by it and there may not be much you

can do about it. The same thing is true as certain and I've seen this in my actual professional career, where you might have articles that do really well in Google Search because of the algorithm, and then Google will change the algorithm and now those articles don't do so well in search anymore, and you'll notice as a result, traffic to your website drops dramatically. That impacts revenue and

impacts how much money you make from advertising. And again it shows that if you're beholden to a third party for traffic to your stuff, for people to actually get their eyeballs on it and to consume it and thus to generate revenue for you, then you could be up the creek. And as The Verge points out, YouTube's own course doesn't seem to have original content creators in mind at all. YouTube seems to have kind of moved away from that d I Y you know, home video content

creator model. When YouTube presents pitches to advertisers, they're not typically showing these individual content creators, even the really popular ones. More and more of the sizzle reel that the company shows off includes stuff like music videos and clips of television shows and movies, clips of celebrities, uh, stuff from

popular late night TV shows. In other words, it's that stuff I was talking about at the beginning when YouTube first started and people were uploading pirated content and the

industry was freaking out. Now that's what YouTube is relying on in their in their sizzle reels, because now they have these working relationships with these these big production studios it's no longer adversarial now it's you know, a sort of a symbiotic relationship, and the content is always more highly produced than what d I Y video content creators can do, even though YouTube build its business around those

content creators. And so the feeling among a lot of creators is that they've been completely left out in the cold, that they've been abandoned by the platform they helped build. And so that's where we are right now, with content creators concerned about their livelihood and looking at possible ways to offset their dependence upon YouTube. Meanwhile, YouTube continues to court big names and entertainment and groups that can create highly produced content, and there's still the worry that another

apocalypse could be coming. So it's, uh, it's kind of a concerning time if you're a content creator. UM. I know a lot of content creators who, even fairly recently, have expressed a lot of concern about this, some of whom have gotten out of the content creation business pretty much entirely. And it's a shame because they made really good stuff. But they were also affected by these moves.

Some of them had content that wasn't at all objectionable, but for one reason or another it would get flagged that way, they'd have to go through the whole appeals pro sess and it would happen with all their videos. And if you've created you know, more than a hundred videos, going through that process again and again just to just to have monetization turned back on, I think it's demoralizing. So it's a pretty rough landscape out there for the independent,

you know, small creators. There's some some of the big names who are still doing quite well. Um you know, they're they're big enough where they can operate on a level at least, you know, similar to the established studios. But for a lot of others, they feel like they've been completely abandoned and left out, so they're looking for alternatives. A lot of folks have moved to Patreon or to Twitch in the hopes that perhaps they can at least

convince their audience to follow along with them. It's tough, and it's one of the reasons why I've never spent a huge amount of time trying to develop my own YouTube video series, because I know that at the challenges would be beyond just your average production challenges. You know, even after something has been produced and published, you still have challenges making sure that it remains monetized and that

you recapture the costs of production. Anyway, that wraps up this episode about the apocalypse and YouTube's demonetization practices, and maybe they will change over the course of twenty nineteen. We'll have to take a look again in the future. If any of you have suggestions for future podcast topics, you can reach out to me by email the addresses tech stuff at how stuff works dot com, or you can drop on by our website that's text stuff podcast

dot com. There you're gonna find an archive of all of our shows, links to our social media, as well as a link to our online store where you can purchase stuff that's got tech on it. Deck stuff Stuff and you can be super duper cool and remember that every purchase you make goes to help the show and we greatly appreciate it. And I'll talk to you again really soon. Hext Stuff is a production of I Heart

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