I imagine a lot of you are probably familiar with Metatron, but if you aren't he's been on youtube for almost a decade now, making primarily very detailed and well-researched historical videos. Almost 750k subs, and over 800 videos during that time.
Couple days ago, Youtube decided to fully remove all monetization from his channel (his (extremely naive IMO) video on this is here).
Personally, I think it is obvious why this happened. Two weeks ago, he made this video pointing out that the ancient Greeks were, in fact, not actually pro-gay which got over 1 million views. And a week ago he made this other video talking about how the black Cleopatra thing was rubbish and that there were better choices to pick from if they wanted black warrior queens which got over 500k views.
And then his channel suddenly just loses all monetization? Such a strange coincidence!
The problem is the other sites just don't have enough money to pay creators. Most ad sponsers won't associate with them and it just isn't financially practical to pay for every creator I like to watch.
I'm not disagreeing with you, but if YouTube demonetizes your videos, you're not getting paid either.
I'm sure there's still some value to posting on YouTube because you get a larger audience and you can pitch for donations or direct viewers to the mirrored copy of your video on another site where you do get revenue, but I wouldn't count on YouTube allowing that forever- I'm surprised they tolerate people pitching other sites in their videos; perhaps they just can't catch it unless somebody reports it.
YouTube makes money from advertisers because of their content. If they're not willing to share that money with the content creators the creators need to go somewhere that does.
That's not really true though. Rumble pays Russell Brand millions and offered Joe Rogan an obscene contract. The problem is that viewers stick with their regular, favourite sites and don't feel a need to move because doing so feels like an unnecessary sacrifice. They're comfortable with the familiar and aren't convinced a change should be made, and even often get defensive if you bring it up.
No doubt in an attempt to bootstrap their platform. Often, big creators get sweetheart deals and smaller ones get nothing.
That's why the winning move would be to pay 1,000 small/medium channels the same amount you would've paid the one big one to change over. It costs you the same, but with a thousand people making content, you've got an actual reason not just to come over, but to stay.
True. Well, all you have to do is give them a better rate than YT. You can try to sell ads just like google does. I dunno how hard that is going to be for a competitor to get advertisers. Google used to have a virtual monopoly on the ad business.
The economy of YT is not straight forward, from my perspective. I point that out because I dunno if these huge streamers are loss leaders for them or they make huge profit off. Money comes back into the ecosystem by channels paying for ads -- the very thing that gets them impressions that gets them paid. I have wondered if the entire thing is a multi-level marketing scheme like OF where the primary profits are being provided by the suckers paying for placement/ads.