Small channels (me) can no longer can make any money on videos. I thought this was one of the cool things about YouTube, and they are even saying so themselves: “One of YouTube’s core values is to provide anyone the opportunity to earn money”.
E-mail for YouTube:
What’s Changing
Under the new eligibility requirements announced today, your YouTube channel, UniMyra, is no longer eligible for monetization because it doesn’t meet the new threshold of 4,000 hours of watchtime within the past 12 months and 1,000 subscribers. As a result, your channel will lose access to all monetization tools and features associated with the YouTube Partner Program on February 20, 2018 unless you surpass this threshold in the next 30 days. Accordingly, this email serves as 30 days notice that your YouTube Partner Program terms are terminated.
One of YouTube’s core values is to provide anyone the opportunity to earn money from a thriving channel. Creators who haven’t yet reached this new threshold can continue to benefit from our Creator Academy, our Help Center, and all the resources on the Creator Site to grow their channels. Once your channel reaches the new threshold, it will be reviewed to make sure it adheres to our policies and guidelines, and if so, monetization will be re-enabled.
I wonder how the youtube community is going to respond to this. Are they going to stop posting videos, or are they going to try harder to make more popular videos. UniMyra, your videos are excellent. Unicycling, unfortunately, isn’t that popular. Cats falling into toilets, that’s popular.
Since beeing accepted as a YouTube partner in 2015 I have earned $40, which means I was almost half way to my first paycheck ($100). My channel don’t have much potensial. I typically get 4-500 views on my videos, so there is no economic loss for me, but in a childish way it was fun to make symbolic money on videos.
You do make some fun videos, Unimyra. I hadn’t seen them before. Your story about You Tube coincides with a massive new campaign of Internet censorship. Google (the owner of You Tube) and other social media giants are currently hiring thousands of new people to police the Internet. Other than the revolutions made by your wheel, your unicycle videos are not political, but having all those new employees on board makes it possible for You Tube to do all sorts of stuff they probably wanted to do for a long time but didn’t bother with before.
If you are really curious about this, it is reported here with a pseudo-Trotskyist perspective, and here, in the financial news.
For google it is not about policing the internet as such as it is trying to convince people to pay to advertise on videos. The first adpocalypse happened where they found lots of big name brands with advertising next to questionable videos. The advertisers themselves pulled out as they didn’t like what they were being advertised next to.
Youtube then had to try and find a way to ensure their advertisers were not put next to material like ISIS propaganda or racist rants or whatever and had to try and tighten what was censored. This was done by algorithms as youtube says “300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute” making it impossible to use people to screen everything.
A lot of people got their ad revenue cut and videos automatically demonetised from the algorithm, you then had to put in to get it un demonetized.
Adpocalypse 2.0 came out more recently when they found loads of videos tagged as children friendly (i.e. they were available on the “Youtube Kids” platform specially for kids) on that were either inappropriate videos or videos with paedophilic comments all over them that the kids would see when watching them. In response youtube demonetized or deleted a whole bunch of channels/videos.
The most recent change to the demonetisation scheme occurred right after Logan Paul put up his video to his 15million subscribers showing the Japanese man who committed suicide. Though they claimed it was not in response to that and the changes made (requiring channels to have a certain 4000 hours of views in the previous 12 months and over 1000 subscribers) wouldn’t have affected someone like Logan Paul so they could be telling the truth. What it does mean is that a channel must be around for a while and be reasonably popular to achieve monetization and therefore its less likely coke is going to be advertised next to an ISIS propaganda video.
Its not internet censorship that youtube/google are trying to achieve. It is ensuring they continue to make money from ad revenue which makes sense as a business seems.
They have put more people on to watch videos to flag inappropriate videos but again with the amount that is uploaded every minute it is almost impossible using that system alone.
Of course they have fucked that up also, Logan Pauls japanese suicide video was up for over a day despite it obviously being flagged by many appalled viewers and youtube didn’t take it down, Logan Paul took it down due to backlash.
Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and CEO of Facebook, is not with Google, but I would assume that his priorities reflect those of other giant social media corporations. He recently described his mission:
This guy’s net worth is in the tens of billions. When he says he wants to prevent the spread of polarizing news, “amplify the good and prevent harm,” to you that doesn’t sound like censorship??
Firstly I explained the youtube “censorship” and why they as a business were intent on still receiving ad revenue. (Seems crazy that a business wants to make money)
I didn’t mention facebook but I don’t think you can say "this large company does this so all others must be doing the same thing. Apple were found to be purposely slowing down their phones, does that mean that all phone companies are? VW were found out to be cheating on their diesel emission tests, does that mean every car company is? Takata deliberately falsified data to make their airbags seem safer, does that mean every airbag company does?
“Company A does thistherefore this must reflect Company B because they sell similar products” is a pretty crap argument. Also you take one word out of his statement “polarizing” and respond to it. Polarizing information could be ISIS or racist propaganda. As well as this Zuckerberg talks about the abuse of facebook with false news (which was known to be an issue in the US election). These are the Russian Facebook ads that aimed to influence the US election - ABC News
Fake news spread on facebook was a massive issue during the US election. People are morons and can’t fact check themselves, you may think it is “censorship” not allowing fake news or propaganda to spread but with how dumb the majority of people are it is probably safer.
Well yes, of course businesses want to make money! The successful ones also want to wipe out the competition and become monopolies. Monopolies must expand overseas, and to do this, they often need military backing. This is called imperialism.
For imperialist tycoons to wage their wars of plunder in the colonial world, they must control the flow of information. Getting all the news outlets they own to falsely proclaim that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction was one of the more familiar examples. Another is their vicious persecution of whistle blowers who release videos and other information from their wars.
Did you ever watch the Collateral Murder video? It shows a US helicopter gunship crew having a laugh while machine-gunning journalists and other civilians on the ground, including children. It is widely believed to be a significant factor in the 35-year prison sentence that Chelsea Manning originally got after releasing it. I remember searching for this video on You Tube when it was new, and the autocomplete would suggest ten other “collateral” things besides murder, even after I had already typed in the beginning of the word. “Collateral music,” “collateral mugging,” and so on- this was quite imaginative on You Tube’s part, considering that when I found the video I was looking for, it already had over ten million views!
Collateral Murder shows a side of the quest for profits that the capitalists don’t want the toiling masses to see. All the big capitalists have this in common, regardless of the particularities of whatever businesses they are involved in, and they know that they and their government must work together on this. In public, they may express concern about one or two (or three) of their news outlets spewing racist propaganda, but in reality, that is not what they are worried about at all.
Today is Super Bowl Sunday. A big controversy in the last couple years has been football players “taking a knee” during the national anthem. A few of my white, conservative acquaintances (neighbors, colleagues) characterized taking a knee as “disrespecting the flag.” They made no mention of any other reason for taking a knee, such as protesting police brutality. I don’t think these acquaintances are morons. I think they’re practicing willful ignorance. They refuse to even try to empathize with, consider the point of view of the players taking a knee.
I understand it’s important to fact check, but some of the things people believe don’t even pass the “smell test.” For example, there is the right-wing notion that more than a million people fraudulently voted in the last U.S. presidential election. Again, there is the failure to empathize. What possible benefit would those people get from voting? They would be risking a felony by voting fraudulently. So, you have to accept some kind of widespread pathological badness in groups of people for the whole notion to work.
I know that Google’s decision about YouTube has to do with advertisers. I just don’t get why they have to shut out every small channel that has been operating for years without any complaints.
It would if Facebook were a public utility, but it’s not. It’s a business, and the person (or people) in charge get to decide how they want to present content, even if that content may be freely provided by members of the general public. In other words, I don’t know if that counts as censorship in the traditional sense. It’s more like a gigantic example of your parents turning on the parental controls on “your” computer. They are trying to “manage” your computing experience, presumably for your benefit. Your parents, that is. For Facebook, they are trying to maximize their profitability, while minimizing their liability. Like most businesses do.
You remain free to post whatever you want on your own website. Post it on someone else’s, and they get to have control over it, as is probably specified in their user agreement. I try to keep this in mind about things like my gmail account. It’s a free service. This is great for millions of users, but at the same time means Google doesn’t owe me anything. If they want, they can decide to stop offering that service and delete all of my emails tomorrow.
Fake news is still all over the place on Facebook (and probably all social media). Somebody wants to start a conversation by stating a non-fact and asking for peoples’ comments. One example of this, which I’m not sure is false but it doesn’t sound accurate, is that border control agents arrest over 1000 people a day. Instead of me responding to that as a fact, my first thought is to question the information and ask for their source.
I just did a little searching around, and that number seems grossly inflated. The guy did say “arrest”, not turn back, detain or other stuff. Fakey-fakey.
Some. There are plenty of large businesses out there that don’t feel the need to “wag the dog” or otherwise manipulate the world just to benefit themselves.
I imagine they were trying to somehow balance the idea of keeping that video available, with making it hard for people to find it by accident. You could still find it if you knew what you were looking for, but maybe they wanted to minimize “collateral finding” of it.
That’s perhaps a good example of White Privilege, a thing that many white people deny is a thing. But it is, and I know I’ve been guilty of it. I grew up white, in a mostly white suburb. I had to learn later, from people of various colors, the things that were all too common occurrences for them. So I agree, moron is too strong a word, especially to use for people who you hope will try to get more objective information in the future rather than just being contrary because you referred to them as morons. Or deplorables.
Because they can’t watch them all, so they have to figure out a more workable way to remove the incentive for “bad actors” to post distasteful content. Hobbyists like yourself will continue to post your cool videos because it’s not about the money for you. Maybe what they changed is that if you reach their minimum “critical mass” now, they can afford to have someone personally vet your channel.
Of course this won’t completely get rid of people who want to post racist, gross or otherwise fake or distasteful content, but the hope is that it may make their content harder to find?
That’s an awfully narrow definition of censorship, and besides, social media giants like Google and Facebook work closely with the US government to decide what to allow and/or promote on their platforms, and to agree on which user information to turn over to the intelligence agencies (usually all of it, is the impression I get). Changes to You Tube’s search algorithm are being openly discussed right now in the US senate, seemingly with political videos being the main concern.
“White privilege” is a myth meant to spread the belief that working-class white people benefit from the oppression of black people. They don’t! In the US states where there was slavery, wages are lower even today, and workers in those states are still almost 100% non-union. Karl Marx wrote about this 150 years ago in volume 1 of Capital: “In the United States of America, every independent movement of the workers was paralyzed as long as slavery disfigured a part of the republic. Labor cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded.” He then said that the sweeping away of slavery by the Civil War was what made it possible to launch the fight for the eight-hour work day.
White people in the US do have a higher standard of living than black people, but it is plummeting. Perhaps it is plummeting a bit more slowly than for black people, I’m not sure, but a plummeting living standard is not privilege! Calling it privilege just helps to make it happen faster. Then fascist agitators can come along and say they want to defend “white privilege.” To the more backwards members of the disappearing middle class, this proposal can begin to sound appealing.
Though school segregation and racist police terror are definitely a thing in the US, there has been a recent spike in mortality for white Americans aged 45 to 54 (mostly due to drug overdose, alcoholism and suicide), and white people are the largest demographic of people killed by police in terms of total numbers (per capita, the US residents most often killed by police are Native Americans, followed by black and Latino people). The numbers killed by police in the US, even if you were to only count white people, are far above the numbers for almost any other country. Ditto for the incarceration rate. This is also not privilege.
The people in the US who are privileged are the members of the capitalist ruling class. They are indeed predominantly white, but more importantly, they are incredibly rich, and getting richer by the minute, and cannot keep control unless the toiling masses remain divided by race. Karl Marx did NOT say: “Workers of the world unite against white people,” he just said “Workers of the world unite!”
Of course that is the impression you would get.
And you may be right, though those companies like to present an image of resisting government control of “their” content and respecting the privacy of their users.
That may be a legitimate definition, but is not the one I’m familiar with and I think not the one people mean most of the time when they use it. My definition goes along the lines of “Being treated differently, every single day, based on the color of your skin, often by people who don’t even realize they are doing it.” That’s 100% real; possibly less for some people and more for others, depending on where they live and what interactions they have in their daily lives.
Here’s the Wikipedia definition:
“…a term for societal privileges that benefit people identified as white in some countries, beyond what is commonly experienced by non-white people under the same social, political, or economic circumstances.”
Real, real real. You can see if even if you just hang out with black people. But it’s hard to really experience it unless it’s happening to you.
In my world, we work with people with developmental disabilities. Our Employers, as we call them (we wouldn’t have jobs without them), come in all shapes, sizes, colors and levels of need for assistance. They are the most vulnerable segment of our population and tend to constantly have their civil rights violated, often by people who don’t even realize they’re doing it. Professional people. Not just cops and salespeople. How about doctors, social workers and others who are supposed to know better? They don’t have much of a political voice, but slowly that’s changing.
Well, yes, of course racist oppression in America is real! That doesn’t mean that most white people benefit from it, though. The only “privilege” for white working people in the US is that of not yet having hit rock bottom! The rate of infant mortality here is higher than in any other industrialized nation. For black women, it is three times higher than for white women, but even for white women, it is still very high. Is this privilege?? If you call it “less fucked up, but still tragic,” I will agree with you, but calling it “privilege” is just wrong, even if the term is used a lot by the more liberal mouthpieces of the people who pocket the healthcare budget cuts. The poorer US states now have an infant mortality rate that is on par with some African countries- Mississippi and Botswana are now about equal, for example.
My explanation wasn’t very good. White privilege is basically going through life without being treated a certain way because of your skin color or ethnic appearance. Getting jobs more easily. Getting into college. Even getting into clubs! Not being singled out by the TSA. That’s part of the “real” that affects many people I know.
A lot of the things you mention sound more like rights than privileges. Accepting them being called privileges is a first step toward having them taken away.
Remember the days when no one got groped or X-rayed by the TSA, and you didn’t even need ID to get on a domestic flight, just a plane ticket? That’s how it was for everyone at one time.
Today, if you do not belong to one of the ethnic groups that gets profiled for extra interrogation (or worse) at the airport, you can call yourself privileged if you must, but politically there is a shortsightedness to that outlook that is quite dangerous.
I’m still not explaining it very well. The “privilege” is in the whiteness; the not being treated like a second class citizen or with some sort of suspicion or pre-judgement, just based on your skin color or ethnic appearance. I took it for granted until people started pointing out to me how their lives didn’t go the same way.
Yes, the TSA makes flying a PITA. Not so much flying, but getting from the parking lot to the plane. And going to the bathroom on the plane too, I guess. I have TSA-pre now, which is very nice when available, but wasn’t free to sign up for. That’s the world we choose to live in now. I prefer a world where the Twin Towers are still standing, but that world is gone.
