I have spent weeks researching and writing the 6 pages long script for my latest 25 minute video, which I have spent many days editing to get it to the quality you can now enjoy on YouTube.
I am not payed by anyone to do this, but I do it because I have a dream of building a business as a political commentator on YouTube.
I released the video 12 hours ago, and already two people have shared pirate links to the video here on Mastodon through the…
@randahl
There's too many damn ads on YouTube, and they are actively trying to prevent use of ad-blockers / ad-skippers. Hence the rise of sites such as Invidious and Piped.
While I feel sorry for you as you try to monetize, and you're an awesome commenter giving Americans an outsider's perspective of them, this "piracy" situation will persist, at least in the short-term.
@jadugar63 If you want to watch Netflix, you pay a Netflix subscription. If you want to watch Prime, you pay a Prime subscription. And if you want to watch YouTube without ads you pay a YouTube subscription.
@randahl
Fair. Netflix Standard with Ads and Prime Video have very few ads compared to YouTube. Google is highly dependent on serving ads through their products compared to other streaming platforms. While I still use standard YouTube to help creators monetize, the sentiment out there for using Invidious/Piped continues to increase. There's zero that you or I can do about it; the solution rests with Google. Reduce the ads to a level compared to Netflix/Prime Video or something acceptable.
… Invidius service, which screen scrapes YouTube to block the ads that pay for the work of YouTube creators like me.
Being a new YouTuber, I am not even monetized yet, which means YouTube does not show ads before my videos. But when some people use the pirate system, my videos are being watched without YouTube knowing, my content is worth watching.
@randahl I haven't watched your content myself, but here's why I won't stop using tools like invidious and piped:
YouTube's business model is screwing over everyone, including content creators. The hoops that one must jump are ever-changing, and recourse when a mistake is made is severely lacking. The truth is that ad revenue is a small proportion of most creators' income. Many creators don't get any revenue and yet the platform still serves ads.
Advertising is exploitative and preys upon neurodiverse people. The ads shown are often designed to trigger negative emotions like anxiety and time-pressure. These manipulations affect people differently. I am very sensitive to these things and they noticably increase my baseline level of stress.
A business that needs to see endless growth at all costs is incompatible with an advertising model in the long term, since increasing profitability ultimately means diverting more attention to ads or using more manipulative ads to produce more revenue.
Centralised platforms are walled gardens. Our culture (yes, YouTube is part of our culture) should not be privatised or held lock-and-key as it currently is. YouTube is fundamentally a public utility. I think it's important to subvert and undermine walled gardens wherever they are found. I can and will make a local archive of your content if I think its worth preserving. I use the exact same methods tools like Invidious use to do this. Please take this as a complement.
Piracy is fundamentally the idea that with a product of infinite scale (eg Software, digital media, an idea), lost "opportunity cost" is analogous to a type of theft in the eyes of the "rights holder". If I have a lemonade stand, and I take one of your lemons, you have one less lemon and can't make as much lemonade, and so I've deprived you of something. If you have infinite lemons, and I take one, you have not been deprived of anything other than making theoretically one more glass of lemonade, despite having infinite capacity. This is a nonsense. Moreover, studies show that those who pirate Music, Film, etc are often some of the biggest paid customers of said media, but through memorabilia, mechandise, event tickets, etc. So the argument for lost opportunity cost is dubious.
None of this means that content creators (the ones actually doing the work to make the platform worth visiting to begin with) shouldn't be renumerated, but those who decouple themselves from the financial interests of the platform should be rewarded disproportionately: Nebula, Patreon, Liberapay, and selfhosting are all valid ways of building an audience that isn't reliant on ad revenue and the whims of a video hosting platform.
Sorry for the long-winded reply. I think this conversation is very interesting and I don't claim to have all the right answers 😅
Reference to claim about pirates being biggest customers:
@johnhamelink@randahl i get both your points. and as one of the tooters of invidious'ed links to Randahls video and as a creator myself i do feel him. yet i'm sideing John. plus i would love to use sth like steady/patreon to donate to Randahl being able to continue his tremendous job. suppose my €5/month is more than yt would pay per year.
@randahl
It is not advisable to have one revenue stream from one provider, especially a large corporation like YouTube, which can go the way of Twitter. Denys, with his Ukraine update got targeted on there and got mass reported for content violations in a DDoS style attack. He was demonetised for a while until he could untangle it, which caused him issues.
Consider setting up something like Patreon and asking your listeners for direct support.
Consider releasing that video as an audio only version, as part of an open RSS podcast (with the Patreon request). Also same idea for anything that’s little extra work and a wider payoff.
Be open to synergistic sponsorship, like Ground News or a VPN. Your audience is looking for the real deal, which you are, and we understand you need to pay the bills.
Remember, this is true for everything… diversity is strength.
Notes for the wider world:
Well, always good to have clarity, but talk about stating the obvious. Of course add blocking is legal, just like stealing is illegal. Imagine if the reverse was true!
It is legal to block a YouTube ad. Ripping a video and packaging it as yours is stealing and stealing is illegal. Just calling something an ad blocker doesn’t mean theft isn’t going on.
@taatm@theseeduneed@mc@randahl I don't think so, simply because Invidious doesn't actually host YouTube videos (“packages them as someone else's”); it rather streams them, acting as a proxy (otherwise, operating an Invidious server would be infinitely expensive). This is very similar to VPN services blocking ads (such as Mullvad and ProtonVPN, I think). Also, the court verdict wasn't really about the private use of ad-blockers, but about providing ad-blocking software to the general public. 🤷
@pixelcode thank you so much for adding some more detail to the matter! to @taatm , @theseeduneed and @randahl : i've already changed my initial posting. approved by Randahl. ;)
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