Looks like Steemit and Dtube are a better bet today
Yeah I was one of the many who received this shitgram in my email from YouTube.
It's not that big a deal because I don't rely on YT for any kind of income, but it's still a kick in the nards, eh?
Mindset and Motivation
With anything worth doing we will get knocked back and question why we even try.
Things like this can be amplified in our minds.
But that is because we look how far we have to go rather than how far we have already travelled.
Digital Sharecropping
Never tie your fortunes to any one platform (including/especially Steemit).
The rules can change over night and what was previously a mainstay can become a liability.
Without the Steemit income potential would you still blog here? For most of us I doubt it. My metrics have never included any click throughs from my Steemit posts in my top 1,000 traffic sources so I stopped including links out, which makes it self fulfilling. I have never seen a Steemit post in a google search.
At least even without monetization, YouTube still ranks and allows you to be discovered.
That said, both should be used to attract an audience to your home base, and from that home base build a list.
Never rely on a platform you own for
- Traffic
- Monetization
- Engagement
- Loyalty
It should never be about the platform, to make any money from producing content, you first have to get an audience. As long as you have loyal following it doesn't really matter what the platform will do, you can always still make money.
The best question to ask yourself - if I moved all my content to my private server, would I still make money? If the answer is NO then you are very vulnerable to the whims of whoever is hosting your content.
I think you mean a platform "that you don't own."
Of course, the problem is that most of us can't afford a platform to do things like serving video and advertising monetization, because those things really only get cheap enough to engage with as you managed to go up with a serious economy of scale.
Back in the bad old days, managing advertising in particular was an absolute nightmare, which is why Google AdSense made such inroads so quickly and so well. While there are other advertising point of access, they made it quick and easy – and continue to, sadly enough. It's a field in which it is inherently difficult for new actors to enter.
YouTube seems to be going out of their way to deliberately kneecap themselves when it comes to new entrepreneurs. After all, most people have absolutely no chance in Hell of reaching 4000 hours of watch time in the last year with a thousand subscribers unless they go all in on making content as what they do during the day. The watch time requirement in particular is going to be brutal.
I wonder how much this is going to blow back on them, however – considering that they got a portion of every advertising dollar that flowed to the smaller channels, they've cut off a vast aggregate supply of secondary market advertising dollars.
Of course, lots of this could be growing out of the ridiculous pushback from advertising companies who don't want to be associated with any kind of content that takes a controversial position on anything, ever – making sure that they are only attached to the most benign of pablum which has the strange side effect of not exciting people enough to care about the advertisements, either.
I wonder how many of those advertisers would be interested in a reverse advertising market, in which they contend individually and compete against one another to come to content producers, and content producers decide whether the advertiser is good enough to be allowed to advertise on their content. Surely in such a situation at least a few advertisers would be interested in going as broad as possible.
It appears that Alphabet won't be the ones to find out if that's the case, however.
If @DTube can ever get their act together on a proper set of documentation, discussion of how to better serve the content, the ability to do some of that reprocessing for multiple resolutions at lower cost, they could be a real competitor. As it stands, while the interface is getting better (though it has a long way to go), it's not ready for prime time – or even time prior to the watershed.
But this would be a good motivation for them to get involved in a big way.
Yeah own or I think more accurately, control. I pay for Vimeo so in a way they have to abide by some kind of terms of service, but they can still cancel my account. Only really a self-hosted website and email list is safe, but even then ... :)
I like Dtube but has a long way to go and needs to be able to monetize public views. People are not going to sign up for accounts just to upvote, and without an account you can't reward content creators ...
I was with Vimeo for a while – quite a while, actually – but they started being really weird about the kind of content that they would except for the platform, changing the rules subtly under my feet until I really didn't feel like there was anything I could put on the platform under my idiom, which made paying for it more than a little silly. I like the platform, but it's not a platform designed for the kind of work I want to do.
I'm not sure there is a reasonable mechanic for or monetizing public views on DTube – but I'm not sure there is a reasonable mechanic for monetizing public views. At all. YouTube's boom time ended up being relatively short because between the costs of infrastructure overhead for serving and holding that much content combined with the cost of actually paying individuals on a per view basis for advertising… It was never actually a profitable venture. It was a loss leader for advertising.
In that sense, I would almost prefer if DTube got more aggressive about stating, upfront, that while this platform is really good for watching content from people that you like, you really need to become a member of the platform/steem blockchain in order to be able to properly reward your favorite creators. ("And at no cost to you!")
If we could get that, along with a much longer window for curator rewards, I believe that DTube could be a strong driver of people joining the platform. In the short term, DTube might actually have to take a loss and suck up the cost of buying new accounts for people who sign up through it directly rather than waiting for Steemit Inc. to process new sign-ups. Given their recent large delegation from Steemit Inc., this might be something that we could see in the short term.
But that's what needs to happen. The money to do these things doesn't just appear because we want it, as nice as that would be. I like DTube's use of IPFS and I really wish that there was a way that I could inject my own video content a little more aggressively into the platform, but that would take some real interest in building some user facing tools. I wouldn't even mind if I had to do my own bit rate/resolution encoding if I could toss it all to one directory, edit some sort of templated text file in that directory with all the descriptions and such, tap a few keys and have the whole thing pushed off into the blockchain.
I don't think I'm the only one. I think it's a good gateway operation.
(Also, DTube needs to get a relationship going with @DLive so that when a stream completes, the streamers given the option of immediately archiving it onto DTube without any other engagement necessary by the user. That is a thing that absolutely needs to happen, because it's a big deal. Also it would drive traffic to both of them.)
Bad news for new youtubers, Thanks for sharing this post. @makerhacks
I'm left wondering "What's next?"
It almost seems like YouTube is actively working to erode its creator base, so it makes me wonder what their future direction is.
Like, there must be a strategy behind this, somewhere. It can't all be knee-jerk reactions.
I think google is now about to lower all income generated through its all sources of monetiezation .