# YouTube no longer allows videos without monetization



## rgames (Dec 2, 2020)

For those who missed it as I did - a couple weeks ago YouTube announced a change to their terms of service that now includes a "right to monetize" for YouTube. Basically that means that you can no longer choose whether or not to monetize your videos. YouTube will reserve the right to decide.

So if you are eligible for the partner program but chose not to join (as with my channel) then you might as well join now because YouTube now claims the right to monetize your videos. It appears you can still choose not to claim your cut but what sense does that make?

The bigger kicker is for people who aren't eligible for the partner program - YouTube will be claiming the right to monetize their videos while not paying them for the content they create.

There's certainly nothing wrong with that - YouTube does provide a service and has every right to get paid for it. But the new policy certainly warrants some consideration on the part of content creators. 



Updates to YouTube’s Terms of Service (November ‘20) - YouTube Community








Terms of Service







www.youtube.com













YouTube Will Now Show Ads On All Videos Even If Creators Don’t Want Them


"This ... does not entitle you to any payments," Google says.




www.forbes.com


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## MGdepp (Dec 2, 2020)

rgames said:


> There's certainly nothing wrong with that - YouTube does provide a service and has every right to get paid for it. But the new policy certainly warrants some consideration on the part of content creators.



I would somewhat disagree with that ... YouTube provides a platform, yet, if you want to watch Youtube without adds, it costs you a monthly fee higher than Amazon Prime or Disney+, even slightly higher than Netflix. Both of those of course spent quite a lot of money on producing content and paying for licenses. YouTube on the other hands barely pays some bitterly fought for small royalties for music and offers some movies on pay per view, while the lion share is produced by individuals that only earn a meaningful amount by getting millions of dollars.

Certainly, Netflix and Amazon Prime are not in it for charity and make quite a lot of revenue by offering their service. That raises the question where all of that money goes ... they charge more just for offering the platform.

I am certainly not against Youtube and find it a good thing that anyone can offer videos on a platform like that. But the monopoly of Google is a bit frightening, if you ask me.


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## Polkasound (Dec 2, 2020)

So YouTube is now going to force ads into videos that might only get ten or twenty views? Gosh, I didn't know Google was _that_ financially strapped. ::😏::

Mark my words, the day is coming when YouTube videos will no longer be viewable by the general public. A Google account will be required. Spotify recently did something similar where you can no longer preview a 30-second song clip on their website without signing up for an account.


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## Varishnipu (Dec 2, 2020)

Polkasound said:


> So YouTube is now going to force ads into videos that might only get ten or twenty views? Gosh, I didn't know Google was _that_ financially strapped. ::😏::
> 
> Mark my words, the day is coming when YouTube videos will no longer be viewable by the general public. A Google account will be required. Spotify recently did something similar where you can no longer preview a 30-second song clip on their website without signing up for an account.


Wow that is a great idea. Everyone should have the google acct to view the videos for free.


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## Reid Rosefelt (Dec 2, 2020)

I believe that if you monetize, you have the right to decide how many ads, which kinds of ads, and where they go. You can put in the ads you can click through or force people to watch. You could put one at the beginning and then leave the rest to play without interruption. I think that's true, or at least was true at one point.

So now I know that if I tell a joke, it's possible they can put an ad in the middle of a sentence and spoil it. Or put all kinds of ads in so that my video is constantly being interrupted.

And we know that if I ever get money for my videos it will be much less than what YouTube makes from the ads.

It's very, very, very unlikely I will get to a thousand subscribers before next year when I do the Black Friday post again. It's like pulling teeth to get people to subscribe, but while I"m doing that thread people take pity on me. 

So probably a whole year of crappy videos. Depressing. 

That said, I agree that they provide a service and deserve to make money from it.


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## reborn579 (Dec 2, 2020)

MGdepp said:


> YouTube on the other hands barely pays some bitterly fought for small royalties for music and offers some movies on pay per view, while the lion share is produced by individuals that only earn a meaningful amount by getting millions of dollars.


i agree. it seems that lately youtube has been fixated to push ads down your throat. i always use an adblocker and until this year i wouldn't get any ads at all. but even with adblock plus they still circumvent it. who would have thought that the biggest IT company in the world needs money so bad. 

it's things like these and others that will eventually move people away from youtube and facebook / twitter to other platforms. although, at the same time it seems that right now all of these guys are way to big to end up like myspace. which is bad, i think. anytime a corporation is too big too fail, it's bad news for the rest of us.

it's really bs that they would force ads on your channel, even if you didn't opt for them. BS


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## Polkasound (Dec 2, 2020)

Varishnipu said:


> Wow that is a great idea. Everyone should have the google acct to view the videos for free.



Some people can't agree to Google's privacy policy, though. I deleted my Google account on February 29, 2012, right before they started combining user data collected across all Google services.




TigerTheFrog said:


> So now I know that if I tell a joke, it's possible they can put an ad in the middle of a sentence and spoil it. Or put all kinds of ads in so that my video is constantly being interrupted.



For a short time earlier this year when I was building a new PC and hadn't yet gotten my browsers configured, I was seeing YouTube the way most others see it. I was shocked at all the advertising I was hit with. I couldn't believe how much YouTube has changed over the years.




reborn579 said:


> ...until this year i wouldn't get any ads at all. but even with adblock plus they still circumvent it.



I use ad blocking filters as well, and I'm still not seeing ads, but that could be because I also block all YouTube and Google cookies. Another trick that sometimes works is to use an old, unsupported browser. About a year ago, YouTube kept blasting me with "We will soon stop supporting this browser. Please update your browser." I never did, and that's helping keep the ads at bay.


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## Varishnipu (Dec 2, 2020)

Youtube is very good site....


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## d.healey (Dec 2, 2020)

If you'd like to see videos (including mine) without ads, and with the ability to support video creators directly, you might be interested in https://odysee.com/ and https://www.bitchute.com/


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## Rory (Dec 2, 2020)

Google/YouTube is basically exercising the right to earn ad revenue from any of the content on its platform, while telling content providers who have at least 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 hours of views per year that it will give them a share of the revenue.

Advertisers will still decide what kinds of content, and what channels, they want to spend money on. I checked ten videos on @rgames's channel, which has 4,400 subscribers, and an ad appeared with one of them.


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## Andrew Aversa (Dec 2, 2020)

d.healey said:


> If you'd like to see videos (including mine) without ads, and with the ability to support video creators directly, you might be interested in https://odysee.com/ and https://www.bitchute.com/



Yikes. When your front page content is Covid deniers and election truthers, you've got a problem.


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## d.healey (Dec 2, 2020)

Andrew Aversa said:


> Yikes. When your front page content is Covid deniers and election truthers, you've got a problem.


Yeah bitchute is well known for its off putting front page. They don't curate the content at all so all this crap shows up and scares people away.


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## pondinthestream (Dec 2, 2020)

I no longer use youtube much on mobile but still do for desktop where my adblocker seems to work better. I post the occasional video to share when I do things with friends like perform TaiChi at a concert. But nothing musical at all anymore. I am gradually getting rid of a lot of net choices that seemed more or less automatic eg Spotify/ Soundcloud. Video I would rather use Vimeo, sound I use Bandcamp. With what I do I make zero money out of the net - everything is through personal contacts so it does not matter to me that much. For people who are making money off the net or who have good reason to believe they will get value for money off the net then go for it. Otherwise I have found it is better not bothering.


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## NekujaK (Dec 2, 2020)

My wife and I frequently browse thru our favorite YouTube channels thru an Apple TV streaming box (not to be confused with Apple's actual TV content channel). There's no provision to block ads with the device, so we're subjected to it all. The sad part is, a year ago, maybe 1 out of every 10 videos we watched would start with an ad. Now nearly EVERY video has an opening ad and the experience is becoming painfully reminiscent of watching broadcast TV 

All of these developments are not surprising. YouTube has been an incredible free ride for many many years, and has become a fertile platform for generating exposure, and in some cases, earning significant revenue, for contributors. However, my concerns are less about YouTube imposing ads or charging for their service (both of which rub me the wrong way, BTW), and more about YouTube implementing more stringent regulations that would create increased restrictions for contributors.

The lack of quality control is what makes YouTube such a great platform for the masses. Anything can be uploaded - good or bad. A push towards more monetization, will naturally lead to a push for more high-quality content, and taken to the extreme, this could eventually mean that any submission must first pass through a YouTube "quality control filter" to be approved.

Hopefully it never comes to that.

---------------------------

Edit: Some of the preceding posts came in while I was typing, so I just want to clarify that the potential restrictions I'm referring to are not related to inflammatory content like what appears on bitchute, etc. But more about the percieved "quality" and production values of the content; i.e. an iphone video your dog running in the park versus a smartly edited tutorial presentation.


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## d.healey (Dec 2, 2020)

Rory said:


> Don't think so.
> 
> Wikipedia: "*BitChute* is a video hosting service known for accommodating far-right individuals and conspiracy theorists, and for hosting hateful material. The platform was created in 2017 to allow video uploaders to avoid content rules enforcement on YouTube, and some creators who have been banned from YouTube or had their channels barred from receiving advertising revenue ("demonetized") have migrated to BitChute."
> 
> Apparently Odysee is more of the same.


These two sites, unlike YouTube, do not host content, they provide a portal to access it but the content itself is distributed in a peer to peer fashion. They use different protocols, Odysee uses the LBRY protocol (the site used to be lbry.tv), bitchute uses something similar to bittorrent I believe.

I don't know about Odysee but bitchute has a policy of not curating any of the links to the content that they give access to. This is good because it means there is no censorship, however it is bad if you are trying to avoid accidently being exposed to viewpoints you disagree with. I don't care for the far right stuff, so I just click on through and watch Big Clive dismantling electronic gizmos


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## pondinthestream (Dec 2, 2020)

NekujaK said:


> YouTube has been an incredible free ride for many many years, and has become a fertile platform for generating exposure, and in some cases, earning significant revenue, for contributors.




For me "exposure" has been one of the big lies of social media and capitalism in general over the last few decades eg get an unpaid internship, get a lot of views / plays and so on. But other than for a tiny group of people such exposure leads as often as not to disappointment. There is a lot of cherry picking of successful examples, a lot of boosterism, that I would think has had a negative effect in terms of public psychological health. A lot of lives wasted trying to get noticed in the virtual world rather than build friendships in the actual world.


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## el-bo (Dec 2, 2020)

I'm guessing that's why every video I watch now seems littered with them. 

I do follow quite a few Youtubers, and would be more than happy to watch all the ads that ended up appearing on their channels, if they were matched properly to the content creator's general output. I get that they aren't always going to be able to be spot on, but being expected to sit through McDonald's adverts before watching a video about veganism is pretty elfin' ludicrous!


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## pondinthestream (Dec 2, 2020)

el-bo said:


> I'm guessing that's why every video I watch now seems littered with them.
> 
> I do follow quite a few Youtubers, and would be more than happy to watch all the ads that ended up appearing on their channels, if they were matched properly to the content creator's general output. I get that they aren't always going to be able to be spot on, but being expected to sit through McDonald's adverts before watching a video about veganism is pretty elfin' ludicrous!


 ad AI is dumb as - my daughter is a teacher - has a Masters degree - so she constantly gets ads asking if she'd like to get a teaching degree or a masters degree ie you bought one Masters degree, maybe you'd like to buy another.  LOL


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## peladio (Dec 2, 2020)

Polkasound said:


> Spotify recently did something similar where you can no longer preview a 30-second song clip on their website without signing up for an account.



Spotify is shit all around..


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## el-bo (Dec 2, 2020)

pondinthestream said:


> ad AI is dumb as - my daughter is a teacher - has a Masters degree - so she constantly gets ads asking if she'd like to get a teaching degree or a masters degree ie you bought one Masters degree, maybe you'd like to buy another.  LOL



It's so dumb! If they actually targeted the ads properly, they might actually generate the clicks they're supposed to. As it is, I'm looking for the most extreme forms of ad-blocking, and considering trying to work a way of periodically supporting various creators via their Patreon accounts.

Speaking of algorithms: See how auto-correct changed my intended "effin" to "elfin". Is this what the world has come to?


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## d.healey (Dec 2, 2020)

el-bo said:


> It's so dumb! If they actually targeted the ads properly,


If I see an ad that is accurately targeted at me it means I'm not doing enough to protect my privacy.



> As it is, I'm looking for the most extreme forms of ad-blocking,


Use Ad-Guard browser extension, works great (and you can allow ads through for sites like VI-Control  )


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## pondinthestream (Dec 2, 2020)

el-bo said:


> Speaking of algorithms: See how auto-correct changed my intended "effin" to "elfin". Is this what the world has come to?


Ha ha, did not pick that up but shows the complete lack of contextual understanding from the algorithm - auto-correct is the example I normally use to show the limits of AI - there is no bigger training corpus than natural language, the commercial research has been enormous, yet it stuffs up all the time.
(AI ie machine learning - is great for a lot of stuff tho - domains with well defined scope. Language not being that sort of domain)


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## MartinH. (Dec 2, 2020)

TigerTheFrog said:


> It's very, very, very unlikely I will get to a thousand subscribers before next year when I do the Black Friday post again. It's like pulling teeth to get people to subscribe, but while I"m doing that thread people take pity on me.



Imho it's worth researching whether that's even a good strategy. I wouldn't be surprised if people that subscribe because they know you from here, but then don't watch your content for some reason, actually drag you down in the algorithmic ratings. At least if I was designing such an algorithm, I'd be using the viewer retention among subscribers as a metric for something. 

If pure subcount was the lottery ticket, everyone would just buy fake subs from some shady website that sells these things.


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## nolotrippen (Dec 2, 2020)

For general browsing and ad avoidance: https://try.bravesoftware.com/quk420/


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## el-bo (Dec 2, 2020)

d.healey said:


> If I see an ad that is accurately targeted at me it means I'm not doing enough to protect my privacy.



I did go down that privacy rabbit-hole for a while. However, ultimately, I had to let it go for the good of my mental health. Besides, I wasn't really referring to the ads tracking me; rather, that they are channel-specific. If it's a gaming channel, then the adverts should be gaming-related. And I'll have no problem sitting through adverts for new games. 




d.healey said:


> Use Ad-Guard browser extension, works great (and you can allow ads through for sites like VI-Control



For some reason, despite being shown as compatible with my computer, it refuses to download. Will try it in a other browser. The bigger problem, is that I watch much of my YT content on an iPad3, and there's nothing I can do to block on that :(


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## d.healey (Dec 2, 2020)

el-bo said:


> The bigger problem, is that I watch much of my YT content on an iPad3, and there's nothing I can do to block on that :(


Ad-guard runs on iOS, and if it's like it is on Android (last time I tried it a few years ago) it can block ads within some apps.


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## MartinH. (Dec 2, 2020)

el-bo said:


> It's so dumb! If they actually targeted the ads properly, they might actually generate the clicks they're supposed to. As it is, I'm looking for the most extreme forms of ad-blocking, and considering trying to work a way of periodically supporting various creators via their Patreon accounts.
> 
> Speaking of algorithms: See how auto-correct changed my intended "effin" to "elfin". Is this what the world has come to?



The properly targetted ads rarely make sense to me either. Every once in a while when my adblock lets a youtube ad through because e.g. I'm watching an embedded video on a whitelisted site, I get things like ads for stuff from Native Instruments and I think "Guys, you're wasting your time, I'm subbed to their newsletter. You're not telling me anything new."


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## jcrosby (Dec 2, 2020)

EDIT: I quoted the wrong post by accident.


It is't going to be a case of people leaving the platform. FB has repeatedly given people plenty of reasons to abandon it but people just keep coming back. It isn't that google's somehow grasping for revenue, if anything COVID's increased YT revenue by a substantial margin. They're doing this to increase revenue, and frankly because they _can._ It's just one more example of a tech company overreaching whenever they can get away with it because they've cornered the market of an online platform.


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## MGdepp (Dec 2, 2020)

Well, I guess this is how you make your stock value rise to almost $2000 by 2020 ...








Alphabet Inc. (GOOG) Stock Price, News, Quote & History - Yahoo Finance


Find the latest Alphabet Inc. (GOOG) stock quote, history, news and other vital information to help you with your stock trading and investing.




finance.yahoo.com




The only way to stop this is by crushing those monopolies. The US (as the leading capitalist and democratic force in the world) used to understand that and used to crush a lot of monopolies. Somehow, capitalism seems to have switched to an oligarchy - I hope that will be recognized some day, soon!

As a EU citizen I am very much for the EU providing the most essential digital platforms and services by tax money at some day. That would be communication, social media and a video platform (maybe some more). It cannot be tolerated that European countries are subjected to US espionage, even setting those dangerous corporations aside. IMO that would be a much better idea than rising military spendings ...


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## Mike Greene (Dec 2, 2020)

I moved a few posts about the right-wing politics of bitchute to this Political Section thread. If you want to continue that part of the discussion, please do so there, not here.

The setup posts are still here as well (they appear in both threads), since they are informative to this discussion.


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## el-bo (Dec 2, 2020)

d.healey said:


> Ad-guard runs on iOS, and if it's like it is on Android (last time I tried it a few years ago) it can block ads within some apps.



Thanks!

Unfortunately, my iPad is locked at iOS9. I would had to have downloaded them back when they were current with iOs9, to still be able to download that older version. Of course, there'd be no point given that algorithms would've changed so much, since then


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## el-bo (Dec 2, 2020)

nolotrippen said:


> For general browsing and ad avoidance: https://try.bravesoftware.com/quk420/



Was using it for a couple of years, but stopped due to some buggy behaviour. With all the BF distraction, I didn't think to check if this upscaling of ads managed to break 'Brave'. Just checked now...it hasn't. Calm has been restored. Thanks


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## el-bo (Dec 2, 2020)

MartinH. said:


> The properly targetted ads rarely make sense to me either. Every once in a while when my adblock lets a youtube ad through because e.g. I'm watching an embedded video on a whitelisted site, I get things like ads for stuff from Native Instruments and I think "Guys, you're wasting your time, I'm subbed to their newsletter. You're not telling me anything new."



Haha! Yeah, I get it! But in this case it would close enough for me to sit through it, for the sake of the creators. But if it's way off track, I won't engage at all.


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## MauroPantin (Dec 2, 2020)

Set up a Patreon and start every video with George Carlin's 7 dirty words, YT detects the curse words and completely demonetizes the video. Or just say the word "Stalin", randomly at some point for the same outcome. No ads, guaranteed, problem solved.


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