Comment on Me watching someone on Lemmy getting cooked for having the same opinion as me:
ClamDrinker@lemmy.world 1 day agoNobody denies Youtube provides value. It’s the most used video platform in the world. Hence why they called them semi-parastic.
But the tooling gets neglected. The legal protection at times screws over the very creators you say you stand by. Some premium features are literal scams (eg. downloading videos). Some ads they allow on their platform promote literal scams. They censor comments, videos, and dislikes, often in deceitful ways like pretending nothing is being blocked to the poster. I could go on.
For a multi-billion dollar company, they provide ample enough reasons to cut them out of the equation as a form of economic protest, and their disloyalty to their creators in many of their decisions is a forever stain on their trust relationship with the public and creators. Which is why Youtube creators routinely try to detach themselves, like streaming on other sites, and why many of them ask you donate directly instead, so that if Youtube should screw them over (which they have done many times), they can still afford to pay rent.
Plus donating to 50+ creators would be more money in payment fees alone than what I pay for YouTube. That’s just wrong. Flat fees aren’t really a thing anymore. Different donation systems have different fees and most charge a percentage of 5% to 12% compared to the 45% of Youtube.
Look, nobody is saying that it’s bad to have Youtube Premium. I used to have it for years, until I found out they were scamming me on a feature I found important. If none of those things are a concern to you, then go ahead. Premium is a convenient option for sure, but it’s not the greatest option either.
Tja@programming.dev 1 day ago
Yes, Youtube makes mistakes, has bugs and the moderation is not perfect. But it gets you 95% there, which would take years and literal millions to do yourself. The only premium feature I care about is the ads. For downloading things long term I use yt-dlp.
Of course creators want to diversify, even if YouTube was perfect they don’t want to be dependent on one revenue stream.
About payments: Square charges 30c fixed fee per payment (+%). PayPal charges 49c. Stripe 30c. Ayden 37c. Klarna 30c. Please enlighten me how flat fees are not a thing.
ClamDrinker@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I mean, if you use yt-dlp, you kinda get why the premium ‘feature’ is a bit of a scam, right? Since yt-dlp actually gives you the video file, not a locked down version you can only play on the app or video (and only when you connect to the internet). So if youtube shut yt-dlp down, would you be happy paying for that ‘feature’ now that you can’t bypass it? Because yt-dlp is also just as against Youtube’s ToS as adblocking is, since you also avoid watching ads and Youtube’s DRM on the video. And they try plenty to shut yt-dlp down.
Yes, but there is a distinct difference between diversifying and cutting off an unreliable partner. One is built on entrepreneurship, the other on broken trust. And for smaller creators, those often are much more tied to Youtube and have no real reason to diversify yet at their growth. Yet they still pretty much have to do it, since they cannot rely on Youtube to help them if things go south. Something that would not happen if Youtube was a ‘good’ host.
These are payment processors, not the donation platforms people use (which would be the stand in for Youtube’s 45% cut), like Ko-fi. If that’s what you meant, fair enough, yes for those flat fees still exist without any exception afaik, and indeed if you use the wrong one the fees might be too much for a monthly payment. But that’s hardly the case everywhere. Where I live, the payment processor takes much, much less than Stripe and Paypal, max a cent or two.
But even with that cut, that doesn’t change a lot though, it’s just a matter of making payments efficiently. Like paying yearly or making a large single donation. Premium might be less payment to processors overall, but 45% is such a large cut that it’s hard to overcome that. And youtube being an unreliable partner, there is also an invisible cut on every payment that makes you less able to detach from them.
With yearly donations, the math still doesn’t really cut it:
spoiler
Lets say premium costs 14 dollars, and you watch 50 creators and every transaction costs 30c flat cut + 3%. >168 dollar a year paid yearly -> 162.66 dollar sent to Youtube for cut -> 89.46 dollar to creators after 45% cut >50 creators -> 1.79 dollar per creator per year vs >168 dollar a year -> 3.36 dollar per creator per year >50 payments of 3.36 dollars with 30c flat cut + 3% -> 2.96 dollar sent to donation platform for cut -> 5% donation platform cut -> 2.81 dollar per creator per year
But more realistically, you might send 30 dollars to their top 5 creators for a year, which is 150 dollars a year, and at those amounts the % cut overtakes the flat cut by a long shot.
Tja@programming.dev 1 day ago
I’m not saying the YouTube tos are sacred, I am just saying that YouTube premium is good value for money and the right solution for a platform that is sustainable and profitable for creators (and Google). If they don’t have a way of me saving a video that I want to archive myself, I will find another way of downloading it. If yt-dlp gets blocked I’ll use OBS. But it’s not practical for everyday use, and not on the potpourri of devices we use in the family.
I’ll repeat, even if YouTube was perfect (which is impossible, no platform is) it would make sense to diversify. Streaming, merch, donations, whatever. You never know what can happen tomorrow. Since YouTube is created an operated by humans, they fuck up, so much more reason. Hard not to fuck up from time to time given their scale and complexity. Could they do a better job? Certainly, but as a i said, they are 95% there.
And I don’t see a reason why a creator that I watch 20 minutes a month shouldn’t get their fair share of the payment, why would I limit myself to the top 5? Or one that I watch 10 minutes once in my life, but solves a problem or a question that I had a that moment.
All for the price of half a trip to the movies, maybe one third. It’s a no brainer to me.
ClamDrinker@lemmy.world 1 day ago
For a video serving platform in a vacuum, maybe it would be the best financing model. But Youtube doesn’t exist in a vacuum. And supporting them as it stands means rewarding them for their malicious practices, even if you yourself can work around them. Youtube isn’t going to magically become decent and friendly by getting more money. Rewarding them anyways is how you get companies that feel empowered to put their own profits before the common good and the good of the customers. It is enabling yourself and others to be squeezed hard should enough people pay for premium and they suddenly close down yt-dlp and free tier viewing in general. Youtube is a near monopoly already, and treating it as if it’s just some small company trying it’s best is extremely dangerous and objectionable. Again, not saying having premium is necessarily bad, but it very clearly is not a safe or recommendable deal that most people should take unless Youtube changes their tune drastically to show they can be trusted with more power than they already have.
You’re missing my point on the distribution of the donations. If 5 people watch the same 5 creators 20% of the time, then the outcome is the same if everyone pays a dollar to every creator, or if each person pays 5 dollar to one of the 5 creators. Online platforms operate at scale, not at the individual level, so having superfans that donate to you directly and are more likely to keep supporting you over longer periods is much better and financially secure than getting a few pennies from someone. It’s as you said, sometimes people provide way more value to you than your watch history would reveal, in which case a direct donation is superior to make sure they get what they deserve.