Keep moving the goalposts so YT can just keep more of the ad money for themselves and the line moving up. More enshittification, nothing new is created but the service gets worse in the name of profitability.
this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2026
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What is the best social media platform for niche content creators? I'm thinking of starting a small project for one of my hobbies but I'd hope to make at least enough to pay for my setup (mic, camera, etc.). Is that unrealistic?
Don't worry, guys. After creators eat THIS shit sandwich it'll stop getting worse and everything will be great.
I used to display Google ad links on my site, they accumulated value - slowly, but Google would only cut a check when you reach $100 worth of ads shown. My earnings approached $100 like an asymptote, halfway there in the first 6 months, 3/4 in the first year, 7/8 in the second year, 15/16 in the third... never did quite reach $100, and so my payout for all my effort and showing of their ads remains to this day $0.
I watch less YouTube than ever thanks to the sheerly ridiculous amount if ads.
Remember everybody. Get a vpn with a node in albania. Youtube cannot force a signin or display ads to people in albania.
Its really that simple.
Ads??
Yeah no kidding. Morphe is a blessing. Same with ublock.
Do you know where the option is in morphe to get the feed on the front page back? For some reason mine is blank suddenly and I don't know how to fix it
Consistently one of the worst paying social media services and not exactly in a generous market.
Today I went on shorts and the first video was tucker carlson dropping antisemtic slurs while he cried about ben shapiro. I'm a lib. I don't watch that garbage. straight up shithole company.
You're going to need to specify the alleged slurs. Too many people chalk shit like "Israel shouldn't get to murder children" as anti-semitism.
Tucker Carlson is a genuine old school European Nazi type anti-Semite.
Big corp squeezing more money from people “because share holders want progress”. BS
Work for free before getting paid! There will still be ads on your videos, but they ain't sharing the attention money.
Nice. Would be good to see youtube go away or go back to people making things for the love it.
Sadly, needing to regulate for CSA, etc. causes it all to get centralized. Also, it’d be great if everyone could self-host their content and then post the searchable in a fediverse indexing host or something?
good. hopefully this will improve the quality for the first time in 14 years or so. Monetization is essentially synonymous with enshittification. Less monetization -> less enshittification. Less need to put stupid red arrows and bug eyes on your thumbnails. etc. I don't even care if youtube is just straight taking all the difference. Anything to decrease the number of people who are in it for the money is good.
I remember what people made videos for fun. Good times.
We still do.
I agree with you on quality, but I’d point out that YT is also requiring a lot of people to work for free.
Imagine if a mechanic’s boss told her they wouldn’t pay her until she changed the oil in 800 cars for free.
YT is also requiring a lot of people to work for free.
It's really not. No more than a casino is requiring you to roll dice and flip cards.
People can just... not host their shit on the site. Or not be in the influencer/content creator business entirely.
People are being baited into doing this work. People are being scammed and lied to about their prospects. But nobody is actually making you do this shit, much less do it for free.
Imagine if a mechanic’s boss told her they wouldn’t pay her until she changed the oil in 800 cars for free.
She'd be crazy not to pick up and work somewhere else. Or hang her own shingle.
But that's the hitch with YouTube. It's not just not-paying-you. It's also hosting your media for free. What you're really trading on isn't revenue from YouTube, it's free hosting services. And then you need to monetize the content yourself, if you want to generate an income.
Case in point - Ms Rachel isn't getting rich off her (wildly popular) YouTube channel nearly so much as her toy line and her celebrity appearance fees. Similarly, guys like Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones do commercial line reads right in the middle of their shows, fully independent of what YouTube injects. Adam Friedland and Justin Rozniak do paywalled episodes through Patreon. Mr. Beast sells shitty snack food.
Everyone who has made a living on YouTube has ultimately collected the bulk of that money from outside YouTube.
It's honestly insane and kinda selfish and self-defeating to say that the response to a bad situation is to just take your business elsewhere.
Like...we can't just write off everyone else's misery and suffering because you personally found a way to avoid it.
That is literally 99% of the world's problems and thank you for providing a brilliant example at the lowest moral stakes possible.
Easy to say if you're not a creator.
I write, edit, record, and publish everything I create, all by myself.
Devaluing smaller creators is going to mean more AI slop, because more people will be motivated to take shortcuts.
And those who don't will probably quit. Creating authentic content and growing a channel takes time, and a lot more of it now.
I write, edit, record, and publish everything I create, all by myself.
Patreon, Nebula, even Audible will give you a better cut of the proceeds.
Devaluing smaller creators is going to mean more AI slop
Video slop is even less commercially viable than the audio, pictures, and literature.
Sora got yanked off the market inside a few months due to how badly it burned tokens for video nobody wanted to look at.
At a fraction of the audience
Yes, that was my whole point. I want you to quit if you are trying to make money on youtube.
YouTube became evil the moment we all dislike-bombed their year in review video and they never made another one.
YouTube became evil when google ditched their slogan "don't be evil!".
So, it was evil from the start. It just needed to lure enough uncritical consumers in before enshittification started. Piece by piece.
YouTube became evil the moment Google got involved.
Maybe but YouTube wouldn't have existed if it wasn't for the years Google paid for it with no monetization in sight.
It was doing just fine until Google bought it.
YouTube says the changes are being introduced to “keep pace with the growth of YouTube, which now sees over 200 billion daily Shorts views and over a billion hours of watch time on TV” every day.
This reminds me of some past employment positions I had with extremely lucrative companies that, upon several employees having pushed and developed their skills to be able to reach production quotas (despite increasing safety hazards), simply raised production standards to avoid paying what was promised (certainly not meeting the threshold of what workers are worth).
In short, if you are a content creator on YouTube, do it for the love of your hobby and make money with your day job.
In short, if you are a content creator on YouTube, do it for the love of your hobby and make money with your day job.
The problem with this is that if you want to get any exposure you have to keep the algorithm happy and the algorithm wants consistent release schedules which means you'll always have that hanging over your shoulder and fucking up once means nobody will ever see your video in the sea of millions of other videos. It's an absolute meat grinder which is why so many channels fade out and why people try to do it full time.
Sure you can upload as a hobby but if people aren't watching it, why go through all the trouble?
All creators start out with zero viewers. That’s just something you have to do until you get traction
The same goes for bands and whatever else
If you can’t deal with that then don’t try
I think it's called vlogging. Like journaling, it can help yo look back at what worked for you and didn't, perhaps one day what didn't work will, when you catch something you missed, before. And there are legitimate other platforms, like PeerTube, but you're not guaranteed views there either, so again, for the love of your hobby.
I subscribed to YouTube Red back in the day, when that’s what it was called.
Then circa early 2018 they changed the rules for monetisation from the previous 10k lifetime views to 1k subs & 4k watch hours over 12 months. That was when I unsubscribed from Red and installed an ad blocker. I had always been anti ad-blocker because my view was that people creating content deserve to get paid for it. That’s still my view in principle, but the increasing enshittification of the web thanks in no small part to shit like this from Google has meant I weigh the pros & cons differently. YouTube showed me very directly that they don’t care about supporting their creators. So I decided I didn’t want to support them anymore. It’s not like this was the first problem…the whole “where’s the fair use” thing came before that, and many other events besides. But cutting off small creators like that, without even grandfathering in existing creators who had been monetised with that threshold, was the last straw for me.
It was also Google’s fault that I moved from Ad Block Plus, which I chose specifically because of its “acceptable ads” policy (basically: let through ads that aren’t obnoxious), to uBlock Origin, which lacked such a policy, after YouTube tried blocking ad blockers from YouTube, and UBO was quicker to adapt.
That’s twice now that Google’s own actions have directly led to me supporting them less than I used to. This won’t be the third time, but only because I have no more cuts to give.
maybe youtube wants us to switch to torrents.
piracy? yes.
but they(youtube) honestly cant even afford to serve the content and remain profitable.
so....
What do people on you tube have to do with Torrents? Much less paying those people?
peertube
So you are saying the relationship is: we can create torrents to have our peer to peer videos without youtube. Similar to how peertube handles it.
That makes more sense.
And they will never stop extracting more value. I just want to prop nebula here, it's great for creators and there's a lot of them already on there.
The only thing 'missing' is the commenting system, but to me that's an upgrade.
And if you want comedy, Dropout (formerly College Humor) is a great service that openly encourages you sharing your account with your friends.
The only streaming platform I sub to is Dropout and I happily do it. I believe I stumbled upon Breaking News first, watched first season or so on the high seas. I was in tears from laughing and I've been subbed ever since. Great value for the money, imo.
Nebula is awesome. I took a gamble with them and bought lifetime during their second round two years ago and never regretted it. It has only been getting better, here’s to hope that they keep direction.
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Meanwhile, you set yourself up on PeerTube and add a Monero address to your tipping thing and people can tip you as soon as they want to, whether you have one view and less than a watch hour or billions of views and tons of watch hours.
Thank you for this suggestion.
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