Was watching a video of penguinz0 on youtube recently and it made me wanna talk a bit about the evolution of web2 platforms and their dependency on advertisers. Now I know what some of you may be thinking: "But acid, you've been complaining about how and why we don't have any advertisers on our front-ends, doesn't this post you're about to write contradict what you've been wanting for Hive?" So let me also talk about why it's different here and why our dependency isn't as crucial, although for most of you I'm sure it's obvious; the way our rewards work and have been working for the past 6+ years.
So basically Youtube is now coming down on content creators with even stricter rules, aside from all that DMCA stuff where everyone had to be careful about what video clip or song they add into their content and for how long. All the "community policing" drama's that have occurred over the years since they sought help from volunteers to help with copyright striking certain content and channels often demonetizing innocent users, the copyright owners themselves or other fiasco's. Now apparently they're going to start demonetizing people who use "swear words" or if the content is "too violent" in nature.
According to penguinz0 it's worse than he imagined it to be, while Youtube has remained quite silent about this new change and hasn't really committed to giving too much details it seems that content creators are once again at the point where they'll just have to fear for their livelihood being taken away from them if they "misbehave" towards stricter and stricter rules being enforced upon them. Do as we say or stop existing, basically. Altough not quite, cause the channels won't be deleted or banned due to this rule, although I guess there's extreme cases where that might happen too, but it's mostly targeting their monetization. As Charlie mentions here, if you say "fuck" too much or other words considered not PG, you may find your videos demonetized. Apparently, since youtube has those closed captions which have been added towards all videos they could've added them on in their database, meaning also older videos, people may start finding their older videos that have been generating them revenue over the years being blocked from that stream due to having said too many profanities in said video according to youtube's liking.
Naturally, this isn't what Youtube likes or doesn't like, considering the amount of creepy stuff one can find there if they knew or bothered to look and Youtube not having bothered taking more detailed look at such to do anything about it this doesn't come off as Youtube trying to be a "cleaner" website to me. I'm not going to get into the creepy stuff most people I'm sure are aware of why some watch certain content and what the prominent gender demographic of such content is, but let's, for instance, use the example of those "savior" videos. You know, the ones titled "we saved this puppy we found stuck under x", at first glance it's heartwarming, "omg I'm so happy they happened to find this puppy, it would surely have died if left at x, these kids are heroes", but then you start looking at what else that channel is posting about, kids, most of the time the same ones, constantly and consistently saving helpless animals, often around the same area, from harm or certain death. Many of them already hurt or injured, hmm, these kids must really be looking hard for these cases, spending all of their time coordinating and tracking down these unlucky pets, or, you know, they're all being planted because Youtube allows ads to exist on these channels and the content creators are aware of that this content gets them views which equals money. Of course, nowadays they've become a bit more clever and have started to spread the videos out over more channels, but yeah, that's basically the kind of content I'm talking about where you'd think youtube would actually care to hammer down.
So why is youtube doing this? It's easy, advertisers are the ones becoming more and more strict and they're the ones in control so youtube has to bend over backwards to please them without caring what the content creators this is affecting think about it. I'm not sure if the world is just becoming more "soft" in general, in many cases this is a good evolution in my opinion, but there's other cases where this mob cancel culture mentality is leading to some absurd power effect where companies literally fear doing something they'd want to do just cause a bunch of random losers who spend all their day on twitter go on these twitter raids. We've seen this happen with NFT's for instance. Remember when discord teased it was going to add ETH wallet integration and NFT's profile pic verification? Yeah well where did that go? Oh right, the tweets got so much hate from kneejerky internet nobodies who most of the time didn't even understand what NFT's were and only saw them as "scams that are destroying the ozone layer" that it lead to Discord backing down and never mentioning them again. How fucking absurd of a world do we live in where we just listen to "the masses" no matter if we know if these masses are certified to know what they're talking about or not, if they have any proof about what they're saying or not, then again considering all the conspiracies revolving covid and the vaccine I really shouldn't be too surprised to see it branching over onto anything so that some random users can get their 5 minute of fame to try to monetize their merch.
Okay so I went a bit off-topic there, so let's get back to the comparison to Hive and why I still think we should accept and build some relationships with advertisers here and why compared to Youtube and other platforms we don't have to bend over backwards to please them at every corner.
Adrevenue is just a Bonus for us, it's that simple. I've talked about how front-ends could try and compete vs another to use their opt-in ad revenue for their users and Hive stake holders to entice them to use their front-end over others. Eventually most front-ends are going to be similar in nature and performance anyway, they may derivate in other ways but I don't think it's going to be just about "this platform is better". My points were that if the front-ends could easily track traffic, user activity they could easily determine which authors are bringing the most traffic to their posts, both new and old, which users are using the front-end the most, thus which of them are generating the most ad revenue to then distribute said ad revenue towards authors, users and maybe even include hivepower in that equation to give holding Hive Power more substance.
If you look at Reddit, they've got quite powerful advertisement compared to other platforms from what I've heard, although I'm sure all the algorithm's are top notch on most platforms due to data mining and cookies tracking everything and anything, Reddit does it well because similar to Hive they have genre's split up over communities so they can target said communities with ads they may be interested in based on what the ad is trying to sell you. I wouldn't personally place a Crypto project ad on the Hive Pets community when I'd more obviously have a better chance at receiving some traffic towards the project by placing the ad in the Leo finance community. So not only would the adrevenue generated on our front-ends be quite "rich", but the front-ends themselves wouldn't have to be as greedy as Youtube or Twitch to take 30-50% of it since many of them are being funded by the DHF so they could instead use that towards marketing themselves or rewarding their authors that are generating traffic which fuels the adrevenue and the users that are the ones viewing the ads on a daily basis through their activity.
Most importantly if some of these advertisers became too demanding about certain things, like say they'd go to the Photography community and be like "we would like to not see our ads on "weed content", now apart from having smart ways to avoid that, the community or front-end that showcases the community could just say "okay, well, then let's stop the ad contract here because the front-end and community leader does not want to ban/mute/demonetize Weed content". What do you think the advertiser is going to do then? What they're doing to youtube right now of course, they're going to demand they abide by their restrictions or pull out and Youtube can't afford to have them pull out cause their whole system relies on adrevenue. Our front-ends could just be like "yeah well we only take 5% ad revenue, rest goes to the community so we don't really care much either way" and the community can be all "yeah, well your part of the ads with these insane demands is only 5% of all advertisers we have in this community, and even if most of those would demand the same thing and leave, we'll still be okay because we got Hive and Layer 2 rewards.
Sure if the advertisers were to leave en masse it would put a small dip on the income everyone may have gotten used to but it wouldn't be as bad as demonetizing your content or channel completely, shadowbanning you from getting onto trending, being recommended to others, showing up in people's feeds. Flat out banning/blocking/deleting your channel. If enough advertisers leave I'm sure new ones would pop up, who wouldn't care about the content everyone else left for and would now be able to advertise their product cheaper cause there's a hole to fill and it's just a "bonus" for us anyway.
Most importantly they wouldn't be able to strongarm us over how we run things and content creators could be content knowing that while our main token is highly speculative and rollercoaster-y with the rest of the crypto market, and while ad revenue may be a bit less volatile but still more than web2 platforms, you can rest assured that your content, the way you want to do things, your account, your following, your whole ideas won't get pushed towards change based on the platform or advertisers, but instead maybe your own fans/viewers, hive stakeholders or other l2 stakeholders/your own token holders.
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Hive's blockchain reward system is super efficient at distributing HIVE governance tokens.
This is the sole job of content for HIVE.
But in saying that, it does so by encouraging high volume, low value content...
Even if we don't personally agree on what is valuable content, the fact of the matter is that Google - the place we're going to drive the most traffic - sees it as garbage.
Layer 2 is the key to content on Hive
This is why imo, it's up to our layer-2 tokens to start maximising the value of content on Hive by financially incentivising the type of content that drives revenue for the domain.
Monetising content via ads (or the like) and then using that revenue to buy/burn layer-2 tokens.
If people can make more money by not only writing high quality content, but also by supporting it in other ways such as generating links and the like, then they're going to change their behaviour.
Layer 2 is the key!
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Lol. I am feeling it like a question on democracy 😉
For sometime, youtube has become pretty annoying. Ads pop up every now and then destroying the focus you have had for the video. Because ads are the major source of youtube's income they have to work for making them happy.
I don't think that advertisement would be that simple on Hive. When there are stake holders, they have interest which are to be taken care of. If advertisements becomes another big source of income, the community would care for the revenue it generates. If certain type of content is not appreciated by advertisers, community may upgrade its rules accordingly. There might be effect on the monetization of the blogs too.
What web 3 has advantage over web 2 is that no one can ban you but your monetization can easily be removed, can't it?
I mean, kind of I guess, there's this saying where "not everyone deserves a voice, you've gotta earn a voice" which I guess goes to say a bit about votes too. Like it's not news that most people have no clue whatsoever not about the average things in life but about politics and stuff, so the way some countries run their voting where it's basically buying marketing, favors and twisting laws depending on whoever paid to help them get there it doesn't really mean that they're the best suited for the country or humanity/the world. The richest people in the world aren't the smartest ones.
Well yeah monetization can be removed but my point is that we're not in that DIRE need of it, we've survived and managed to be without it for this long now, if push comes to shove it's not like we'd bend over backwards to make sure we're satisfying all of the advertisers demands. Some front-ends may and those authors would naturally just move over to another front-end that isn't demonetizing them based off of a few advertisers asking not to monetize certain users content with their ads or something. It's a bit of thing where it'll depend on what exactly, I'm just saying that without ads Youtube would instantly die, they're already running at a loss daily and have to pay for everything from google's other revenue's just to make sure they continue hosting most of the activity on the internet. If ad revenue were to go away completely for some time they would not be able to offer what they do today. Whereas Hive is working on decentralized solutions where the users and regular people are t he ones in charge of maintaining and making sure these things exist and continue existing, not companies. @threespeak is for instance working on decentralization video storage solutions which is exactly the opposite of what youtube does so it would just make sense that if there's adrevenue to be had, it should go towards the users, stakeholders, service providers that make this community run and continue running on this blockchain that has been fine-tuned to scale properly and run cheaply.
Belonging to such a country, I attest to the notion above. Honestly speaking, I am not a blind fan of democracy. Democracy can be as bad as other form of governments are said to be, and other form of governments can be as good as democracy is claimed to be. It depends on how the ruler rules. Unfortunately, what I see in my country, so called democracy (with parliamentary form of government) is one the major hinderence in the way of prosperity.
I understand your point about different front-ends usage. It makes sense. On hive we have choice to leave what bothers us and join something else and still be active on the platform. It might be annoying to some extent but still the options are open.
So, Advertisers are the one stealing freedom from Content creators on YouTube....
I Noticed many of YouTubers whom I subscribed changed their content from being aggressive before. Know about demonizing is making them take move.
The idea of implementing ads on hive You give is fascinating. If it's possible to track traffic and kind of contents in different communities with different ads will be something Good that won't bother one or take freedom/creativity.
Even if it's hard to completely track who should get how much in the beginning, one can always start out by giving adrevenue rewards to hive power holders we know are active at least looking at their active governance votes. Then over time it could try and improve to give more to authors bringing in and retaining traffic, avoid abusers, etc.
Awesome idea. Hope it Gets implemented and eventually will become way better than web 2.0.
Yep
While what you speak of is a horrible thing—I hate this mob culture—I don't think that's what's at play with advertisers becoming more strict, at least not directly. Advertisers just want to appeal to the widest possible audience, and when you want to do that you need to be as "safe" as possible, hence no bad words, no violence. It has nothing to do with beliefs: it is all money driven. How do we make the most possible money, they think. By appealing to everyone and that means making things as bland as possible.
Great point, I kind of knew those two weren't related that way while I was writing it but guess I was just quite annoyed by those mobs we're seeing lately that are literally making people indecisive about what they wanted to do from the beginning just cause they go on these tirades against them.
Advertising still has to come to hive front ends in order to bring value in. You can't keep running these front ends and keep asking for money out of hive it's a constant sink with no fill and is a huge issue to the value of the token. Content creators care about revenue, that revenue has to come from somewhere and the easiest of places is advertisers.
No while some web2 platforms cater to advertisers that doesn't mean web3 has to or the owners of those platforms and that's where the key difference comes. You also don't have to track everything or if you do it doesn't have to be in an aggressive way like web 2 currently does. There's no reason why person A user A can't have a hive token which has no real details of them but still collects relevant data for advertisers can't be used. NO personal information is collected. But that's going to have to come down to the developers on these platforms. Revenue MUST come in and there's no reason why ads should not be implemented and given back to the users and content creators in some way. If content creators and users are suppose to own their content on web3 you damn well should expect they should be earning something if not more then web2 if it's ever going to catch on.
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If YouTube starts demonetizing because because of swear words...
What about music videos?
Hip hop musicians that their songs are almost all swear words 😵
🤷♂️
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I recently watched a video about Youtube's policy and a Turkish Youtuber was saying that the situation is going to get worse than it is now. I mean, everyone, no matter who they are, uses or hears slang in their lives. I don't understand why a few words in videos trigger people so much. I'm not talking about very heavy swearing, they can put a restriction on that, but it's ridiculous that videos with the slightest swearing suddenly stop making money. Also, even if they bring this for the future, it's understandable to some extent, but the fact that it also applies to old videos? That's insane haha.
I don't think I'd have a problem with ads on Hive, especially if they're in the right places in the right doses. Maybe it could even be useful in bilateral agreements to promote Hive to the world.
Being bound to an advertising model for revenue is a scourge on creatives and becomes a yoke around the neck of the platforms, who have to keep them happy, or else. There is obviously the need and space for advertising, but it shouldn't be the thing that dictates what is available on the internet, yet currently, it owns it. Hopefully Web3 will start to undercut some of this power and provide an alternative model that digital companies can survive with, without advertisers being the core.
Web2 advertising has gotten absolutely obnoxious. Every 4th post I scroll by on Facebook is an ad. YouTube videos are interrupted by ads all the time, but many content creators I like are under constant threat of strikes and demonetization not because they are doing vile things, but because corporate Karens run the show now.
If you have ads on HIVE frontends, you have a delicate balancing act of appealing to HIVE bloggers, not driving then to other ad-free frontends to escape the deluge, and satisfying the goals of the advertisers. It's a big risk for all involved, really. And then there's the legal problems which may arise as well.
I'm not saying it's entirely a bad idea, but anyone who thinks there's an easy answer is nuts. And when you start talking about tracking clicks and read time, you also risk driving away people who value relative anonymity. We don't tend to want corporate eyes on us if we can avoid it.
This would be an opt-in kind of thing, if u don't want extra rewards then you never see any ads. It's on the front-ends anyway. You may still get some extra rewards depending on your HP holdings if the front-ends decide to share some of that towards holders, but yeah. If you don't want to, nothing changes for you except for people talking about the ads in your feed I guess.
If other people see ads in my feed when I have opted out, that could be a problem.
I think this is the way "the attention economy" works in this era. The opportunity to have ad-revenue should never be wasted as they are win-win for both advertisers and the front-end. If the creators can be the partner of the revenue, then this would create an awesome system in which nobody would have any concerns.
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Great thoughts here. LeoFinance frontend has been generating massive revenue from ads revenue, The revenue are used to buy back LEO and distribute to LEO stakeholders in proportion. I hope the amount would skyrocket as the new Leo UI goes live.
However, the model you postulated here would be superb in motivating creators to put together evergreen contents.
Just apt. The below description.
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Very freedom-oriented. 😆
This is what Mises describes as the "new sovereign," the common man. Number game and public opinion rule. That is why the essence of good politics in our time is to become the champion of the masses.
!PIZZA
!CTP
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I watched this video last night. Absolutely nuts what they're doing, seemingly trying tk make all content kid friendly. Imagine the amount of game streamers that are going to suffer.
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It makes sense, the advertising revenues of conventional social networks in 2022 according to several specialized pages, almost reach 200 billion dollars. If we manage to attract a fraction of this capital it would be a great boost to our economy. And most importantly, as you say, we wouldn't have to fall prey to censorship because right now we don't depend on those revenues. I hope that never changes.
Maybe youtube should also take that view. I get that they're afraid, but they already make insane profits.
This post has been manually curated by the VYB curation project
Been saying for years that we are wasting ou potential as an eco-system. Self funding is a great asset to have but not sustainable forever. We need external revenue to grow and reach a sustainable business model.
Ads can pay a huge part of that as we are a community of content creators. That creates value for advertisers that we can use.
Leo are working to take advantage of this and there is no reason that peakd or other hive front ends couldn't do the same. It seems that the leo team earn roughly 4K a month right now form a small selection of ads that don't effect the user experience whatsoever.
A site like peakd might generate 10K or more per month. At current prices that could buy almost 40K hive form the market to either burn or distribute to the top viewed authors.
Would it generate a lot of interest in the site if that hive was distributed between the top 500 authors for the month? Would it incentivize people to create better content and share it if people knew that there was a prize pool for bringing eyes to the eco-system>
10K might seem like a small amount in the grand scheme of things but to regular users it is a large amount of money that could be put to good use every month and spend time growing it. Imagine if that prize pool was 100K every month, how many authors we could attract form medium, personal blogs, other websites trying to increase site views and grow their audience.
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😣 pretty messed up there YOUTUBE! (I still luv to watch endless coub vids on there tho) :P
I think it started a long way back during the ad apocalypse over at Youtube where people were just going after sponsors and other things due to a very vocal minority. It's a huge issue and I think it has changed a lot of the content over at Youtube because there are a ton of people who rely on it as their income. I am not opposed to having some advertisers come in but once they do, they do have some control. After all, money talks and so long as the money itself isn't that large, we should be fine.
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I gifted $PIZZA slices here:
@rzc24-nftbbg(1/5) tipped @acidyo (x1)
Learn more at https://hive.pizza!
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~~~ embed:1611600065633857543 twitter metadata:NDEyMjg5MTQzNHx8aHR0cHM6Ly90d2l0dGVyLmNvbS80MTIyODkxNDM0L3N0YXR1cy8xNjExNjAwMDY1NjMzODU3NTQzfA== ~~~
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Honestly I don't think advertisers give a damn about language in a video. All they care about is how many clicks they'll get for their money.
I think the stricter and stricter guidelines has a much more simple reason: Greed.
Why pay your content creators for every single video they make when you can hit them with the community guidelines stick and pay them 50% less while keeping the same amount of advertising money for yourself.
Read how this all have started with Toruk
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That's true if you are youtuber then it clear means that you are slave of advertiser because youtube give first priority to advertiser and change policy according to advertiser facility and you have to follow it whether you like it or not.
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