Thread: youtube monetization strategy changes

I tried my best to adhere to the "no naming and shaming" rule by using the correct wording

Just a minute ago I replied a small rant about the egon dc hub on a different sub-forum and I almost digressed too much into the topic of this post when I figured it might be a good one for its own thread here. I guess it could just as easily be titled "subscription models" since that is basically what it boils down to.

There once was a time when youtube advertising income would be sufficient to run a decent channel. This all changed quite a few years ago during the so called "ad-pocalypse". This has meant that creators needed to pivot to different income streams. Around that time patreon became very popular.

Now, I do not mind people using a service as such, though I disagree with patreon since they had a tendency to be selective in the people they allowed on their platform, but although some content creators mentioned their patreon in the default "like subscribe blabla" closing rant. Some people however had a tendency to be more, shall we say, insistent.

My main gripe with this entire process has been that even when you had a patreon membership (my girl gifted me one for example) the "perks" that were promised you were not always fulfilled. This problem existed mainly with content creators that worked without a team and had previous monetization schemes such as a merch store or something similar since patreon, as far as I know, could not integrate those services. With that in mind and also my aversion to subscription based models I decided to discontinue patreon and the likes. In fact, aulro is the only subscription I have left

However, it seems that a number of youtubers have been switching to youtube membership as a monetization tool. This has meant that the creators who already had a tendency to be of the more nagging kind about their monetization are now even more so in my experience. Now, I should not complain for getting "free" content for all that time but the membership model has now pushed content behind a paywall effectively. I am not sure how to feel about that. For starters, I was never going to pay for many of the content creators I watch since I simply do not have the funds to do so but I was willing to let them have their ad-income (I use any and all forms of ad/unwanted content blockers for decades) or for those who offered a one-time payment I would donate them a cup of coffee or a beer. I do know that youtube supports one-time donations on videos but I doubt that works for membership videos (that is, to view them).

I think it is a sad state of affairs and I wonder if it works for the content creators. I can only imagine them losing subscribers this way but perhaps that's just me. In an ideal world I would be able to watch a video, decide it was top notch content and buy them a beer and be done with it. Maybe it's just me

Cheers,
-P

Originally Posted by p38arover

Because of advertising I’ve moved to using the Brave browser, especially for watching YouTube. It kills the ads.

Me also. Moved to Brave some years ago. It of course can't filter out the paid promotions inside a video. Louis Rossman can show you how to do that, but I can't be bothered. I also can't be bothered with paying any yter a sub*. Plenty of free content still out there. If people choose to try and make a living out of YT good luck to them, but the people making real $$$ got in early. Anyone else missed the boat.

* Mike at Britrest is my only exception.