Hey, YouTube lovers! How about you pay us, we start paying for STUFF? - Google YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki has confirmed that the Google vid service is open to introducing subscriptions. This is not exactly news – one of the most controversial sagas to rage this year concerns complaints from independent music companies over YouTube’s yet-to-be launched subscription music service. Indies requested …
Sure, but if they say I've gotta log into Google+ AND fork over ten bucks a month, it's not happening. The crap on that site isn't worth real money.
And that's a good thing indeed. It'll give other, ah, unprofessional video sites a chance to compete.... finally.
This will follow the usual path for such things. Offer the option, and see not many people are willing to pay. Start throwing on more and more ads and making them more and more annoying to induce people to pay.
The uploaders determine where to put video, not downloaders, and since Youtube pays them (maybe more with the subscriptions) where the alternatives don't they'll continue uploading there, so freeloaders will suffer more and more until they're forced to pay up or give up.
Your mention of Psy and footballers brings to the fore the issue of whether talent should get paid for its initial demonstration. For myself, football is a gentleman's game played by hooligans, and it's "stars" are weird names who do not represent the communities emblazoned on their shirts. But that's largely irrelevant, by the time they're drawing down enough to pay lawyers to get them off rape charges, they have demonstrated that their brain is in their toes, in a range of poorly remunerated leagues.
Now, consider Psy. A classic one hit wonder. A bit like Chesney Hawkes. They delivered the goods briefly, without really having showing any previous form. A plant that flowers without budding, if you like. Should they be remunerated according to (say) Youtube views? In my universe the answer is Yes. But that also means that "cat versus printer"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSK1D3bZhRs
is worth millions. And the magic of this is worth so much more after a couple of drinks.
I'm happy with that, is everybody else cool with it?
Now, consider Psy. A classic one hit wonder. A bit like Chesney Hawkes. They delivered the goods briefly, without really having showing any previous form.
To be fair, Gangnam Style came off his sixth album, and he was regularly topping the charts domestically in South Korea. So while he is a one hit wonder internationally, I think the no previous form is a little harsh.
Kind of like a solid domestic league footballer having a stunner of a game in the champions league before breaking himself and being relegated.
It's a true work of art. I'm suffering an acute case of Stendhal Syndrome right now. I'm gonna lit another toke, see if it cures this condition. ;-)
PD.: I also would suggest to the IEEC that they make the use of tags compulsory for cat images and videos, so they can be easily filtered out.
Thanks for your attention.
> But in real cash terms, he’s reckoned to have pocketed about £5m. In other words, he created a global phenomenon - but pocketed what an averagely talented Champions League-level footballer might take home in a year.
I think you've got that arse backwards.
Most people accept that the amount of money paid to some professional footballers is pretty obscene. Admittedly it is the rate that the market sets but stupid nonetheless.
In other news: someone produces a very, very average song for which they net £5 million.
YouTube made the content creators the product. Why do you pay the product, when you can dangle intangibles?
Considering that the content creator is the product, and the viewer was also the product (to advertisers)...GooTube offering subscriptions to remove ads converts one of the products into a customer. That's possibly implying that Google is seeing signs that the value of the viewer-as-a-product doesn't have much in the way of an upside anymore.
"revenue per click continued its long-term decline"
That paradigm only seems to have been invented for interwebs advertising. In the physical world, advertising is more about brand awareness and long term gaining of customers. No one placing a poster on a billboard is going to expect that to turn into purchases immediately by everyone passing by.
No one is totally immune to advertising, whether that be posters, online ads or word of mouth from others. Even those who claim not to be influenced by ads, once they start researching a product will most likely start by searching the brand names or products they are most familiar with because they know the names from adverts.
This post has been deleted by its author
"In other words, he created a global phenomenon - but pocketed what an averagely talented Champions League-level footballer might take home in a year."
Did he discover a cure for cancer or AIDS, or discover a new species of human in a valley somewhere? No, he just came out with a popular novelty record and yet 'pocketed what an averagely talented Champions League-level footballer might take home in a year.'
The personal value judgment argument ("I don't like X so I don't think it is worth very much") is fine - but not the point here. It's whether money follows popularity, as it does everywhere else. Sell a lot of cars, you get a lot of money. Sell a lot of insurance policies, you get a lot of money.
1 in 4 people on the planet can sing Gangnam Style. And he didn't even pocket enough to buy a decent yacht.
"Sell a lot of cars, you get a lot of money. Sell a lot of insurance policies, you get a lot of money."
The key word here is "SELL".
Psy got paid for the number of records that sold not that got played for free on youtube.
I don't think car sellers would be paid very much for giving away cars free on the internet, nor insurance sellers for providing free insurances...
>The point is that youtube made a fuck sight more than that off him....
Which is normal for any kind of creative work. Record company/distributor/etc gets x, you get somewhere between 0.1x and 0 depending on how aggressive your lawyer is and how much The Powers That Be rate your prospects.
I'm not saying it's fair, just that's how it works - except on Amazon and in the App Store, where the split is much more favourable.
Incidentally, on YouTube you don't just get ad share from direct plays but from plays of related content. In Psy's case that includes all those parody videos.
"1 in 4 people on the planet can sing Gangnam Style. And he didn't even pocket enough to buy a decent yacht."
What an amazing contribution to the global community of this planet.
Meanwhile, people doing actual useful stuff, like say, cleaning your office, or picking up your trash, making your clothes, etc. get paid next to nothing.
Although, now I think again, maybe Gangnam Style did do something useful, as it proved that about 1 in 4 people on the planet are dumb & boring people with nothing more fulfilling to do with their lives than watch retarded YouTube videos; although that already have been proved by the likes of Rebecca Black & Justin Bieber.
I'm old enough to remember when we used to get away from TV commercials by paying for cable TV. At first, you could drastically reduce them by going cable. Now look. Many cable shows have more commercial time than show time. You pay for the cable and then you get mind pollution anyway. And a monopoly or oligopoly keeps anyone from being able to do anything about it.
Don't trust these guys. You may not be able to stop them but if you can, it will be easier now than later.
They should remove adverts for users of Google All access music. I wouldn't pay for YouTube directly as i don't use it all that often for music and no one in their right mind should as most music streaming is free on spotify. Also would PSY have made any money out of that song without YouTube?
A different way to look at it: football players actually generate the cash that drives their revenues. Everyone seems to be crazy about football and ready to pay to watch it in stadiums or pay (through ads) to watch it on TV. The obscene pile of cash is there. Now where should it go ? To fatten the pockets of middlemen ? Or to the players on the field ? I think the current arrangement is somewhat better than what gladiators in Rome were getting...
A pint to them, they can afford it!
I want to downvote this, on the grounds that footballers are overpaid, but what you've written is all true.
I think professional football is a load of rubbish, and thus throw precisely none of my disposable income at it, but plenty of people feel different, and jacking up the gate prices doesn't seem to put them off.
> Everyone seems to be crazy about football and ready to pay to watch it in stadiums or pay (through ads) to watch it on TV. The obscene pile of cash is there.
I can point you in the direction of a shit load of football fans that are pretty pissed off about the cost of watching a decent game of footy these days. Instead of charging the earth to pay the earth to these footballers, it might be a good idea to charge reasonable prices and pay reasonable wages.
Over here in Canada, most people can't afford to go to the big hockey matches. To take a family to a league Canucks game is pretty much out of the question for most people.
Hockey has become a corporate game where an awful lot of tickets are bought by corporations to wine and dine their customers. You end up with an inflationary situation whereby ticket prices and player's wages are chasing each other's tails.
I'm a wee fish on youtube - but I've had about 480,000 views so far - will probably hit 500,000 by xmas.
Most of my videos are 'monetized' where I've been bothered enough to not use copyright music.*
It makes me about 50 quid a year.
It obviously makes youtube/google a lot more, when they are prepared to give me 50 quid - at 1%, maybe they make 5000 quid a year out of me advertising wise.
that's a pretty good deal for them - which is why google have billions and I have 50 quid....
However, if they now say 'you get FA now if a viewer pays us the advertising revenue we are losing... then I want 1% of that too... basically I should still get my amazingly generous 50 quid.
If I don't - f&ck of youtube, hello Vimeo.
youtube.com/powerlord69
(safe for work)
*which I don't get either - so basically here I've still created 90% of the content, just not the music, but google take this as sufficient reason to keep all the ad revenue there... wtf is that about. makes no sense. If the music companies weren't so much up there own arse they would actually REWARD me for using one of their tracks in my video. fuckwits.
It obviously makes youtube/google a lot more, when they are prepared to give me 50 quid - at 1%, maybe they make 5000 quid a year out of me advertising wise.
Huh? Google typically keeps around a third of the ad money. That is, if you made 50 quids, they made 25.
would it be a set amount per view (or 100 views from different IP's - otherwise a botnet will jack up the hits) and who decides what ads appear on the video? Google now sends ads to the video's and around the page based on who is logged in and their history etc.. so now if a YouTuber gets a ton of hits and becomes a sensation ad companies want to put their ads on that person's page for views. What should be done is the ARTIST should be the one who decides what ads appears on their YouTube page and is fed to their viewers. Thus they get $$$ from the advertisers, and arrange it with Google/tube to place the ads on their page..
£5m for Gangnam Style from youtube views/ads income is pretty good going, considering that on the BBC4 show about the top 10 richest songs in the world ever, number 10 got £12.5m and number 1 got £30m (and most of those are over a much longer period of time via more traditional routes).
http://www.didyouwatchit.com/bbc4/bbc4-the-worlds-richest-songs/
I enjoy getting on YouTube to watch music videos from time to time. I'm highly irritated to have to sit through 15-30 seconds of forced commercials before the actual music video plays, but such is the price of free crapware. However, I'm not sure I want to pay for YouTube service unless Google wants to sell me NFL football or College football games a la carte. That, I might pay for, but not for low-quality videos pervasive on YouTube.
Are there any clever hosting people here who would like to attempt some maths for working out how much it would cost in terms of hosting/bandwidth for a music artist to host their own 4minute 13sec music video at various resolutions up to 1080, and provide 2 billion video views over say a 2 year period. I realise it is a moot exercise in that the video wouldn't have gone so viral if it wasn't on youtube, and I also realise there are short rough answers leading to more complex more accurate answers, but I think it would be an interesting discussion.
This always happens. When a technology is new or experimental, it's often offered for free. Then, once it's seen widespread adoption and it's clear that a lot of money COULD be made from it, a lot of money WILL be made from it. "What once was free, is now a paid-for service" is a classic line in the IT world.
Content creators should get paid. But it's so impractical to pay for stuff on the Internet. You can't hand cash to your computer. You need this new-fangled thing called a credit card, and there have been security breaches.
YouTube could start with one important small step it hasn't taken. It worked out a deal with music companies to allow YouTube video users to include copyrighted music from many major labels in their videos, I remember reading a year or two ago. But it isn't possible, yet, for someone posting such a video to YouTube to direct that revenue from ads on that video go to the owner of the song.
"Once real money is changing hands, shouldn’t the video talent start to get feisty, and start demanding more? "
But they can't. The minute they start trying to charge, people will just find another video to watch. This isn't the 80s. There's no longer a tiny number of records out there by artists that get on the Radio 1 playlist. Anyone can make a video and stick it on YouTube.
Gangnam Style would never have been a global phenomenon without YouTube. If Psy had charged people, he'd have made some sales in South Korea, but be worse off than giving it away and collecting on the small percentage of the billions of views that bought the MP3. And the artists largely don't care if they give away a billion YouTube views. It's the million sales that come from it that matter.
I frantically stab Skip Ad as soon as the 5 seconds are up.
While making a mental note never to buy said product.
Although as I'm a good 25 years older than their usual target demographic most of the ads wouldn't attract me anyway.
I'd rather walk than drive a "lifestyle" car and I'd rather drink my own piss than an artificially fruit flavoured vodka shot.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
