Only now catching up on the latest YouTube De-Monetization news after my holiday. An interesting and generally balanced write up about it here. Considering YouTube is non-profitable, it makes total sense that they would take action to please and attract more advertisers. In the same breath, for a content creator, it makes no sense that they would limit the pool of popular content that they can apply ads to. One particularly interesting point I’ve read elsewhere is the idea that it’s just a different form of censorship.
The odd multifaceted paradox with this idea is that ‘we’ want the content, but because we don’t want pay for it, they have to sell advertising, which we don’t want, but if the thing we don’t want doesn’t want all the things we do want, then the things we want become unsupported by the things we don’t want. We’re sort of censoring ourselves with our unwillingness to pay with anything other than our eyeballs. Poorly expressed there, but maybe you get my point?
It all takes me back to an old idea for closer (meaning, far less media and ad agency middlemen) Kickstarter-come-Tinder like content creator and advertiser introduction platform. Reduce the amount of waste with media and ad agencies and give funds directly to content creators, who could become genuinely grateful to their genuinely supportive funder. More partnership and support than parasitic and unwanted dependency. It wouldn’t work for all products for sure, but it feels like a model that ‘sponsored content’ is getting close to. They just need to sponsor it, not have any editorial input in it. ‘Just!’
Documenteering 