Hi, I'm stuck waiting on laundry to finish and am bored, so why don't I come on here and write some hot takes about YouTube?
I mean, I can think of several reasons, but too bad I'll do it anyway.
Knowing the leanings of the folks on this particular platform this is likely to spark some debate, but note that I'm not trying to paint YouTube as a saint - in fact, the first thing I want to talk about is a strategy they've taken which puts me and all YT creators in a weird place:
Seemingly few people know (or understand completely) that YT Premium is a good deal for all parties involved - it kills ads, creators get a cut of the membership, and (in my experience anyway) it neutralizes many of the platform's weird tendencies because serving relevant ads to the viewer is no longer a concern.
I would advocate for it much more strongly (and I say 100% truthfully that Premium views pay me more than ad-supported views do) except YT continues to lump YT music into it.
I have been paying for YouTube Premium since it was called YouTube Red, and I will happily continue to do so.
So many of the "YouTube is getting so much worse" takes I see just... don't apply to me because I haven't seen an ad on the platform in years now.
I would tell you that by signing up for YT premium you should happily think about it as a small Patreon membership for everybody you watch - your money will be sent to those folks split up based on watch time.
But Music complicates this.
I honestly don't know how your fee gets split up here.
Does more go to video creators if you stream music less? Or not at all? Don't know!
What is the typical split? Don't know!
I really wish YouTube/Google would split this out. I use YT music because I never got started with a different service and enjoy it. But if I had invested in a different service with playlists and stuff, I probably wouldn't bother with YT music and that makes YT premium far less compelling.
Now, saying anything positive about YT or Google on this particular platform is... well it's probably not going to be received well.
Understand that I would love for there to be a competitor to YouTube that worked like YouTube, but so far nobody has had the balls to copy their revenue split model. That's what it takes. Pay your creators!
Some alternatives kinda-sorta do but I would rather my content be accessible to all and currently I'm not interested in another thing to manage.
Do you know what's the order of magnitude of the ratio of the revenue split?
@robryk My understanding is that the portion of the subscription that goes to the video side of the platform is split 55-creator/45-YouTube just like ad revenue.
But the real question what is that portion? And does it change whether and how much you stream music?
If YouTube actually split those services out and made this clear, I'd wager WAY more creators would be advocating for it.
Thank you, it's very nice to know about this split. Do you know if the music side itself has the same split?
I also wonder about the split across authors of videos I see. ISTM, given that Premium is a fixed price subscription, that watching _more_ videos decreases the fraction that I send to a particular author. I'm not sure what incentives it creates (looking at first order effects, it would seem to me that YT is incentivized to decrease the amount of videos Premium subscribers watch; that's probably not true for PR reasons if no other, so my naive views of incentives here would probably be wrong), but intuitively it feels very weird.
