Look how nice they are

Creators have also complained that YouTube’s trending section, an important page for finding viewers, often skips over their videos — instead showing sports highlights, movie trailers, music videos, and late-night clips. Wojcicki’s blog marks the first time that an executive at YouTube has addressed those frustrations at length.

To address complaints, Wojcicki says at least half of all trending videos will now come from YouTubers, “with the remainder coming from music and traditional media."

Surprise, now not only you will see most shitty channels made to dumb people down present in trending, but they even get half of slots from them for paid promotion of their big partners.

Will YouTube's current policy changes turn into a success?

Which of the following lifted youtube from obscurity into the dominance it now enjoys:

The illegally uploaded copyrighted, non-native content or the native, consumer created videos that sometimes went into becoming viral?

Is there any kind of public statistics about this as a proof?

If the previous is the more correct answer, then youtubes current emphasis to kill the independent production and promote the videos made by various corporations and MCN:s is understandable. That would prove that the professionally made content always was and would remain to be the moneymaker. and the consumer created content was, from a wider perspective, always more of an economic burden, than an asset. Maybe the youtube of yesterday was a pipedream? And we return to the “old ways” where there was only a handful of trusted production houses and channels to choose from? Are we too much blinded by our own bias, our dreams and wishes concerning the viability of independently created content?

What rights, if any, does one sign away?

@DrDave - Sure. It's pretty straightforward with just a few bumps along the way for me that were quickly resolved.

First, you need to sign up with AVD, which includes providing a bank account and tax info so that they can pay you. Once done, you sign the contract and you can get the specs for video, audio, etc. It's pretty easy to set Media Encoder to the proper specs (though there's no preset yet). You will have to provide CC files. There are several formats that they will accept, but interestingly, not the .STL that is most common. I found that .SRT worked for me with 24fps and 23.976fps material. I use Rev.com to do the captions - for $1/minute run time turned around in <24 hours. AVD accepted all my Rev files.

You pick your own prices for sale and rental of HD and SD material in each market (US, UK, Germany, Japan). For free streaming on Amazon Prime, the price is fixed. You can see the rates on the AVD site. You pick/design your own image and key art files.

I had a hiccup because some of my files already existed on Amazon under a different distributor. It had been a miscommunication, but the distrib and AVD worked with me to resolve it quickly. Another surprise is that if your content has any on-screen URLs, you need to remove them. Most of my movies had a movie website URL at the end of the credits, which is pretty common among indie films. So I took those off. Once all is done and accepted, your movies go online in a day or two.

Pretty painless. There is a dashboard that shows your sales on about a daily basis for various titles, territories, and methods of purchase. I think this is about as specific as I can be, but you can find a lot of info on the AVD website. I haven't gotten around to payment time, but I don't foresee problems there. It's pretty straightforward and the process has been quite transparent.

I don't know if I'll make a lot of money on my films--they are not new in distribution, but then, most have some recognizable actors in them, and that helps. AVD puts films in front of an enormous potential audience. My main goal is just to have these films available for people to see. All of my films have had distribution, but the traditional distributors have had some painful elements to them. AVD doesn't have to be perfect to be a lot better than traditional distributors.

You can find my films on AVD by searching for my name. There are also a couple of films on there that I directed or wrote but don't really have any involvement with, and I don't know any details about those.

I'm happy to help if you have any other questions.

"Controversial or sensitive subjects and events, including subjects related to war, political conflicts, natural disasters and tragedies, even if graphic imagery is not shown"

They're screwing over any one who doesn't line up perfectly with YouTube's concept of "acceptable" view, which will shut down freedom of speech on YouTube.

Amazon has opened up Amazon Video Direct for movies, webcasts, etc. from users. I've just uploaded several of my films there. It's not a straight replacement for YouTube, but it's an easy and direct option for distribution.

Meanwhile youtube's own button for fullscreen exit looks exactly like a german ww2 emblem... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balkenkreuz

@Riker

My original channel: Vlogs mostly since I only had a webcam and microphone. I discussed mostly creative projects I was working on as well as explaining how I was able to accomplish fundraising and market myself and things like that. This was wildly unsuccessful. I actually took this one down.

2nd: Cooking. A friend of mine and I tried to do a short cooking show using his old sony handycam (MiniDV old) and provided short "episodes" of how to make budget meals for college students or anyone unable to shop at Whole Foods. Mostly crockpot style stuff. We were broke and making cheap meals anyway, so it didn't matter. Besides, the aesthetic and resolution of MiniDV only lent itself to the fact that it was about being low budget. My friend and I went on with this for about 8 months before calling it quits. We ended up being able to pay for the groceries, a few crock pots, and enough to treat ourselves to something small.

3rd: At one time in my youth I had dabbled in the semiprofessional gaming circuit. The non first person shooter variety. MMOs and RTS specifically. At any rate, I started to see the online market with Twitch boom for gamers and decided to hop on board. I ended up doing videos on how to prep yourself for professional play and better yourself in general. Most of it was improving hand eye coordination, situational awareness, and how to properly key bind and break "bad habits." things like that. 5,600 plus subscribers despite abandoning the channel over a year ago. I still see some decent residual income from this one. The numbers wax and wane, but it doesn't matter to me. I have absolutely no time to update it at the present and have no use for video games anymore. If I have some free time down the road...sure.

4th (and probably last) The main draw has been from a channel where I do bi-monthly vlogs and have tutorials for production and post production work. I live in the part of the United States where all things Video/Filmmaking are pretty much non-existent. It's pretty much an untapped resource for work. I obviously can't charge industry or union rates, but it definitely pays the bills. Anyways, my vlogs consist of recaps of what I've learned on projects along with examples of what I've determined are "do's and dont's" I also put up short films I have either made or worked on in collaboration with others.

I run a few "small" youtube channels for extra income. My most successful channel contains 54 videos and quite a few of those have 200,000 plus views. Two of the videos have even cleared a million views. I've also got over 12,000 subscribers on that channel. Out of all of my channels this one in particular has a much higher CTR rate (ad click rate) than every other channel I've seen and or run . Typical CTRs I've seen hover between 2-6 percent. This channel in particular is upwards of 10-12% over the last 2 years. From this channel I have consistently pulled in between $200 and $600 a month.

Keep in mind there are quite a few factors weighing in on how much money a person makes from Youtube. However, the two most important factors are CTR and Ad payout rate. Some ads only pay out 2 cents while others might be 7 cents or more. The higher the ad payout and the higher your CTR the more money you'll earn. It's really just common sense....

I still haven't figured out what causes people to click the ads on this channel in particular more than the others. If I were able to, I'd well....be rich.

That said, I've done quite a bit of experimenting with content on different channels (cooking, video games, tutorials, short film works) over the last couple of years. I've also figured out how to effectively market my channels using SEO and other social media platforms.

Unfortunately, I've kind of lost interest in the majority of it and really don't have the time with all of the video work I've been doing. I've abandoned all channels save for two of them, but left the others open for small residual income. I'll still upload my short works and will put up tutorials from time to time. After all, money is money I guess =)

Now, I'm not claiming to be a Youtube superstar as I really have no interest in making a full time job of it, but last year I was able to use my "Youtube Money" to invest in quite a bit of video equipment (body, lenses, stabilization, etc...) and head in the direction I had originally intended. I guess all of it was an experiment to see just how far I could get on a next to zero budget. I started with a $50 webcam and a $10 dollar table top microphone. It took damn near 4 months to hit the $100 payout threshold, but after that things began to snowball.

I'm starting to ramble.....

Our group about 10-11 million spread over several channels. Don't make anything like $2000 per month, more like $200 :)

Views were a mixture of subscribers, utilizing a local celebrity, the actors hitting their local networks, and me stupidly wasting money on advertizing. I say stupidly bc I used adwords, facebook, twitter, and a few other solutions in the past. They all left me with nothing to show.

I was initially getting about a 1000 views per day after the first Video "The Fourth." I spent about $100 on advertising. I only had the one video at the time. It lasted about a week before it dropped to about 500 a day. It lasted a week before dropping to 200 a day. One month later it fell to about 20 views per day.

Now, after adding G&G I am at a steady 40-50 views per day. The key words I chose for G&G were not highly optimized. The Fourth, however, is ranking in the top 5 for 4 keywords. That is where my traffic is coming from.

For G&G Youtube Advertising was a bit tricky. I used $100 and $50 coupons for advertising Google and FB. It went no where in google. I may have gotten a thousand views. Facebook was a bit better, but the money ran out fast. I did okay with sponsoring tweets. I basically paid ppl with huge twitter followings to send out a good number of tweets about my video.

The rest was posting all over the net. I lucked out the on first day of "the Fourth" and ended up on the main page. I also had tons of ppl copy my video into their feeds. This time I didn't do as much and it shows.

Around 275,000 views. I shoot short fiction. Web series. Have a new episode being shot in a couple weeks. The first one using the GH2. Feel free to add me to your featured channels. I will do the same. A little synergy can go a long way.

http://www.youtube.com/user/LyndrickMCollins