Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Youtube Short-Changes Creators”.
Revenue sharing for shorts as of February 1st, rather than attaching ads to specific videos, YouTube, will pool the revenue from ads that appear in the shorts feed. That pool is then split into a pool for fees and music licensing and a pool for creators. Oh no! No! That’S fine! That’S fine, because this is the way to combat tick. Tock tick.
Tock is just going to not respect copyright and not pay anything to license holders and realistically anyone operating in this hemisphere is not going to be able to get away with that. So this is the way to make it so that shorts can contain copyrighted music. So you can actually have like clips from Rihanna and Drake Taylor Swift, like whatever else so that you can upload the same content to YouTube shorts, that you could to tick tock and, unlike Tick, Tock YouTube is actually going to share some of the revenue from that. So now that there’s no huge disadvantage other than tick tock’s creation tools, but hopefully they’ll catch up. So now that there’s no huge disadvantage in your content like you can’t have music or whatever. Hopefully, there will be a big migration to shorts, which should be more profitable and or Force Tick, Tock to actually compensate creators. So, overall everything you’ve said so far is good. I don’t think I scrolled down far enough earlier when I was skimming through this to see the caveat section. Some of that is BS, we’ll get there in a second though um.
I just read the the first three bits and I thought it was actually really cool. Anyways short that use one music track will be taxed. Fifty percent of their views, the ad revenue for which is then paid to rights holders of said music YouTube, then takes 55 of the cut of the remaining ad revenue and, finally, the rest is split among eligible creators based on views.
In summary, if YouTube shorts makes just say a hundred dollars to make this easy in ad revenue and twenty percent of those shorts use a song so remember if it uses a song, it’s fifty percent of the views, but let’s say only twenty percent of the shorts. Actually use the song, then the music industry gets 10 bucks, YouTube gets 49.50 and the creators split forty dollars and fifty cents. There’S some important caveats, though. A lot of this is based around the ad not playing before your specific video right. So it assumes you’re in the shorts feed.
Okay, YouTube doesn’t count views from outside said shorts feed, for example, if a viewer clicks on a short from a Creator’s Library not counted what what YouTube also doesn’t share revenue from ads on navigation Pages, leading two shorts or the first ad that plays in the shorts Feed if it comes before the first video, what what we asked a representative from YouTube, we did, and we asked more than one representative from YouTube. Actually, because YouTube has asked me respectfully to not just go live and make a video and crap on their policies and procedures um and business um, without at least you know, giving them a chance to talk me down um, but at least give them a chance to Not do anything so I said: hey um, this isn’t going to change anything because, realistically I I’ve seen the pattern over and over again I don’t get attention unless I make a bunch of noise publicly but I’ll tell you what I’ll play along. I will go through the I’ll go through the chain of command and I will raise my concerns with all the appropriate people before I go live with a denouncement of your extremely crappy, two-faced approach to revenue sharing in shorts uh. So I did it did nothing yep and so we’re talking about it yeah.
So that was a big waste of time. I think next time YouTube. I won’t bother because it was clearly a waste of time. You guys are obviously wrong.
You guys are obviously being disingenuous here and it didn’t matter, because you don’t care because I actually, I actually don’t know what makes you care – and this is. This is an extremely dangerous step. From my point of view, I don’t know what is going on with YouTube leadership right now, because Google somehow – and I I it almost feels like by accident um – Google – has somehow managed to be the one company that has successfully figured out the key to retaining their Creators to maintaining those relationships and building a library of content that you guys come back to the site for Time and Time and Time Again, they’re also the The Refuge for other dying platforms and equities. They come here an equitable Revenue sharing approach, and this is the first time that I’ve looked at something and gone well.
That was obviously clearly something that should have been shared with creators and you just went no, I don’t think I will so here’s the thing. Here’S the big problem, their argument for why that first ad, when you click into the shorts shelf, that used to be called, I don’t know what they call it now shorts, something uh. I don’t know feed yeah their argument for why that first ad, when you navigate into the shorts feed, should not go into the pool, is that they haven’t interacted with a short yet, so there would be no way of knowing what short that that ad view should Be attributed to uh uh YouTube, that’s the whole point of pooling. It remember.
Remember that whole deck that you went through with me for, like 45 minutes, explaining this whole system, where you were going to compensate the music rights holders and then create these pools, and then it would be a shared pool, because the truth is we have no. Unlike a normal video, where you actually interact with the video and then there’s a pre-roll and then there’s a mid-roll and then there’s a post role and whatever, where you can clearly say: okay, this viewer was retained by this video, and these ads are associated with this Video the whole point of pooling it is that you can’t do that. So riddle me this.
Why would anybody click on the shorts feed if they weren’t driven there by Short’s creators? What makes you think that it was it was you and you alone who is, was responsible for that interaction? For that ad view, there is actually zero rational defense. There is no logical defense for this because they already laid out the reason for everything being pooled, and you know okay, so why am I flipping out over this? Did they took my money? In reality, YouTube AdSense is already a fraction of our revenue and of that shorts is a tiny just infinitely small fraction. Not for everyone, though this doesn’t hurt me. We’Ve got LTT store, we’ve got LTX, we’ve got our direct sponsor relationships like we’re. Fine not even mentioned we’re 100 fine right there, though, let’s go flow plane we’re fine, but this is not fine and it represents just like what it. What is going on over there like Google, was supposed to be the less evil Tech Giant right, and certainly they haven’t been always, but did you see how they handled the last round of layoffs, not one, but multiple ex-google employees reported getting an email laying them off, While they’re sitting in the hospital with their newborn child and I’m sitting here going, even if that’s legal – I I don’t – I don’t know how it’s inhumane real.
This is. But I read a short little story thing about someone who was traveling uh, but they were in the States on a work visa and they got fired while they were traveling over email. So they can’t come back so like their stuff, their car.
Everything is just like they’re getting one of their friends to like sell it for them, and they just have to like yeah, I don’t know really brutal yeah. So, in a nutshell, um. This is a super slippery slope and you know what honestly I’m not expecting anything good to come of this. If anything, if I was Google, I would just kind of listen to my feedback and go well.
We just won’t clarify that next time we will just. We will just write the policy in such a way that it never raises this question. So we’ll say we’ll say all ads displayed between short videos are are eligible for the pool and then just quietly, just we’ll just put some ads at the beginning.
They weren’t between that they weren’t between anything so um. Then we just need spiffing Brit to figure it out for us. I I don’t even I. This is probably because I don’t watch enough shorts, but I don’t even get it like if I click on a short like if I, if I’m on the YouTube app thing and I click on a short, it doesn’t immediately play an ad right. It plays the for it plays the short that I click on uh yo.
No, but if you from the YouTube app, if you just click shorts, if it plays an ad before it plays a short, they go. Well, that’s ours that had nothing to do with shorts creators. That’S obviously wrong! That was all us absolute 100 percent and yeah I was trying. I was trying to pick a lift me up topic man, it didn’t work and the discussion question here is like why act in bad faith over such a petty amount of money. That, actually is a really good question, because compared to traditional ads, I do not expect the shorts Fund in general, the shorts pool in general, and I especially do not expect this small percentage of ads that they’re displaying before they actually play a short to even make An impact, so why carve it out? It’S ludicrous yeah yeah! I I I have no idea.
I I want to kind of assume that it has something to do with like shareholder happiness, because stocks in general for a while have been a little I as far as I know, they’re going slightly up recently. I don’t know I mean that’s the thing. A little brutal like that’s the thing, that’s what I’m talking about with Google right now, though, it’s like there’s still a company, that’s making literally billions of dollars a quarter and they’re sitting there going. Okay, we need to. We need to cut this cost. We need to. We need to squeeze blood from this Stone here.
We need to you, know whatever and I’m looking at it going like. No, the reason you guys just brought the founders back in is because of the of the absolutely existential crate like threat that is chat, GPT and AI chat assistants. This doesn’t even register.
Why? Why are you fighting such a ridiculous battle? And I honestly, I don’t even think I don’t even think a shareholder. This wouldn’t Merit mention on a shareholder call anyway. Yeah I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know, and I so yeah so Tom XYZ goes: Google missed earnings per share by 12.
This quarter right: that’s not going to make up 12 yeah yeah. Well, it will do absolutely nothing in the grand scheme of things for Google, and in spite of that, that big Miss big big problem, Google made billions and billions of dollars this quarter. So, okay yeah. I don’t know, maybe I’m just maybe I’m maybe I’m just not getting it. Yeah .