Inside the 'arms race' between YouTube and ad blockers / Against all odds, open source hackers keep outfoxing one of the wealthiest companies.

L4sBot@lemmy.worldmod to Technology@lemmy.world – 783 points –
Inside the 'arms race' between YouTube and ad blockers
engadget.com

Inside the 'arms race' between YouTube and ad blockers / Against all odds, open source hackers keep outfoxing one of the wealthiest companies.::YouTube's dramatic content gatekeeping decisions of late have a long history behind them, and there's an equally long history of these defenses being bypassed.

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$10-$30/1,000 views doesn't sound like much. Except the people who make a career out of YouTube are regularly producing 100k+ view videos. It adds up. It's one of the things you can pick and choose to leave out of a competitor. But it is a major reason why people put videos on YouTube.

That's the absolute top end. Most accounts see 50 cents per thousand.

Why lie?

Do you have a source for that? What are you basing it on?

Idk, what are your sources? What the fuck? You wanna demand sources, gib first.

So did you just make up a number? I did try some searching before I spat out mine. It wasn't extensive research and figured anyone doing any cursory check would come away with the same answer. Which is why I didn't bother linking anything. I couldn't find anything that said as low as $0.50/1000 and have never heard a creator saying that low. Hence me asking where you got your number.

https://blog.hootsuite.com/how-much-does-youtube-pay-per-view/

https://influencermarketinghub.com/how-much-do-youtubers-make/#:~:text=On%20average%2C%20a%20YouTuber%20earns,%2418%20for%20every%201%2C000%20views.

https://medium.com/swlh/how-much-does-youtube-pay-516ea8cd338d

I don't remember where I looked it up. This page has a similar rate: https://gegcalculators.com/youtube-cost-per-view-calculator/

How much YouTube pays for 1,000 views? Estimation: On average, YouTubers can earn between $0.25 to $4 per 1,000 views. This range is quite broad due to various factors like niche, location, and viewer engagement.

Remember that "on average" is a slippery term. There are different kinds of average. There is mean, mode and median. The mean for youtubers will skew much higher than the median, for instance, but the median will give you something more realistic for what you should expect to make. In fact half of creators will make less than the median, and even then that's if we're excluding all non-earning channels. Mode is even more representative for what you should expect, since it's the most common amount, and I expect it would be lower still.

The distribution of incomes for youtubers is probably quite extreme, with a long, low tail and a sharp rise at the high end. Similar to this:

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2011/05/24/business/economy/economix-24percentilechart/economix-24percentilechart-custom1.jpg

Of course I can't show you the real thing because youtube actively suppresses this information, which tells you it can't be something they're proud of. Unfortunately that leaves us in the position of relying on blogs and "calculators" that may or may not be reliable, but anyone seeking to market towards youtube creators has an incentive to make the market look more lucrative than it is.

Your own source assumes a standard rate of about $2.14 per thousand: https://influencermarketinghub.com/youtube-money-calculator/

That's the calculator from your first link. It's really strange you didn't notice that, unless you read this paragraph:

Google pays out 68% of their AdSense revenue, so for every $100 an advertiser pays, Google pays $68 to the publisher. The actual rates an advertiser pays varies, usually between $0.10 to $0.30 per view, but averages out at $0.018 per view. Around 15% of viewers on average watch the requisite 30 seconds of a video ad to count for payment. This means that for 1,000 views, 150 people are likely to watch an ad. At $0.018 per view, Google will charge the advertiser $27, keeping 32% ($9) themselves. The YouTube channel will receive $18 per 1,000 views.

...and then you didn't notice the weird mathematical alchemy they did where 1000 video views turned into 150 ad views and then suddenly we were talking about the revenue per 1000 ad views. You need to pay attention to when they're talking about cost per view, revenue per view, and whether it's per ad view or per video view.

This has creators at the lower end earning about $2 per thousand: https://www.businessinsider.com/how-much-money-youtube-creators-make-per-1000-views-rpm-2021-5?op=1

But remember, these are the people who were successful enough to warrant interviewing. The sample bias already selects for the people who are making more money than most.

Your list of sources seemed to originally include an article like this one, but perhaps you read it and realised it said something you didn't like and removed it. I can't tell. Lemmy doesn't show edit histories yet.

Anyway, don't make bald assertions and then only demand sources when someone disagrees. It looks pretty disingenuous.