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Numerators without denominators aren't too useful. How much total revenue did these creators represent?
From what I've read, their yearly revenue is around $15 billion.
The title is somewhat misleading: the actual quote is $30B to "creators, artists, and media organizations." I suspect that the vast majority of that money went to already established music artists and big media organizations.
They also released many of their own shows (called Youtube Originals). Those might be included in the $30B as well.
It's clearly not benefiting the quality of content. If you go to the front page of youtube right now, it's filled with vlog style, 10-minute-padded, clickbait junk. Creatives who excel at making interesting <5min videos can't sustain themselves on the platform any more it seems.
> If you go to the front page of youtube right now, it's filled with vlog style, 10-minute-padded, clickbait junk.

This... Doesn't make any sense. The Frontpage looks like that because it's what the average viewer wants to watch (many of which are kids). If you use YouTube with any regularity, your homepage recommendations shouldn't be coming anywhere close to that.

Yeah, the frontpage is just lowest common denominator. If you get into the topics you're interested in there is a lot of impressively high quality content from small to medium sized creators.
> 10-minute-padded

Is THAT what it is? I thought a lot of people were just bad speakers, guess I was naive.

Let's say that children watch clickbait junk while true intellectuals with large disposable incomes watch creatives who make masterpieces every once in a while.

While the clickbait junk should end up presenting more ads to their audience due to either sponsor deals or ads directly on the video page, shouldn't the audience be "worth less" from a $/impression perspective compared to the audience of true intellectuals?

At the end of the day a monetized uploader's "monetary goal" is to show enough ads to the audience, not so much as to make them leave, but right before the limit. Why should someone who creates short bits of content have their $/impressions so much higher to make up for that? It's not a youtube problem, it's an advertiser problem (because if I recall correctly, it's a marketplace bid system where whoever offers the most for a demographic will get their ad shown).

I suppose you could say that youtube is not a good platform for this high quality content. Imagine if movie studios started putting their $180 million budget movies onto youtube. You could say that the movie studio is spending too much on creating their content, above the maximum for what youtube can offer. Or that youtube isn't the right platform for this content. Although youtube does have the option to offer content behind a paywall.

So this is either that advertisers aren't valuing the opportunity to show their ads to the audience of these high quality content creators enough, or that their audience doesn't want to pay for the high quality content if it was behind a paywall.

Not bad considering Youtube takes in something like $15B per year.