Youtube has great individual creators like 3blue1brown, but I'm skeptical that youtube itself will supply the additional human curation and editing role required to make an educational resource that is consistently coherent and useful across a range of topics (like say, khanacademy.org).
I'm also curious what benefits youtube would provide a creator/educator like, say, musician Charles Cornell, who is already perfectly able to sell his course that he advertises in his youtube videos.
I would say so, unless it's something they are betting big on like with Google+, I often only learn about a new google service when I hear it's being killed. I've always found it odd that for an advertising company they don't seem to do a good job at plugging their own services.
> Every day, people come to YouTube to learn something new.
True.
> shows content on commonly used education apps without distractions like ads, external links or recommendations
External links seem important on educational files, and I kind of like recommendations when I'm browsing educational stuff, but whoo, no ads on educational stuff? That's great!
> Next year, qualified creators can begin offering free or paid
More subscribers for increasing their revenue from other videos, maybe yt-premium or even some protection against infamous random ban because of needness to support learning materials.
Just to play Devil's Advocate (and I can't believe that I'm arguing for YouTube here): Why shouldn't they charge for a useful service? And it does sound like they're removing other major problems with using their platform for this purpose.
Problem: Creators want to be paid more for their content (great content, good content, bad content, etc)
Solution proposed by Google: Lets charge customers who view this content so that we can pay creators more without losing revenue.
Solution proposed by Consumers: Lets give creators a larger share of youtube's profits. We're already paying for the service by offering our data, our youtube premium subscriptions, and other forms of MTX monetization.
TLDR; Youtube is double dipping in the guacamole bowl, despite having billions of pounds of guacamole.
But the new paid videos are ad-free, so the user would no longer be offering anything monetizable. A company offering free, ad-free video streaming does not turn a profit.
That's a pretty big assumption that offering this service would not result in these users also spending more time on other, non-education related content on YouTube that is monetized. There are also other ways to monetize the product.
I think that two things can both be true: creators should be paid for their work, commensurate with the value they provide, and learning should be free (or of negligible cost) to the person doing the learning. There are exceptions to the latter when there isn't a platform involved, like personalized tutoring or coaching, but in general.
YouTube can achieve both of those goals, and advertising is not the only solution. What bothers me most about this announcement is that they aren't doing anything _new_. This is basically a carbon copy of Udemy's value prop, leveraged by YT's existing massive scale. Other than the videos being hosted on YouTube, it doesn't do anything that other platforms haven't already been doing for years.
> That's a pretty big assumption that offering this service would not result in these users also spending more time on other, non-education related content on YouTube that is monetized.
It isn't a big assumption at all because this is an external embedded player (so the user is not 1 click away from the youtube homepage, they will be in a completely separate app), with no watch-next recommendations or external links.
This is designed explicitly to not compel the viewer into continuing on to watch unrelated youtube videos.
> a new YouTube embedded player that shows content on commonly used education apps without distractions like ads, external links or recommendations.
We've determined by our standards that you have too much guacamole. But, we refuse to see the hypocrisy of this hand-wavy standard that we've got way too much guacamole ourselves compared to another arbitrary entity. We also think, based on our own subjective assessment that guacomole is bad for you and you must reduce consumption. Correct strategy according to our experts is that we need to coerce those who have too much guacomole (again based on our subjective assessment) must give it to those who we think do not have enough. It is morally approved by insert-current-virtue-thing.
your "solution proposed by consumers" seems obviously absurd. Google should just give away money for no reason?
If you're going to make a pitch that Google should pay more money to creators, there's got to be at least some justification for it. other than "i want more money". If google is underpaying creators, then creators should switch to other platforms. If platforms like nebula become a threat, they'll start paying more. as long as most youtubers can make more money on youtube than any other platform, there's no reason for youtube to pay more. that's how capitalism works.
Even if youtube gives total of its ad revenue(not just profit) to its creator, it will still amount to something like a dollar per 5 views. Which is too low for high quality niche content.
I'm confused, how is this different than adding a 5$ membership program? Why is allowing the creator to sell video content users want a bad thing? Yes Youtube gets a cut, but that's literally how every single platform works.
As long as they offer both and not one or the other this should be ok. I’m hoping this allows creators to build more in depth courses consisting of a large number of videos. Right now I mostly have to go to Udemy et al for that sort of thing. Being able to preview some of a course on YouTube with ads and then buy the whole thing if I like it sounds like a win. I’ll reserve judgment until it launches though, it is an Alphabet product after all.
Probably what they meant by that is a beta by invitation only. That may lead to an open beta based on metrics and not hand picked creators, and eventually open to anyone who wants to participate. But I am just speculating.
Because if they just dumped it on everyone we would have pirated content and scam courses being sold on day one. So instead of the team getting to refine the service, they spend their time playing whack a mole with scammers.
The alternative isn’t these creators giving their content away; the alternative is these creators using one of the dozens of paid-video-course hosting platforms that have sprung up. This isn’t going to put a paywall in front of any content that didn’t already have a paywall in front of it.
(FYI, Nebula is a bad analogy, because it exists not to do anything like courseware, but rather because a bunch of creators don't believe in YouTube as a long-lasting + stable revenue engine that won't betray them one day. There's nothing YouTube could offer to make the channels with Nebula extras switch back to posting only on YouTube. Other than, maybe, offering them a contract that basically makes YouTube into a B2B video-hosting platform where the content-creator is treated as a paying customer that deserves things like SLAs, and a human customer-success agent being in the signal chain between copyright strikes and account suspension. Which will seemingly never happen.)
Nebula has also recently started selling skillshare/masterclass-esque classes in addition to the main video platform product. Many (maybe all???) are taught by existing Nebula creators.
The classes are advertised on the Nebula homepage to subscribers, but require additional payment.
On your very last point, you seem to be wrong. These commercial platforms are neither accessible for everyone, nor do they offer the sort of reach as youtube. The choice then is paid content somewhere, or ads on youtube.
By contrast, you now can chose between ads and no ads, both on youtube (and the former likely with algorithmic support).
That's a different calculus that - as it seems to me - should imply more paid content than before, contradicting your statement.
Let me phrase more precisely: as a result of this, there is not going to be any paywalled content created that otherwise would have been created as free ad-supported content. There is only going to be paywalled content created that otherwise would have been paywalled somewhere else, or not created at all.
Media entrepreneurs set out to run a certain kind of business, revenue-engine-wise; and they choose their distribution channels by what will allow them to do the revenue model they have in mind. They don't compromise on their plans by choosing a channel with a larger reach but an entirely different revenue model. If they can't start a business with the revenue model they had in mind, then they just don't start that business. (They might start some entirely different business that does fit the revenue model of the channel; but that'd be a ground-up re-think, and probably have nothing in common with the original business.)
A TV-series creative planner doesn't "compromise" when they can't get their TV pitch greenlit, by turning around and making a Hollywood movie or "direct-to-VHS" miniseries instead. Those are entirely different revenue models, and so require entirely different development strategies — different budgets, different teams, even different content!
Same with educational content. You don't put the sorts of courseware videos you'd publish on Coursera, on YouTube as ad-supported recommendation-discovered videos. They don't belong there. People won't watch them, and you won't (currently) make any money. (For one thing — as another comment thread here attests — they aren't designed to be clickbait in the way that YouTube videos are, so they'll be ignored by the recommendation engine.)
If you're already creating that type of content, you're currently creating it for some other platform where it works, and ignoring YouTube. Now YouTube will be one more "platform where it works." That doesn't change anything about whether you will have made this type of content. It only (maybe) changes how much money you'll make doing it, and so moves a few people over from "not creating educational content at all" to "creating courseware on YouTube." Just like happens incrementally every time one of the other dozens of such courseware sites pop up.
Laughable. If you have some following on youtube you are not giving away your content you get ads and sponsorship money from it. They are already getting paid for it and the proof is that there are a growing amount of full time streamers or content producers.
Yes, but you as a consumer choose youtube, because you pretty much know that all the content there (from your home feed to search result, to related videos) is free. You start with a soldering tutorial, then click on the related video on how to solder SMD components, then a related video about how transistors work, then you find a nice documentary about the history of computing, about enigma, etc... so you click through videos, watch (or adblock) the ads, and learn a bunch of stuff.
Now, most (or even all) of those related videos will be replaced by "pay to watch" videos, and i'm 99.9% sure, that the algorithms will prioritize paid video over free content, so all the free stuff will get buried, and you're left with shitty paid content of worse quality than those old, free videos.
Anybody who has used YT for learning purposes will have quickly realized the limits of "free".
There are numerous channels with click bait titles that are little more than upsells to their paid courses. Quality courses (not referring to pre-recorded uni lectures) are not given away for free.
Maybe not full longform courses, but there was A LOT of great free content.
Have to open a laptop to replace the hard drive? No service manual? Just google "XY-123 laptop disassembly", and you'll get a video. Now, a "XY-123 disassembly course", only $1.99.
on the plus side, let's hope this drives a significant enough portion of traffic to things like peertube, odysee, archive, self-hosted vids etc, to create the required network effect that will make them viable alternatives.
By no external links or recommendations, I think they're talking about the links to other videos they show after the video being currently watched has finished because they are talking about the embedded YouTube player
Many creators of educational content on Youtube already have paid content alongside their free. Except, the paid is currently hosted on other platforms like Udemy and Patreon. As long it's not an exclusive deal which forces them to only use YouTube, I don't really see that many problems with it. In the end, it will likely draw in more creators, which translates to more educational content, both free and paid, and hopefully better, as competition grows.
You can expect YouTube to take a fat percentage (30%?) far beyond what alternative monetization methods like Patreon.
Good revenue stream, especially if they can get partnership deals with schools or other educational institutions. Imagine YouTube getting this sort of "guaranteed" revenue, like publishers do from textbooks, but getting schools to foot the bill instead of students; great business model.
Does it bother anyone else that YouTube has its own TLD (.youtube)?
TLDs used to carry a lot of weight, and used to signify something besides individual entities/companies... but it feels to me like that designation is becoming rather diluted.
Personally, I'm quite happy with the proliferation of top level domains. It seems like the alternative was a completely unnecessary layer of indirection; it's not like every .com was a company or every company used a .com, so they weren't even strongly meaningful before.
One can arrange their own TLD for under $200,000 initial fee, plus around $25,000 a year (IIRC).
I imagine there will be a whole TLD auction game, but among those with deep pockets and governed by an organization that doesn't seem to take their job seriously. ICANN looks like a cash grab nowadays to me. I don't mean any offense to the engineers behind it, just that the administration seems quite greedy.
It bothers me that we still have those useless suffixes attached to domains. What does „org“, „com“, „net“ even mean to the average user? Nothing. It’s nothing but a pointless ritual at this point, and after ICANN chose to add thousands of generic domains, they don’t have any significance left at all, except that nice names are very expensive now. It would be easier for everybody if we simply removed that extra step that is TLD names.
I still don't know why ICANN gets to tell people what they can or cannot have as their TLD name. It's just a string, it doesn't cost anything more to compare on the DNS server if it's custom or standard.
I don't know if every ICANN restriction can be justified from first principles, but there definitely has to be some strategy to ensure nobody sets up a .(U+0585)rg TLD.
There's still a need to limit the TLDs. In small increments it doesn't matter if we add another one. But fully opening the floodgates? I don't think the root server operators would be happy about the load.
Interestingly, a number of corporations that registered their own TLDs seem to have since let them go. You can see them by searching for "Not assigned" on that page.
Next year, qualified creators can begin offering free or paid Courses to provide in-depth, structured learning experiences for viewers. Viewers who choose to buy a Course can watch the video ad-free and play it in the background.
So you're cloning Udemy? Meh. Not much to be excited about so far.
Finally, to help learners apply what they’ve learned, we’re introducing Quizzes — a new way for creators to help viewers test their knowledge.
That could be somewhat useful, but..
For example, a math creator who recently posted a series on algebra can create a Quiz on the Community tab to ask their viewers a question related to a concept taught in their latest video.
Does anybody ever actually visit the "Community" tab of a channel? Why add this extra friction? Hasn't the technology progressed to the point that quizzes could be integrated right into the video player? For that matter, why not have "adaptive" videos where your quiz results can affect the video that you see (like triggering an extra in-depth explanation for notoriously tricky topic if the quiz taker scores below a certain level, etc.).
I hope this works out and provides some value, but I have my doubts as it stands.
Good stuff - I could have never imagined how much I could learn through YouTube - it has basically taken my Spanish from a very rudimentary level to being able to almost watch Netflix series without subtitles (via Dreaming Spanish, which is hosted on YouTube).
Oh I'm so glad you mentioned Dreaming Spanish. From the first video I'm already learning new words, phrases, sentences in Spanish - without any English at all. This immersive approach, and the bite-sized self-contained video shorts, are just what I needed.
> shows content on commonly used education apps without distractions like ads, external links or recommendations
It's almost like they know how addicting their recommendations and other "distractions" are. They have to make a separate product to actually create a healthy environment for learning.
I think it's more so that many schools use unofficial YouTube frontends that already hide ads & recommendations. The elementary schools in my area do anyway.
YouTube killed learning on their platform, when they killed the downvote.
They removed the one metric that people had to signal that content is crap. So now people have to trust that "the algorithm" is filtering out all the junk. Which of course we know doesn't happen. The algorithm only cares about engagement, it doesn't care if the content is of good quality or even truthful.
But that would be just someone’s personal opinion (or worse). Why should I care? Besides, people discuss things on forums, and a more detailed review is more useful than a simple vote. Finally, it is often not that hard to see whether the presentation or the content is worth your while from the first few minutes of watching it. (There are, of course, some cases when watching is made difficult because of the presenter’s excessive showing their face or gesticulation, or having a distracting accent, but even those do not necessarily deserve being called “crap.”)
I can scan hundreds of vote counts in the time it takes to watch a few minutes of a single video. Google chose to make this process orders of magnitude worse for no good reason.
Also, why should I care about the algorithm's opinion? IME it's much much worse on average than the up+down vote ratio from thousands of individuals.
I'm surprised it's taken this long, honestly. Seeing other sites which in some ways just clone Youtubes functionality but are focused on education, where creators can make courses and sell them (Udemy for example), it just makes sense to me.
When you say 'clone Youtube's functionality' do you just mean host and play videos? That's a pretty narrow definition, and one that I don't think YouTube deserves to have a monopoly on.
Can we go back to the chapter on YouTube where we had downvotes so we can tell whether or not a video is going to be high quality and informative or not?
I don't understand YouTube's move to remove the downvote button - cyber bullying? What I will say though is it actually hasn't stopped me from being able to identify a bad video. If a "bad" video had 1,000 upvotes and (previously) had 10,000 downvotes, combined with a high view count and engage via the comments, just removing the downvotes still tells me everything I need to know: 1,000 upvotes on a high view count video with high engagement? Probably a bad video.
But again, I don't know why they removed it? /shrug
I think it was more useful for evaluating videos with low view counts. Maybe the video was good/useful, just not by an established high subscriber YouTuber. Or it's garbage spam but I can't see the 200 downs next to the 20 ups.
I am affiliated with a few Youtubers from a wide variety of topics and the general gist I have gotten from all of them is that they don't want to charge for content nor they do really want to do sponsorships or Patreon. They just want their CPMs to not be absolute garbage like they used to be.
Yes? That doesn't contradict what I'm saying. Youtube isn't putting ads on the paid courses but that doesn't help most Youtubers. Youtubers that want to sell courses are already doing that on Udemy and Teachable. What Youtubers want is their CPM on their regular videos to not be in the toilet.
I've learned so much from youtube, I've routinely provided tips to people who generate great content. It's awesome to see them invest more into this :)
I produce Music Tech-based educational content on YT. It started as a hobby and sideline to my main work (which at the time was classroom teaching of the same content). While I'm no longer working in classrooms (pandemic plus other reasons led to this), I'm still producing content, which I think is of good quality and worthwhile.
The issue I have with it is that I refuse to produce attention-grabbing clickbaity titles or thumbnails. I don't like the whole algorithmically-driven race to the bottom of the brain stem, and have zero interest in producing the same. I've had plenty of comments from viewers who say the videos are great and informative, but if I'd just jazz things up a bit then I'd get more views.
I'm just wondering how this will change (if at all) with this new program. It takes a LOT of time to produce decent content, and even more if you're going to provide a course and backup materials etc.. Writing curricula is HARD work, and writing tests, etc., that are actually valid is reasonably challenging and time consuming.
I currently get about £100 a month from YT, which definitely doesn't reflect the time I put into it (but I know it has other benefits as I sell a fair number of books partly as a result of the viewership). I know that the beasts of the platform (3b1b spring to mind) would do really well from this (and deservedly so), but I do wonder if things really need to change to make YT work well for genuinely-produced non-clickbait educational content.
> Click bait isn't different than wearing a funny hat to engage students in class.
what are you talking about?
a student gets stuck going to class regardless of how goofy the teacher dresses, whereas I feel an extreme sense of revulsion when I click on a YT link with a meme-thumbnail or a clickbait title.
your analogy fails since in this instance the 'student' gets to decide whether or not they participate in the course.
If I had had the chance to walk out on goofy teachers through high school then -- just as one anecdote -- I wouldn't have graduated.
so, in other words, clickbait 'engagement' style marketing will get your volume numbers up, but the hidden aspect is that there will be a market that pulls entirely away from you -- 'teachers' on YT will need to understand these market dynamics if they're really interested in teaching the masses rather than making money on viewership.
If teachers K-12 were paid according to their student throughput that'd turn into a major humanitarian crisis, imo.
You’re baking in the assumption that goofy hat is 100% correlated with bad content, but I’d say 30% of my YouTube subscriptions do the goofy hat thing (usually just having somewhat baity thumbnails / titles) yet deliver great content.
And honestly? I don’t care. The content is good, and if the hat gets them more viewers then all the better.
I'm not who you replied to, but I do care, I don't want to be made to feel stupid, I don't want to think that people are stupid, I want things to be presented as they are even if not immediately understands them.
In the UK we see this with nonsense talk of 'the [energy] price cap' being some £ figure per year - when it's not, it's a £/kWh cap, but the media can't cope with that, we're stuck with what it means for 'the average household'. Even comparison sites refuse to compare what you actually pay, £/day and £/kWh, and instead insist on asking you about number of bedrooms etc.
Good example of clown being educational is ElectroBoom. He constantly keeps "accidentally" electrocuting himself and goofing around. The videos have very crisp editing and baity thumbnails. At the same time a lot of the content is deeply informative and educational.
I'm not sure you can call his series a curriculum, yet I think I learned a lot more from there than from my university classes, despite watching it primarily for the fun and not for learning.
You're correct. Now imagine that the vast majority of teachers focused more on wearing funny hats to engage students than teaching them the material - because schools paid them more for that.
Parents would probably be interested in alternatives.
A click bait, is a bait, a lure in all instances to get something different what is expected.
A fish wanting the worm gets the hook, a fox wanting the meat, gets the snap trap. The clicker wanting the content promised in the title, gets something different, not what is expected.
> ... wearing a funny hat ...
An instructor still delivers all the details and content as expected with or without the funny hat. Not so for click bait videos.
Having good thumbnails and tiles is just marketing. If you want to sell or get the word out about what you are offering it helps to have a good marketing effort. Yes, creating the material is a lot of work, but that doesn't mean that marketing is something that doesn't need hard work.
The problem is it isn't "good" thumbnails. It's that stupid fucking, "who farted?" face. Or more often for young women, it's "Uh-oh, I did a bad thing" face.
I agree, race to the bottom of the brain stem. I sympathize with GP
It's not stupid if it works. It's not like it's YouTube who is deciding these types of thumbnails perform well. It's just that users engage with those kinds of thumbnails more.
The race is about making the best possible thumbnail based of empirical data and not aesthetics.
Right but the context to this is not fixed and is human constructed. Just because a bad system produces undesirable outcomes doesn’t mean we have to shrug our shoulders as if this is the only possible state of things.
Yes, but it's not about making cringe and it's not a race to the bottom.
I don't see how it's not marketing? YouTube is willing to promote your video for free and asks you to upload some promotional material for them to use.
The middle ground I've seen is to concede a bit to the clickbaters and make a few clickbait videos that talk about what you do and what's available in the other videos.
It depends on what you want. Google is optimizing for eye balls so content that warrants more engagement is going to win. 2 questions on the end of the spectrum to ask yourself...
Do you want to build a community that is a reflection of your ideas?
Do you want to build revenue by growing your channel regardless of the type of consumer you attract?
While obviously in a minority, GP should take heart in the fact there are viewers out there, myself included, that will actively avoid videos with click bait title cards.
Silly facial expressions and “you won’t believe…” type text are an instant turn-off for me. However, they are obviously effective in engaging a younger audience.
Whenever people say that I think "of course I don't believe ..." (ie that the topic is stupid, or that the decision of the day by xyz company is weird/bad/good, etc)
why should I believe or not believe in someone who I don't know?
If my mom says "you won't believe me if I told you you are not my son, but adopted" I'd be shocked.
Random youtuber "you won't believe?" - heck I don't believe a word coming out of your mouth! Of Course I DON'T believe you.
> content that warrants more engagement is going to win
What does that even mean?
I'd be careful about using the language of silicon value ad companies. It changes how you think. One minute you're talking about content and community and the next thing you know you have metrics and are trying to measure engagement and are now making decisions based off something you could actually measure and not relying on your instincts, experience, and good taste.
Instead, create videos (not content) for your fans / audience based on what you know works. Make it so good, your audience will want to support you.
I think Justin Sandercoe does a good job of this. There is a community on his web site and a community on his YouTube channel, but more importantly he has fans on every guitar forum on the internet. He sells books for people who want them and he has courses you can pay for, but they are mostly guides through his lessons which are all available for free on YouTube or reproductions of copyrighted work which he can't give away for free.
The most important thing for his success (IMHO) is that he has created a lot of very high quality videos. He doesn't do clickbait titles or images. Just video after video of great stuff.
>Make it so good, your audience will want to support you.
You used the same type of voice you criticized, I'm confused why you're projecting this narrative onto my comment.
I'm obviously pointing out that clickbait content will get more engagement. I'm trying to make the OP ask themselves what they want... which I believe is very clear.
I probably am projecting and for that I apologize.
I do bristle at the use of words like content and engagement. If you are thinking about those things, you’ve already surrendered. I believe thinking in those terms will lead you to make more of the same stuff that’s already out there.
Mostly though, nobody should make content. That’s a word used by platform operators because it’s all they see your work as. To them, the thing you’ve created is just another file they can store in their CMS, to be monetized later. Be a video producer or podcaster or digital artist or writer or whatever it is (more specific is better IMHO), but don’t call yourself a content creator.
> Do you want to build a community that is a reflection of your ideas?
I do, and I think I've done that - I have regular viewers who I interact with, and some of them also get private tuition from me. Many more, though, have bought my book on Cubase and Music Technology, and have found it useful, which is wonderful for me. It's precisely why I don't engage in OTT titles or "shock face" thumbnails - although they are a lot better produced than when I first started the channel (which look more like 1940s UK Government infomercial titles!)
>Do you want to build revenue by growing your channel regardless of the type of consumer you attract?
No, I don't. I'm fortunate that I don't need to earn a lot of money to get by, and I'm not very materially driven. I have a decent house with no mortgage, and no expensive hobbies (any more!) or vices, and I'm generally pretty happy where I am. I'd love to make 10x what I'm making at the moment, and be able to devote a day or two a week to making videos, but I think it'd be difficult to get 10x the subscribers to allow me to do that.
This reminds me of a saying I've heard from Dean Graziosi (sales type guy).
"Sell them what they want, give them what they need".
I also dislike this whole game where you have to essentially mould yourself into this "mainstream click-baity character", but part of me recognises that if your goal is to sell, then you'd be wise to spend time on presenting your content in a way that is at least initially attention grabbing.
One way to think of it is - you owe it to your audience to save them from worse educational experiences, and the only way to save them is to try to rank higher than these other more click-baity low-value videos.
> but part of me recognises that if your goal is to sell, then you'd be wise to spend time on presenting your content in a way that is at least initially attention grabbing.
The issue is, I think, exactly that everyone must be at least partially a salesman to get ahead. Is this what we want? Is there a way for YouTube to compensate for clickbaity titles and thumbnails? Are they incentivized to do so?
Thinking back at teachers and teaching that I really liked, they aren't always the best salesmen, but they're always very good communicators, and good at speaking. I don't think that the content promoted by today's engagement machines are optimizing for that.
Just to add, most of us AREN'T trying to become big YouTube viral influencers. My channel has 2.5k viewers and all my videos were done because I want my in-class students to have a resource to review at home. I got my doctorate and a career as teaching faculty to teach students, not become another Computerphile. I love the channel and link it regularly, but again my passion is in helping people learn in the classroom. The "Thanks!" comments and $100 a year I get from YouTube are just nice bonuses to that end.
Honestly the biggest hurdles are the mythical free time and being comfortable enough with my understanding of the material to allocate said free time. I love the Khan Academy-style super casual, not overly produced, just "here's me writing out the concept and providing a worked example". Take a look at the link in my profile, you'll see its mostly that and talking head over code/slides recorded on OBS. I like that style because it requires minimal overhead work on my behalf.
Students' attention is low (not an insult, just what my analytics show). They are mostly searching for a fix to their immediate problem when coding. So my videos are split into 3-10 minute chunks covering that single thing. Recordings for a single concept take roughly 1ish hour, mostly a combination of setup, being human and flubbing words, and something in my examples going awry and taking too much time on it rather than demonstrating the example. I mostly record on Sundays (again, free day) or at night if I know I'm going to be away. As faculty, you're not paid extra to do this, so its very much intrinsic altruistic volunteering your time to do it.
And like I said, the second part is being comfortable enough with the material to record it. I'm teaching Intro to AI for the 3rd time this semester and while I'm confident in my ability to teach it, I still have some kinks in my examples. Typos, what gets covered when, etc. type things. I feel ready to record it during my next iteration, but then we fall back to making time to do it.
> "The issue is, I think, exactly that everyone must be at least partially a salesman to get ahead. Is this what we want?"
Regardless of what we as a society want, and even if YouTube never existed, it's the reality that salesmanship is always important to some extent.
Persuasive communication is important even outside of business: it's key for academia to get grants, it's important for non-profits to get funding and volunteers, and it's important for individuals who want to improve their lives (even in relationships). I know several people who are technically brilliant, but have abrasive personalities and/or fail to get their point across to key stakeholders, so they don't achieve what they want.
There is a difference between honest salesmanship and sales pitches that include lies or fraud. It's necessary to sell, but you can play the game with some ethics instead of not playing at all and losing out.
Sales and politics are not avoidable, I agree with that. While a scientist might have to dreadfully deal with salesmanship now and then, it shouldn't be affecting the day to day. We have procedures to isolate these things from core business, so we can focus without the hyper-selfawareness of salesmen. If you have to be constantly getting the most eyeballs, attention, upvotes, in everything you're doing, it will change you and your work. Look at the conversational tricks that people use to get ahead at your (least) favorite social media, and see which type of personality is promoted there.
What I'm trying to say is, while the medium doesn't change core mechanics of human behavior, it distorts and accentuates – there is, for instance, a difference between tiktok and a novel. And we do have power of mediums, we can choose to engage in different types, and we can lobby for digital mediums to change. So pitting youtubers against the algorithm (just pimp your quantum physics lecture with an O-face thumbnail) isn't the only way forward. There's also "here's how YouTube could be better" or "we need a better alternative for this type of content". Unfortunately, we have almost 0 visibility and control over the algorithm so there's very little behavioral analysis that can be done.
> "What I'm trying to say is, while the medium doesn't change core mechanics of human behavior, it distorts and accentuates – there is, for instance, a difference between tiktok and a novel. And we do have power of mediums, we can choose to engage in different types, and we can lobby for digital mediums to change."
You've made a good insight with an interesting solution. You might already be aware of this, but for an academic perspective, Canadian academic Marshall McLuhan framed this with the famous assertion "the medium is the message," [0] in other words the method of delivering a message strongly influences how that message is drafted. The reasons align with what you've written: the incentives caused by YouTube algorithms do pressure creators to create more clickbait content.
Perhaps human curation can be an initial way to get more viewership for quality channels that don't try as much to game the algorithms. Recommendations on HN and other forums have led to the discoveries of such interesting channels, though this would have limited impact versus change on YouTube's end.
>While a scientist might have to dreadfully deal with salesmanship now and then, it shouldn't be affecting the day to day.
Scientists spend something like 20-30% of their time begging for grant money.
Worse still, in order to get the grant money, scientists have to abandon the genuine pursuit of knowledge and do some random busywork bullshit that they deep down know will produce nothing of value.
Once they have produced the bullshit research, they then spend another disproportionately large chunk of time convincing their colleagues that their research is actually valuable.
The remainder of their work time is spent pretending that they don't realise that their peers' and colleagues' work is complete bullshit.
> Persuasive communication is important even outside of business.
You said "outside of business," and then gave three examples of _asking for money_. You could have said "in dating," or "in electoral politics," but even in those examples, "persuasive" speech verges on "coercive" speech.
> you can play the game with some ethics instead of not playing at all and losing out.
In a darwinian competition, eg "the marketplace of ideas," ethics will always lose out to money. To play is to lose.
> You said "outside of business," and then gave three examples of _asking for money_. You could have said "in dating," or "in electoral politics,
No, I didn't: the third item I listed was "it's important for individuals who want to improve their lives (even in relationships)." Relationships include both romantic and friendship. The second item with non-profits also mentioned recruiting volunteers, not just fundraising.
>"but even in those examples, "persuasive" speech verges on "coercive" speech.
Persuasive speech includes: if I ask a friend to hang out with me and go to a conference, it's great for the both of us because we'll both enjoy it together and learn. There's no threat or coercion here, it's a win-win that is communicated well. The non-persuasive alternative would be: "There's a professional event this Thursday, we should go" with no further explanation.
> "In a darwinian competition, eg "the marketplace of ideas," ethics will always lose out to money. To play is to lose."
Ethics has value in many contexts. Certain non-profits can struggle to raise money due to having a bad reputation. Significant ethical misconduct can lead to scandals and arrests of executives. Highly unethical companies end up paying premiums to applicants due to struggles with recruiting.
> In a darwinian competition, eg "the marketplace of ideas," ethics will always lose out to money
I might be confused about the context or definitions, but I didn't read on any darwinian model that included notion of "losing out to". Did oaks lose out to orcas? Or was it the other way around?
Sales were around before the industrial revolution and likely before the agrarian revolution. I'd conjecture that whether one employs ethics or not, a moderate amount of salesmanship can spice up ones daily hunting-gathering.
You're wrong in looking at orcas and oaks. They are too far apart the evolutionary path so that it is meaningless to think of them as competitors.
Darwinian selection is the species versus the environment and this environment can include other species, as well as other individuals in the same species with slightly different traits, that will compete for similar resources as well as the climate.
It's very difficult to even think of who is actually a competitor of who, was Facebook a competitor to myspace? Youtube to myspace? Tumblr? Livejournal? These were all platforms competing for creators and attentions so I think they are all in a certain degree of competition.
I think a sale in this space is the gathering of attention (i.e. time and/or money). But thinking of what's required to actually learn might offer some insight on why it is hard to compete in this space. To learn people need to spend effort and although it can be made fun it is extremely difficult to be made effortless. On the other hand, entertainment is effortless but it offers little learning. So these are two parameters that need to be tuned. But I think the problem here is that the algorithm benefits entertainment much more than it does learning, entertainment is more valuable for youtube's ultimate purpose (to grab the viewers attention) and so to thrive on youtube people that want to offer learning have an uphill battle to fight.
So I think this move is Youtube acknowledging that learning is also desirable in society and can be pulled apart from the loop and monetise in its own way. In other words, it's an evolutionary split, cells all have a common ancestor but some cells evolved to harvest the sun energy while others evolved to harvest the energy of other cells. Learning being desirable has given rise to platforms such as coursera which are also multi-million businesses and Youtube probably sees them uploading most of their content to youtube anyway (usually as private videos), so why not adapt the platform a little bit to give existing creators a chance to stay on youtube instead of moving to other services?
This move won't really solve the problem of entertainment predating on people's time over learning (if we consider that a problem) but it's not really intending to do that. So I believe if we want to look at things from a darwinian perspective we have different angles to look at. Creators that produce entertainment content will probably still benefit more than the ones that produce hard to approach but very good learning material, why? because attention is the most valuable resource out there. This move offers little solution to that, but, on the other hand creators will have more tools inside the platform to manage learning which will completely change the current online learning business and we'll see platforms like edx and coursera in need of offering more value to pull themselves apart from youtube. Because users from these platforms (including youtube education) are already searching for valuable learning experiences we might see evolutionary jumps in this particular area. Though this might also be a race to the bottom where youtube captures the segment and then changes to optimise attention-seeking. We'll see.
I think the problem is not precisely in the salesman but in that in a free world, the only way to get people to listen is to be appealing and what appeals to us is often not that healthy. Terms like "engagement machine" makes it sound like it's the algorithms which are unhealthy, but the problem begins with the audience. If everyone wanted to watch math content all the time then we'd have math celebrities over YouTube.
> Terms like "engagement machine" makes it sound like it's the algorithms which are unhealthy
I stand by this term for various reasons. I think it's accurate and summarizes the current day social media status quo.
> but the problem begins with the audience
Yes, but humans are non-linear. Porn, for instance, is extremely powerful for attracting clicks, and we've figured out that we need to keep it separate. Even if people want some amount of porn, they want other things too and the best way is to not mix. Now say hate, or cheap entertainment, is not porn but not super far off. Similarly, that type of content tends to win the attention-game against math lectures, if presented side-by-side to the average amygdala. If we mix it all together, it's hard to focus. So.. I'm pretty skeptical to leave education to Youtube. Not only do they have all the cheap content, they're incentived to bombard you with it.
>The issue is, I think, exactly that everyone must be at least partially a salesman to get ahead. Is this what we want?
That's what the world's biggest marketing company wants.
Otherwise, I think it's pretty obvious that the idea of rating artists, journalists, engineers and educators primarily on their salesmanship skills is a disaster in the making.
Most classroom teachers in the U.S. don’t need to sell because they are either employed at public schools (attendance is compulsory), or at private schools (selling is handled by the school administration).
In the long run, online learning will probably become dominated by the equivalent of private schools: companies that hire great teachers and, separately, great marketers to build audiences.
Or look it at this way: Nonprofit authors don’t generally design their own book covers. They work with a publisher who does that. Why should teachers try to design their own YouTube thumbnails?
(On the flip side, if you highly value your independence as a sole proprietor, then yeah, expect that you’ll have to put on the marketing hat sometimes).
Also a good chunk of folks (i know) that are good at what they do, will not be salesy.
Call it misplaced pride or whatever, but they usually feel doing/saying something purely because it helps selling comes across "not pure" or "not in good faith" or not "why I do this".
Eventually they end up justifying with something along the lines of "good product (or person) just sells itself" or end up bitter comparing themselves with someone who sold worse stuff, but sold more to stay long enough in business.
good advertising/sales/marketing (i know they are not the same) strategies have a large upfront cost, which most if not all good-but-failed products/services cannot sustainably pay for.
My hope for the internet was to lower the bar by being accessible to everyone and allowing more indie sellers to prosper. And it did deliver. what i did not see coming was this industry for gaming the system which in turn drowns the true indie voice.
My first serious number theory course was called "number theory and cryptography." The professor told us on the first day that modern crypto is basically a trivial application of the major proof from the second half of the course, and that the title was basically click bait. Awesome class, a couple students got NSA interviewers later.
> if your goal is to sell, then you'd be wise to spend time on presenting your content in a way that is at least initially attention grabbing
Or you bet against fads and hope that your consistent brand will develop an increasingly loyal and appreciative following over the long term.
You could lose that bet, but sometimes cashing in on today’s hot trends means washing out and being forgotten when they change. You’re making bets every where you look.
The justification some youtubers (LTT comes to mind) use for clickbait video titles/thumbnails is that they feel that so long as the content itself is good then it doesn’t matter what techniques they use to get people to watch it. Their logic is that there’s nothing wrong with lying to get someone to watch your video so long as they enjoy it once they do.
To me it the race to the bottom of clickbait video titles/thumbnails feels dishonest and harmful but it’s hard to see what to do about it other than manual curation and/or alternative platforms which don’t use recommendations to exponentially amplify click rates.
It's a hard line to walk. And I'm sure not everybody draws the same line.
The part I think LTT and many other folks with a similar philosophy ignore is that even engaging with their title/thumbnail isn't free. Clickbait forcefully grabs attention which requires every potential viewer to spend time and energy evaluating that option. A less forceful title/thumbnail makes it much easier to quickly and easily find the things you actually want to spend your time and energy on.
To make matters worse, most/all clickbait does it's damnedest to make it as hard as possible to decide a video isn't worth the time. Even when you know it's not worth it, the clickbait can make it extremely hard to actually skip.
So yeah, it has a real cost, even when the video itself is good. It's not equally good for everybody, and figuring that out has a cost too.
(And LTT in particular really pushes the boundaries, far more than most that actually try to not be dicks. LTT will sometimes draw the line at 'merely' technically not saying a lie, and blame you for hearing one anyway.)
> One way to think of it is - you owe it to your audience to save them from worse educational experiences, and the only way to save them is to try to rank higher than these other more click-baity low-value videos.
This is clear self-deception and a way for a person to start the slide down the slippery slope to abandoning their standards. You don't owe it to your audience to 'save them' (a weird, evangelical way of putting it). You might like to put better content out there and hope that people find it and value it (and take reasonable steps to promote it, in a non-scammy way) but no, you don't need to rank higher than lower quality content. Because 9 times out of 10 the highest ranking content is junk and trying to rank higher will cause your own content to descend into being junk as well.
From what I have seen this idea of is the problem with a lot of online courses.
The courses that sell seem to be made by great sales men and women. But then the actual course itself is bad.
A lot of courses/content is created by a single person. The chances of them being great sales people and educators at the same time is pretty rare I would imagine.
This goes back to what the original commenter is feeling, the algo is going to work to the benefit of the great sales people. Which in turn leaves the good educators and the learner at a disadvantage.
We need a better way to find great courses/learning content. Social media(including Youtube in this) is not a great way to discover good content.
I think there exists a middle ground that doesn't devalue your content, sell your soul, sacrifice your authenticity, keep up with the joneses, etc. That being said, hard pass on the clickbaity thumbnails and titles. When folks suggest "jazzing things up", they might be looking for some vlogging and conversational segments. You, as a personality, are just as marketable and appealing as the content you produce. You are the brand.
An example of an overcorrection would be posting short one-off videos that address specific problems and solutions with titles such as "When Should I Apply Reverb?" or "My Top 5 VST Plugins". If producing lectures is your strong suit, well, we need more of that...
I'm a creator too. I'm small on YouTube (3,880 subs; 6.4k views and about 293 hours watched in the last 28 days), but have a (relatively speaking) large Discord with 3,800 members. I have a mailing list of about 1,600. My goal and focus is to sell, but it's to sell a big package around the idea of IT education. I want to sell to people who want the interaction and community, not just the knowledge dump.
And I'm the same. I won't do the over-the-top, hyped up character who uses the latest trends to grab your attention, like some sort of hollowed out clown that has no real joy in the middle.
Instead, I just focus on writing my online courses, mentoring people, and building a community. If you're interested in the same thing, and I can help, reach out :-)
Hey 3880 subs is pretty good. I'm still on 241. haha. It actually takes a lot of effort to get past 1000 subs/5000 watch hours, which is the minimum for monetization.
The minimum for you to monetize it. Google will gladly sell ads and keep 100% until then.
I wouldn’t have built what became a $2000/month revenue website if I didn’t start making $2/month, then more work to get to $20/month, then 200, then 2000 over ~5 years.
YouTube is shooting itself in the foot with its monetization cutoffs.
Reach out? How?
Looking up movedx i found a channel with 40 and a channel with 441 subs.
Having integrity in 2022 seems pretty cool, but am i missing something...like a link?
There is certainly slimy YouTube tactics for attention and clicks, but not all successful YouTubers are doing slimy things.
If your videos are genuinely interesting and / or useful, you need to be able to convey that fact to users, before they watch it. It isn't too much to ask.
Just imagine a viewer asking you the question, "ok so why should I watch your videos over someone else's?". It is a fair question. And replying back, "you don't get to know that until you watch it" isn't a reasonable response.
Matthias Wandel comes to mind as exceptional here - almost 2M subscribers as I recall, a popular 'second channel' too, and way against 'youtube scream face' and similar nonsense. He's done a few 'shorts' since initially saying he didn't (as I don't) see the point, but other than that, standout top of class etc.
I just hope that the use of metadata is enforced using AI the same way copyright is being enforced. I think a better approach would be to corral/wall-off this learning content sub-platform, similar to how kidsyoutube is walled-off. I wouldn't mind typing youtube.ed or edutube.. or something else. The value of youtube would be in the big iron behind it, so the front-end can be anything, as long as it's policed to comply. Example of it not being police. I make a video and I call it "Trump's documents classification". I then use the metadata to insert words used in FBI classification and voila..
People will never just spontaneously realize you exist and on their own seek out the media you produce.
They have to discover you somehow. The YouTube Algorithm is at least partially concerned with enabling people who would like your channel to discover it.
Regardless of how well you think YouTube does that, you have to admit it's not exactly a simple thing to do. YouTube is trying to maximize ad revenue by maximizing watch time. They are not trying to evenly distribute viewer attention among "worthy" channels.
Take a look at Veritasium's perspective on this issue [1]. Veritasium reflects on clickbait thumbnails from the content producer perspective, and balances that against the motivation behind YouTube's algorithms. His final conclusion is that cilckbait isn't all bad, and that it serves an important purpose for both viewers and content creators. His classification of clickbait into different types is also fascinating.
Very minor anecdata I would like to share: I have discovered Veritasium like most others, at the time when they weren't "clickbaiting", when their videos actually had the thing that they discussed right there in the title. I learned tons of things. Each new video, and each title, made me eager to discover that thing.
But around the time they implemented their "clickbait" titles and thumbnails, it had the opposite effect on me. They all just *seemed* like so many other videos: bland and tasteless. The content itself hasn't much changed, but the allure certain has diminished for me. I've stopped watching their videos.
Compare that to Curious Droid, or Practical Engineering, which still use descriptive titles, sometimes questions, but always exactly about the subject.
Totally see where you are coming from, and as a consumer I try to avoid any video that smells like clickbait.
There are many channels that do have great content and accurate captions/thumbnails. From what I’ve seen, having high quality, consistent content over a prolonged period of time is a pretty sure way to grow.
> Totally see where you are coming from, and as a consumer I try to avoid any video that smells like clickbait.
same.
i watch a lot of youtube. i pay monthly for it, so i don't have to see ads. i've seen linus tech tips videos come up in my recommendations a time or two, and i am never going to watch them, just on principle. boy do i ever hate the mugging and pimping people like him indulge in, in an effort to bait me into watching.
3Blue1Brown and channels of the like are the ones I gravitate to. Unfortunately a lot of things on YT are based on bad news and exaggerations selling better than more reasonable content
Honestly, if your content is good, all the more you should put some effort on your thumbnails. Don't feel bad about it.
To me it's like spending your lifetime writing an amazing book, only to spend a few minutes on designing the cover. It could be an amazing video/book. But how would I as the customer know?
I (and probably many other people) are constantly searching for good videos to watch. And unlike books, it's so easy to take a peek on a video and decide to close it within seconds if it's not something that is interesting to me.
While I agree with your hesitation in marketing deceptive content, I think you may be overloading marketing on YouTube with the term click-bait.
From Wikipedia:
> Clickbait is ... designed to attract attention and to entice users to follow that link ..., being typically deceptive, sensationalized, or otherwise misleading.
Think about it the other way, for all the time you spend producing content in an effort to help others, wouldn't it be more rewarding to you to help as many people as possible? As a user of YouTube, when I search for help with something, I typically start with result that visually looks like it's going to provide me the best answer, as that's the only thing to go on. If the title and thumbnail looked low-effort, I assume the content would look low-effort as well. Maybe that's an intentional aesthetic choice, it can definitely work for some content.
HOWEVER, if the video were to actually deceive me, I would just stop going to that creator entirely. This should be true for most viewers and YouTube is encouraged not to provide misleading results. Otherwise, trust in the results would diminish searching directly through YouTube.
I used to think like this about marketing in general. "Build it and they will come" was the usual motto in my formative years. But isn't it a shame to build a great product and then not have people engage with it, just because I frown upon marketing?
Good to see producers also don't like attention-grabbing titles or thumbnails. I fight clickbate with the only tool I have found.
If a recommended canal have clickbait titles, shocked faces on the thumbnails or if the titles are auto-translated to my language I select never recommend this canal and move on to the next
There are some examples in fitness-educational content, say Jeff Nippard and Athlean-X, that use some clickbait tactics in terms of thumbnail choosing, titles, and editing, but then nonetheless delivery high-quality educational content that doesn't seem like it should have been behind clickbait.
But even if you feel like that's a betrayal of your integrity and you just want to produce something like MIT OCW, well, there are other examples from fitness content, say Stronger by Science, Sigma Nutrition, Iron Culture, where they either make enough to get by but not a ton, or even in Iron Culture's case lose money from the social media ventures but do it anyway. If you want to use MIT itself as an example of something that can be legitimate, high-quality education, but still make money, you can consider that universities operate as non-profits and rely on charitable donations to amass the wealth they have.
I don't think the phenomenon you're getting at here is limited to YouTube or even to educational content on any platform. Sellers of junk food make more money than sellers of high-nutritional, better quality food, and the most profitable sellers of high-nutrition content, high-quality food are even still using clickbait-like tactics of misleading marketing and overselling what their products can really do. The most boring fruit and vegetable stands in the world selling basic nutrient-dense, really good products but not lying about what it can do for you, are just getting by and not getting rich.
Sometimes, that has to be enough. If you believe in what you're doing, do it, even if you're not going to get rich.
I find this thread interesting because the 10-or-so comments I've read are all discussing the merits and necessities of 'salesmanship' for this kind of work and throwing their hands in the air for 'What could be done' (maybe not literally but by omission of engagement with that part of the topic).
From my perspective, there are viable 'solutions' to this problem; Patreon, Curiosity stream, Coursera, etc.
I suppose those solutions, Direct Pay or Subscription, require more from individuals compared to youtube, 'free but with ads'. So the problem here is , "Is there a solution to the ad-revenue-based-on-views approach that keeps the content free for viewers"? When you identify it like that, I don't think there can be. I think the model demanding as many views as possible is a feature not a bug even if the outcomes are less than desirable. And now, in my view, we're talking about failures of Capitalism and this is just one example, Teachers being another.
> I don't like the whole algorithmically-driven race to the bottom...
Yup.
The consumer's challenge is finding what they want (or need).
Is it ironic that a search company mostly uses recommenders?
Why not better search? Why not better foraging and browsing?
--
Sole reliance on algorithmic recommenders, automated hate machines, has resulted in multiple negative outcomes. Existential threat to democracy, spike in teen suicides, accelerant for self radicalization, death of independent journalism, dominance of conspiratorial thinking, loss of public discourse, and probably a few more.
I'm sure search, foraging, and browsing strategies also have downsides. But I can't imagine how the outcomes could be worse.
Maybe just me, but I'm not really excited for established YouTubers to sell more stuff and expand their empires. It's already a winner-take-all game of attention.
The beauty of YouTube is finding like a retired professor who puts up their lectures on an account with a couple thousand subscribers.
It is not having a click-bait worthy thumbnail, over-produced video, and barely learning anything while being mindlessly entertained.
YouTube will kill many services in the process like skillshare, udemy, etc. They will continue to get bigger and bigger or this will fail miraculously.
They might (do that kind of killing), but I'd also like to think that good educators are a segment that will be wary and savvy enough to steer clear of something that doesn't support the learning that they want to foster, so other learning platforms will endure. Basically I don't think that selling education works like selling ads. But I'm not objective (being an educator).
I found channels with 10k-100k subscribers to be extremely high in quality and... bespoke. Just these days, I am learning a lot about OpenWRT while I wait for my router to arrive, and there was one channel with near 30k subscribers run by an amazing person, as he shares quite detailed information about routers, even the ones that are less exciting.
This was such a fresh breath from Linus Tech Tips style "we upgraded to 100 Gbps network" kind of content, because most of us are just tinkering around with consumer hardware, and geek out on minor details.
That, and they don't shove merchandise and minute long sponsored contents to you.
Agreed, some of these smaller channels still carry the spirit of public access TV by attempting to be informative first rather than going straight to growth hacking.
> YouTube will kill many services in the process like skillshare, udemy, etc.
Honestly I can't get over a cynical impression that the announcement is basically: "brilliant and skillshare are getting a bit too popular, we need to do something about it".
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 321 ms ] threadI'm also curious what benefits youtube would provide a creator/educator like, say, musician Charles Cornell, who is already perfectly able to sell his course that he advertises in his youtube videos.
I never hear about a new product or changes from them.
True.
> shows content on commonly used education apps without distractions like ads, external links or recommendations
External links seem important on educational files, and I kind of like recommendations when I'm browsing educational stuff, but whoo, no ads on educational stuff? That's great!
> Next year, qualified creators can begin offering free or paid
There it is.
That’s not an answer as much as it’s moving the question.
Solution proposed by Google: Lets charge customers who view this content so that we can pay creators more without losing revenue.
Solution proposed by Consumers: Lets give creators a larger share of youtube's profits. We're already paying for the service by offering our data, our youtube premium subscriptions, and other forms of MTX monetization.
TLDR; Youtube is double dipping in the guacamole bowl, despite having billions of pounds of guacamole.
I think that two things can both be true: creators should be paid for their work, commensurate with the value they provide, and learning should be free (or of negligible cost) to the person doing the learning. There are exceptions to the latter when there isn't a platform involved, like personalized tutoring or coaching, but in general.
YouTube can achieve both of those goals, and advertising is not the only solution. What bothers me most about this announcement is that they aren't doing anything _new_. This is basically a carbon copy of Udemy's value prop, leveraged by YT's existing massive scale. Other than the videos being hosted on YouTube, it doesn't do anything that other platforms haven't already been doing for years.
It isn't a big assumption at all because this is an external embedded player (so the user is not 1 click away from the youtube homepage, they will be in a completely separate app), with no watch-next recommendations or external links.
This is designed explicitly to not compel the viewer into continuing on to watch unrelated youtube videos.
> a new YouTube embedded player that shows content on commonly used education apps without distractions like ads, external links or recommendations.
We've determined by our standards that you have too much guacamole. But, we refuse to see the hypocrisy of this hand-wavy standard that we've got way too much guacamole ourselves compared to another arbitrary entity. We also think, based on our own subjective assessment that guacomole is bad for you and you must reduce consumption. Correct strategy according to our experts is that we need to coerce those who have too much guacomole (again based on our subjective assessment) must give it to those who we think do not have enough. It is morally approved by insert-current-virtue-thing.
Subjectivism has taken over objectivism.
If you're going to make a pitch that Google should pay more money to creators, there's got to be at least some justification for it. other than "i want more money". If google is underpaying creators, then creators should switch to other platforms. If platforms like nebula become a threat, they'll start paying more. as long as most youtubers can make more money on youtube than any other platform, there's no reason for youtube to pay more. that's how capitalism works.
[0]: https://www.omnicoreagency.com/youtube-statistics/
Some community measure of the content quality perhaps? Something opposite of a Like button?
So pretty much, with launching a model where viewers might pay, Youtube is launching a Udemy competitor, no?
But otherwise isn't being able to charge directly a good thing assuming creators remove ads and any product placement?
Google just wants that Nebula money.
https://blog.nebula.app/nebula-classes/
The classes are advertised on the Nebula homepage to subscribers, but require additional payment.
By contrast, you now can chose between ads and no ads, both on youtube (and the former likely with algorithmic support).
That's a different calculus that - as it seems to me - should imply more paid content than before, contradicting your statement.
Media entrepreneurs set out to run a certain kind of business, revenue-engine-wise; and they choose their distribution channels by what will allow them to do the revenue model they have in mind. They don't compromise on their plans by choosing a channel with a larger reach but an entirely different revenue model. If they can't start a business with the revenue model they had in mind, then they just don't start that business. (They might start some entirely different business that does fit the revenue model of the channel; but that'd be a ground-up re-think, and probably have nothing in common with the original business.)
A TV-series creative planner doesn't "compromise" when they can't get their TV pitch greenlit, by turning around and making a Hollywood movie or "direct-to-VHS" miniseries instead. Those are entirely different revenue models, and so require entirely different development strategies — different budgets, different teams, even different content!
Same with educational content. You don't put the sorts of courseware videos you'd publish on Coursera, on YouTube as ad-supported recommendation-discovered videos. They don't belong there. People won't watch them, and you won't (currently) make any money. (For one thing — as another comment thread here attests — they aren't designed to be clickbait in the way that YouTube videos are, so they'll be ignored by the recommendation engine.)
If you're already creating that type of content, you're currently creating it for some other platform where it works, and ignoring YouTube. Now YouTube will be one more "platform where it works." That doesn't change anything about whether you will have made this type of content. It only (maybe) changes how much money you'll make doing it, and so moves a few people over from "not creating educational content at all" to "creating courseware on YouTube." Just like happens incrementally every time one of the other dozens of such courseware sites pop up.
Now, most (or even all) of those related videos will be replaced by "pay to watch" videos, and i'm 99.9% sure, that the algorithms will prioritize paid video over free content, so all the free stuff will get buried, and you're left with shitty paid content of worse quality than those old, free videos.
There are numerous channels with click bait titles that are little more than upsells to their paid courses. Quality courses (not referring to pre-recorded uni lectures) are not given away for free.
Have to open a laptop to replace the hard drive? No service manual? Just google "XY-123 laptop disassembly", and you'll get a video. Now, a "XY-123 disassembly course", only $1.99.
Good revenue stream, especially if they can get partnership deals with schools or other educational institutions. Imagine YouTube getting this sort of "guaranteed" revenue, like publishers do from textbooks, but getting schools to foot the bill instead of students; great business model.
TLDs used to carry a lot of weight, and used to signify something besides individual entities/companies... but it feels to me like that designation is becoming rather diluted.
One can arrange their own TLD for under $200,000 initial fee, plus around $25,000 a year (IIRC).
I imagine there will be a whole TLD auction game, but among those with deep pockets and governed by an organization that doesn't seem to take their job seriously. ICANN looks like a cash grab nowadays to me. I don't mean any offense to the engineers behind it, just that the administration seems quite greedy.
It’s mostly the tiny islands that decide to cash in on fancy tlds who don’t care so much about providing them as a service to the small population.
Nearly no one knows the meaning of .com
also the US centric monopoly of .gov is probably antithetical to many early internet ideals.
.edu is much worse IMO.
Interestingly, a number of corporations that registered their own TLDs seem to have since let them go. You can see them by searching for "Not assigned" on that page.
https://icannwiki.org/.ninja
So you're cloning Udemy? Meh. Not much to be excited about so far.
Finally, to help learners apply what they’ve learned, we’re introducing Quizzes — a new way for creators to help viewers test their knowledge.
That could be somewhat useful, but..
For example, a math creator who recently posted a series on algebra can create a Quiz on the Community tab to ask their viewers a question related to a concept taught in their latest video.
Does anybody ever actually visit the "Community" tab of a channel? Why add this extra friction? Hasn't the technology progressed to the point that quizzes could be integrated right into the video player? For that matter, why not have "adaptive" videos where your quiz results can affect the video that you see (like triggering an extra in-depth explanation for notoriously tricky topic if the quiz taker scores below a certain level, etc.).
I hope this works out and provides some value, but I have my doubts as it stands.
They don't want creators funneling users to external sites like Patreon. They want 100% of their income going through Youtube.
Same reason they roll out the "most replayed" feature, to make it easier to skip in-video sponsor segments.
Yes.
Channels have community tabs?
Coursera does this right now. It's very useful.
https://www.dreamingspanish.com/
It's almost like they know how addicting their recommendations and other "distractions" are. They have to make a separate product to actually create a healthy environment for learning.
They removed the one metric that people had to signal that content is crap. So now people have to trust that "the algorithm" is filtering out all the junk. Which of course we know doesn't happen. The algorithm only cares about engagement, it doesn't care if the content is of good quality or even truthful.
But that would be just someone’s personal opinion (or worse). Why should I care? Besides, people discuss things on forums, and a more detailed review is more useful than a simple vote. Finally, it is often not that hard to see whether the presentation or the content is worth your while from the first few minutes of watching it. (There are, of course, some cases when watching is made difficult because of the presenter’s excessive showing their face or gesticulation, or having a distracting accent, but even those do not necessarily deserve being called “crap.”)
Also, why should I care about the algorithm's opinion? IME it's much much worse on average than the up+down vote ratio from thousands of individuals.
For instance a few weeks ago I was stuck on a quest in WoW Classic, so I did a quick YouTube search, 100k+ view video, dozens of likes.
Yeah the video sucked and didn't show anything worthwhile.
[1] https://www.returnyoutubedislike.com
But again, I don't know why they removed it? /shrug
They had a setting to disable votes per video but that just means the company admits the video is unpopular.
Ah, so they did it to counter vote-brigading? Makes sense now.
Most users dont care. So Google removes it because its good for business, not for the user.
Massively downvoted videos are bad press.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_top-level_domain#Expan...
The issue I have with it is that I refuse to produce attention-grabbing clickbaity titles or thumbnails. I don't like the whole algorithmically-driven race to the bottom of the brain stem, and have zero interest in producing the same. I've had plenty of comments from viewers who say the videos are great and informative, but if I'd just jazz things up a bit then I'd get more views.
I'm just wondering how this will change (if at all) with this new program. It takes a LOT of time to produce decent content, and even more if you're going to provide a course and backup materials etc.. Writing curricula is HARD work, and writing tests, etc., that are actually valid is reasonably challenging and time consuming.
I currently get about £100 a month from YT, which definitely doesn't reflect the time I put into it (but I know it has other benefits as I sell a fair number of books partly as a result of the viewership). I know that the beasts of the platform (3b1b spring to mind) would do really well from this (and deservedly so), but I do wonder if things really need to change to make YT work well for genuinely-produced non-clickbait educational content.
what are you talking about?
a student gets stuck going to class regardless of how goofy the teacher dresses, whereas I feel an extreme sense of revulsion when I click on a YT link with a meme-thumbnail or a clickbait title.
your analogy fails since in this instance the 'student' gets to decide whether or not they participate in the course.
If I had had the chance to walk out on goofy teachers through high school then -- just as one anecdote -- I wouldn't have graduated.
so, in other words, clickbait 'engagement' style marketing will get your volume numbers up, but the hidden aspect is that there will be a market that pulls entirely away from you -- 'teachers' on YT will need to understand these market dynamics if they're really interested in teaching the masses rather than making money on viewership.
If teachers K-12 were paid according to their student throughput that'd turn into a major humanitarian crisis, imo.
And honestly? I don’t care. The content is good, and if the hat gets them more viewers then all the better.
In the UK we see this with nonsense talk of 'the [energy] price cap' being some £ figure per year - when it's not, it's a £/kWh cap, but the media can't cope with that, we're stuck with what it means for 'the average household'. Even comparison sites refuse to compare what you actually pay, £/day and £/kWh, and instead insist on asking you about number of bedrooms etc.
I'm sick of everything being dumbed down.
I’m just saying there’s a decent reason for some of it. A huge audience on YouTube are children, teens.
I'm not sure you can call his series a curriculum, yet I think I learned a lot more from there than from my university classes, despite watching it primarily for the fun and not for learning.
Parents would probably be interested in alternatives.
A click bait, is a bait, a lure in all instances to get something different what is expected.
A fish wanting the worm gets the hook, a fox wanting the meat, gets the snap trap. The clicker wanting the content promised in the title, gets something different, not what is expected.
> ... wearing a funny hat ...
An instructor still delivers all the details and content as expected with or without the funny hat. Not so for click bait videos.
The thumbnails are doing the funny hat thing.
I agree, race to the bottom of the brain stem. I sympathize with GP
The race is about making the best possible thumbnail based of empirical data and not aesthetics.
Andrew Huberman has tame thumbnail images that are professional and informative. Like others have said, there has to be a middle ground to explore.
[1] https://i.ytimg.com/vi/nZQgszA0_80/hqdefault.jpg?sqp=-oaymwE...
are you seriously going to pretend that optimizing for the most cringy thumbnails , because its a race to the bottom on Youtube, is marketing?
this is a ridiculous take.
I don't see how it's not marketing? YouTube is willing to promote your video for free and asks you to upload some promotional material for them to use.
Do you want to build a community that is a reflection of your ideas?
Do you want to build revenue by growing your channel regardless of the type of consumer you attract?
While obviously in a minority, GP should take heart in the fact there are viewers out there, myself included, that will actively avoid videos with click bait title cards.
Silly facial expressions and “you won’t believe…” type text are an instant turn-off for me. However, they are obviously effective in engaging a younger audience.
Whenever people say that I think "of course I don't believe ..." (ie that the topic is stupid, or that the decision of the day by xyz company is weird/bad/good, etc)
why should I believe or not believe in someone who I don't know?
If my mom says "you won't believe me if I told you you are not my son, but adopted" I'd be shocked.
Random youtuber "you won't believe?" - heck I don't believe a word coming out of your mouth! Of Course I DON'T believe you.
What does that even mean?
I'd be careful about using the language of silicon value ad companies. It changes how you think. One minute you're talking about content and community and the next thing you know you have metrics and are trying to measure engagement and are now making decisions based off something you could actually measure and not relying on your instincts, experience, and good taste.
Instead, create videos (not content) for your fans / audience based on what you know works. Make it so good, your audience will want to support you.
I think Justin Sandercoe does a good job of this. There is a community on his web site and a community on his YouTube channel, but more importantly he has fans on every guitar forum on the internet. He sells books for people who want them and he has courses you can pay for, but they are mostly guides through his lessons which are all available for free on YouTube or reproductions of copyrighted work which he can't give away for free.
The most important thing for his success (IMHO) is that he has created a lot of very high quality videos. He doesn't do clickbait titles or images. Just video after video of great stuff.
You used the same type of voice you criticized, I'm confused why you're projecting this narrative onto my comment.
I'm obviously pointing out that clickbait content will get more engagement. I'm trying to make the OP ask themselves what they want... which I believe is very clear.
I do bristle at the use of words like content and engagement. If you are thinking about those things, you’ve already surrendered. I believe thinking in those terms will lead you to make more of the same stuff that’s already out there.
Mostly though, nobody should make content. That’s a word used by platform operators because it’s all they see your work as. To them, the thing you’ve created is just another file they can store in their CMS, to be monetized later. Be a video producer or podcaster or digital artist or writer or whatever it is (more specific is better IMHO), but don’t call yourself a content creator.
I do, and I think I've done that - I have regular viewers who I interact with, and some of them also get private tuition from me. Many more, though, have bought my book on Cubase and Music Technology, and have found it useful, which is wonderful for me. It's precisely why I don't engage in OTT titles or "shock face" thumbnails - although they are a lot better produced than when I first started the channel (which look more like 1940s UK Government infomercial titles!)
>Do you want to build revenue by growing your channel regardless of the type of consumer you attract?
No, I don't. I'm fortunate that I don't need to earn a lot of money to get by, and I'm not very materially driven. I have a decent house with no mortgage, and no expensive hobbies (any more!) or vices, and I'm generally pretty happy where I am. I'd love to make 10x what I'm making at the moment, and be able to devote a day or two a week to making videos, but I think it'd be difficult to get 10x the subscribers to allow me to do that.
"Sell them what they want, give them what they need".
I also dislike this whole game where you have to essentially mould yourself into this "mainstream click-baity character", but part of me recognises that if your goal is to sell, then you'd be wise to spend time on presenting your content in a way that is at least initially attention grabbing.
One way to think of it is - you owe it to your audience to save them from worse educational experiences, and the only way to save them is to try to rank higher than these other more click-baity low-value videos.
The issue is, I think, exactly that everyone must be at least partially a salesman to get ahead. Is this what we want? Is there a way for YouTube to compensate for clickbaity titles and thumbnails? Are they incentivized to do so?
Thinking back at teachers and teaching that I really liked, they aren't always the best salesmen, but they're always very good communicators, and good at speaking. I don't think that the content promoted by today's engagement machines are optimizing for that.
I’d be curious to learn if there’s any pain points or things you wish you could do faster in your process. Happy to chat offline :)
Students' attention is low (not an insult, just what my analytics show). They are mostly searching for a fix to their immediate problem when coding. So my videos are split into 3-10 minute chunks covering that single thing. Recordings for a single concept take roughly 1ish hour, mostly a combination of setup, being human and flubbing words, and something in my examples going awry and taking too much time on it rather than demonstrating the example. I mostly record on Sundays (again, free day) or at night if I know I'm going to be away. As faculty, you're not paid extra to do this, so its very much intrinsic altruistic volunteering your time to do it.
And like I said, the second part is being comfortable enough with the material to record it. I'm teaching Intro to AI for the 3rd time this semester and while I'm confident in my ability to teach it, I still have some kinks in my examples. Typos, what gets covered when, etc. type things. I feel ready to record it during my next iteration, but then we fall back to making time to do it.
Regardless of what we as a society want, and even if YouTube never existed, it's the reality that salesmanship is always important to some extent.
Persuasive communication is important even outside of business: it's key for academia to get grants, it's important for non-profits to get funding and volunteers, and it's important for individuals who want to improve their lives (even in relationships). I know several people who are technically brilliant, but have abrasive personalities and/or fail to get their point across to key stakeholders, so they don't achieve what they want.
There is a difference between honest salesmanship and sales pitches that include lies or fraud. It's necessary to sell, but you can play the game with some ethics instead of not playing at all and losing out.
What I'm trying to say is, while the medium doesn't change core mechanics of human behavior, it distorts and accentuates – there is, for instance, a difference between tiktok and a novel. And we do have power of mediums, we can choose to engage in different types, and we can lobby for digital mediums to change. So pitting youtubers against the algorithm (just pimp your quantum physics lecture with an O-face thumbnail) isn't the only way forward. There's also "here's how YouTube could be better" or "we need a better alternative for this type of content". Unfortunately, we have almost 0 visibility and control over the algorithm so there's very little behavioral analysis that can be done.
You've made a good insight with an interesting solution. You might already be aware of this, but for an academic perspective, Canadian academic Marshall McLuhan framed this with the famous assertion "the medium is the message," [0] in other words the method of delivering a message strongly influences how that message is drafted. The reasons align with what you've written: the incentives caused by YouTube algorithms do pressure creators to create more clickbait content.
Perhaps human curation can be an initial way to get more viewership for quality channels that don't try as much to game the algorithms. Recommendations on HN and other forums have led to the discoveries of such interesting channels, though this would have limited impact versus change on YouTube's end.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_medium_is_the_message
Scientists spend something like 20-30% of their time begging for grant money.
Worse still, in order to get the grant money, scientists have to abandon the genuine pursuit of knowledge and do some random busywork bullshit that they deep down know will produce nothing of value.
Once they have produced the bullshit research, they then spend another disproportionately large chunk of time convincing their colleagues that their research is actually valuable.
The remainder of their work time is spent pretending that they don't realise that their peers' and colleagues' work is complete bullshit.
Don't get into academia.
You said "outside of business," and then gave three examples of _asking for money_. You could have said "in dating," or "in electoral politics," but even in those examples, "persuasive" speech verges on "coercive" speech.
> you can play the game with some ethics instead of not playing at all and losing out.
In a darwinian competition, eg "the marketplace of ideas," ethics will always lose out to money. To play is to lose.
No, I didn't: the third item I listed was "it's important for individuals who want to improve their lives (even in relationships)." Relationships include both romantic and friendship. The second item with non-profits also mentioned recruiting volunteers, not just fundraising.
>"but even in those examples, "persuasive" speech verges on "coercive" speech.
Persuasive speech includes: if I ask a friend to hang out with me and go to a conference, it's great for the both of us because we'll both enjoy it together and learn. There's no threat or coercion here, it's a win-win that is communicated well. The non-persuasive alternative would be: "There's a professional event this Thursday, we should go" with no further explanation.
> "In a darwinian competition, eg "the marketplace of ideas," ethics will always lose out to money. To play is to lose."
Ethics has value in many contexts. Certain non-profits can struggle to raise money due to having a bad reputation. Significant ethical misconduct can lead to scandals and arrests of executives. Highly unethical companies end up paying premiums to applicants due to struggles with recruiting.
I might be confused about the context or definitions, but I didn't read on any darwinian model that included notion of "losing out to". Did oaks lose out to orcas? Or was it the other way around?
Sales were around before the industrial revolution and likely before the agrarian revolution. I'd conjecture that whether one employs ethics or not, a moderate amount of salesmanship can spice up ones daily hunting-gathering.
Darwinian selection is the species versus the environment and this environment can include other species, as well as other individuals in the same species with slightly different traits, that will compete for similar resources as well as the climate.
It's very difficult to even think of who is actually a competitor of who, was Facebook a competitor to myspace? Youtube to myspace? Tumblr? Livejournal? These were all platforms competing for creators and attentions so I think they are all in a certain degree of competition.
I think a sale in this space is the gathering of attention (i.e. time and/or money). But thinking of what's required to actually learn might offer some insight on why it is hard to compete in this space. To learn people need to spend effort and although it can be made fun it is extremely difficult to be made effortless. On the other hand, entertainment is effortless but it offers little learning. So these are two parameters that need to be tuned. But I think the problem here is that the algorithm benefits entertainment much more than it does learning, entertainment is more valuable for youtube's ultimate purpose (to grab the viewers attention) and so to thrive on youtube people that want to offer learning have an uphill battle to fight.
So I think this move is Youtube acknowledging that learning is also desirable in society and can be pulled apart from the loop and monetise in its own way. In other words, it's an evolutionary split, cells all have a common ancestor but some cells evolved to harvest the sun energy while others evolved to harvest the energy of other cells. Learning being desirable has given rise to platforms such as coursera which are also multi-million businesses and Youtube probably sees them uploading most of their content to youtube anyway (usually as private videos), so why not adapt the platform a little bit to give existing creators a chance to stay on youtube instead of moving to other services?
This move won't really solve the problem of entertainment predating on people's time over learning (if we consider that a problem) but it's not really intending to do that. So I believe if we want to look at things from a darwinian perspective we have different angles to look at. Creators that produce entertainment content will probably still benefit more than the ones that produce hard to approach but very good learning material, why? because attention is the most valuable resource out there. This move offers little solution to that, but, on the other hand creators will have more tools inside the platform to manage learning which will completely change the current online learning business and we'll see platforms like edx and coursera in need of offering more value to pull themselves apart from youtube. Because users from these platforms (including youtube education) are already searching for valuable learning experiences we might see evolutionary jumps in this particular area. Though this might also be a race to the bottom where youtube captures the segment and then changes to optimise attention-seeking. We'll see.
I stand by this term for various reasons. I think it's accurate and summarizes the current day social media status quo.
> but the problem begins with the audience
Yes, but humans are non-linear. Porn, for instance, is extremely powerful for attracting clicks, and we've figured out that we need to keep it separate. Even if people want some amount of porn, they want other things too and the best way is to not mix. Now say hate, or cheap entertainment, is not porn but not super far off. Similarly, that type of content tends to win the attention-game against math lectures, if presented side-by-side to the average amygdala. If we mix it all together, it's hard to focus. So.. I'm pretty skeptical to leave education to Youtube. Not only do they have all the cheap content, they're incentived to bombard you with it.
That's what the world's biggest marketing company wants.
Otherwise, I think it's pretty obvious that the idea of rating artists, journalists, engineers and educators primarily on their salesmanship skills is a disaster in the making.
In the long run, online learning will probably become dominated by the equivalent of private schools: companies that hire great teachers and, separately, great marketers to build audiences.
Or look it at this way: Nonprofit authors don’t generally design their own book covers. They work with a publisher who does that. Why should teachers try to design their own YouTube thumbnails?
(On the flip side, if you highly value your independence as a sole proprietor, then yeah, expect that you’ll have to put on the marketing hat sometimes).
Call it misplaced pride or whatever, but they usually feel doing/saying something purely because it helps selling comes across "not pure" or "not in good faith" or not "why I do this".
Eventually they end up justifying with something along the lines of "good product (or person) just sells itself" or end up bitter comparing themselves with someone who sold worse stuff, but sold more to stay long enough in business.
good advertising/sales/marketing (i know they are not the same) strategies have a large upfront cost, which most if not all good-but-failed products/services cannot sustainably pay for.
My hope for the internet was to lower the bar by being accessible to everyone and allowing more indie sellers to prosper. And it did deliver. what i did not see coming was this industry for gaming the system which in turn drowns the true indie voice.
Click bait is ok sometimes?
Or you bet against fads and hope that your consistent brand will develop an increasingly loyal and appreciative following over the long term.
You could lose that bet, but sometimes cashing in on today’s hot trends means washing out and being forgotten when they change. You’re making bets every where you look.
To me it the race to the bottom of clickbait video titles/thumbnails feels dishonest and harmful but it’s hard to see what to do about it other than manual curation and/or alternative platforms which don’t use recommendations to exponentially amplify click rates.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32785822
The part I think LTT and many other folks with a similar philosophy ignore is that even engaging with their title/thumbnail isn't free. Clickbait forcefully grabs attention which requires every potential viewer to spend time and energy evaluating that option. A less forceful title/thumbnail makes it much easier to quickly and easily find the things you actually want to spend your time and energy on.
To make matters worse, most/all clickbait does it's damnedest to make it as hard as possible to decide a video isn't worth the time. Even when you know it's not worth it, the clickbait can make it extremely hard to actually skip.
So yeah, it has a real cost, even when the video itself is good. It's not equally good for everybody, and figuring that out has a cost too.
(And LTT in particular really pushes the boundaries, far more than most that actually try to not be dicks. LTT will sometimes draw the line at 'merely' technically not saying a lie, and blame you for hearing one anyway.)
This is clear self-deception and a way for a person to start the slide down the slippery slope to abandoning their standards. You don't owe it to your audience to 'save them' (a weird, evangelical way of putting it). You might like to put better content out there and hope that people find it and value it (and take reasonable steps to promote it, in a non-scammy way) but no, you don't need to rank higher than lower quality content. Because 9 times out of 10 the highest ranking content is junk and trying to rank higher will cause your own content to descend into being junk as well.
The courses that sell seem to be made by great sales men and women. But then the actual course itself is bad.
A lot of courses/content is created by a single person. The chances of them being great sales people and educators at the same time is pretty rare I would imagine.
This goes back to what the original commenter is feeling, the algo is going to work to the benefit of the great sales people. Which in turn leaves the good educators and the learner at a disadvantage.
We need a better way to find great courses/learning content. Social media(including Youtube in this) is not a great way to discover good content.
An example of an overcorrection would be posting short one-off videos that address specific problems and solutions with titles such as "When Should I Apply Reverb?" or "My Top 5 VST Plugins". If producing lectures is your strong suit, well, we need more of that...
And I'm the same. I won't do the over-the-top, hyped up character who uses the latest trends to grab your attention, like some sort of hollowed out clown that has no real joy in the middle.
Instead, I just focus on writing my online courses, mentoring people, and building a community. If you're interested in the same thing, and I can help, reach out :-)
I wouldn’t have built what became a $2000/month revenue website if I didn’t start making $2/month, then more work to get to $20/month, then 200, then 2000 over ~5 years.
YouTube is shooting itself in the foot with its monetization cutoffs.
I developed the Discord community via the channel plus other ways.
If your videos are genuinely interesting and / or useful, you need to be able to convey that fact to users, before they watch it. It isn't too much to ask.
Just imagine a viewer asking you the question, "ok so why should I watch your videos over someone else's?". It is a fair question. And replying back, "you don't get to know that until you watch it" isn't a reasonable response.
I would expand on it slightly by adding that "Good Thumbnails" are complicated and are not necessarily "Clickbait".
They have to discover you somehow. The YouTube Algorithm is at least partially concerned with enabling people who would like your channel to discover it.
Regardless of how well you think YouTube does that, you have to admit it's not exactly a simple thing to do. YouTube is trying to maximize ad revenue by maximizing watch time. They are not trying to evenly distribute viewer attention among "worthy" channels.
I am hopeful that somehow…somehow!!! we can have the quality content like yours more discoverable without having to game the system.
It reminds me how “SEO” has turned into an entire, absolutely ridiculous meta game industry that rarely has to do with how good a website actually is.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2xHZPH5Sng
Been watching him from basically when his channel started many, many years ago. Was really disappointed to see him give in to this.
But around the time they implemented their "clickbait" titles and thumbnails, it had the opposite effect on me. They all just *seemed* like so many other videos: bland and tasteless. The content itself hasn't much changed, but the allure certain has diminished for me. I've stopped watching their videos.
Compare that to Curious Droid, or Practical Engineering, which still use descriptive titles, sometimes questions, but always exactly about the subject.
There are many channels that do have great content and accurate captions/thumbnails. From what I’ve seen, having high quality, consistent content over a prolonged period of time is a pretty sure way to grow.
same.
i watch a lot of youtube. i pay monthly for it, so i don't have to see ads. i've seen linus tech tips videos come up in my recommendations a time or two, and i am never going to watch them, just on principle. boy do i ever hate the mugging and pimping people like him indulge in, in an effort to bait me into watching.
To me it's like spending your lifetime writing an amazing book, only to spend a few minutes on designing the cover. It could be an amazing video/book. But how would I as the customer know?
I (and probably many other people) are constantly searching for good videos to watch. And unlike books, it's so easy to take a peek on a video and decide to close it within seconds if it's not something that is interesting to me.
not just that but the ones shown in this post are absolutely cringe. makes for zero credibility when it comes to education.
From Wikipedia:
> Clickbait is ... designed to attract attention and to entice users to follow that link ..., being typically deceptive, sensationalized, or otherwise misleading.
Think about it the other way, for all the time you spend producing content in an effort to help others, wouldn't it be more rewarding to you to help as many people as possible? As a user of YouTube, when I search for help with something, I typically start with result that visually looks like it's going to provide me the best answer, as that's the only thing to go on. If the title and thumbnail looked low-effort, I assume the content would look low-effort as well. Maybe that's an intentional aesthetic choice, it can definitely work for some content.
HOWEVER, if the video were to actually deceive me, I would just stop going to that creator entirely. This should be true for most viewers and YouTube is encouraged not to provide misleading results. Otherwise, trust in the results would diminish searching directly through YouTube.
I tried to find your channel, but I don't think I found it. Would you say it's name or link to it, if you don't mind me asking?
But even if you feel like that's a betrayal of your integrity and you just want to produce something like MIT OCW, well, there are other examples from fitness content, say Stronger by Science, Sigma Nutrition, Iron Culture, where they either make enough to get by but not a ton, or even in Iron Culture's case lose money from the social media ventures but do it anyway. If you want to use MIT itself as an example of something that can be legitimate, high-quality education, but still make money, you can consider that universities operate as non-profits and rely on charitable donations to amass the wealth they have.
I don't think the phenomenon you're getting at here is limited to YouTube or even to educational content on any platform. Sellers of junk food make more money than sellers of high-nutritional, better quality food, and the most profitable sellers of high-nutrition content, high-quality food are even still using clickbait-like tactics of misleading marketing and overselling what their products can really do. The most boring fruit and vegetable stands in the world selling basic nutrient-dense, really good products but not lying about what it can do for you, are just getting by and not getting rich.
Sometimes, that has to be enough. If you believe in what you're doing, do it, even if you're not going to get rich.
From my perspective, there are viable 'solutions' to this problem; Patreon, Curiosity stream, Coursera, etc.
I suppose those solutions, Direct Pay or Subscription, require more from individuals compared to youtube, 'free but with ads'. So the problem here is , "Is there a solution to the ad-revenue-based-on-views approach that keeps the content free for viewers"? When you identify it like that, I don't think there can be. I think the model demanding as many views as possible is a feature not a bug even if the outcomes are less than desirable. And now, in my view, we're talking about failures of Capitalism and this is just one example, Teachers being another.
So maybe the solution is community willpower.
Yup.
The consumer's challenge is finding what they want (or need).
Is it ironic that a search company mostly uses recommenders?
Why not better search? Why not better foraging and browsing?
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Sole reliance on algorithmic recommenders, automated hate machines, has resulted in multiple negative outcomes. Existential threat to democracy, spike in teen suicides, accelerant for self radicalization, death of independent journalism, dominance of conspiratorial thinking, loss of public discourse, and probably a few more.
I'm sure search, foraging, and browsing strategies also have downsides. But I can't imagine how the outcomes could be worse.
Society benefits when education is free. Keeping educational content behind a paywall just speaks to greed.
That's now a course for $14.99, BUT DONT YOU WORRY
you get a quiz with it now.
The beauty of YouTube is finding like a retired professor who puts up their lectures on an account with a couple thousand subscribers.
It is not having a click-bait worthy thumbnail, over-produced video, and barely learning anything while being mindlessly entertained.
YouTube will kill many services in the process like skillshare, udemy, etc. They will continue to get bigger and bigger or this will fail miraculously.
This was such a fresh breath from Linus Tech Tips style "we upgraded to 100 Gbps network" kind of content, because most of us are just tinkering around with consumer hardware, and geek out on minor details.
That, and they don't shove merchandise and minute long sponsored contents to you.
I find YouTube unbearable without ublock origin and sponsorblock.
Honestly I can't get over a cynical impression that the announcement is basically: "brilliant and skillshare are getting a bit too popular, we need to do something about it".