Youtube and guns

[KY DAN]

Go for it

 

[boom boom]

To understand Youtube a little better, you have to depart from the so-called "gun community" and look at the bigger picture. For Youtube to "monetize" a channel means they hand out cash for "views" and "subscribers." It doesn't take much imagination to recognize that's going to be "gamed." There are entire enterprises devoted to automatically creating channels, using software to generate new videos without human labor or intervention, and using banks or farms of virtualized computers to subscribe and watch them. Search on "finger family" and you'll find several nursery rhyme channels with over 22 million subscribers and single videos with over 1 billion views. These are not pop music videos. There are other channels with over 100 thousand videos uploaded (representing over 10 years of video play time). A quick search pulled up a "this little piggy" video uploaded 3 weeks ago with 2.7M views. These only represent the most rudimentary efforts that were realized many years ago. Since then, the whole game has become far more elaborate because naturally, Youtube is going to make an effort to identify channels and videos that get real people watching them with enough interest to tolerate targeted ads because ultimately the advertisers are going to become savvier and not want to pay for bots to watch their ads.

The bottom line is not to expect monetization from Youtube unless you're willing to make a tremendous effort to not only produce good content and cultivate a valuable audience but also to be recognized as distinct from the many scammers. There may be an impression that Youtube doesn't favor gun-related content or that they even persecute gun-content creators, but you can bet that what the company is even more actively working against are the ones trying to rip them off. Youtube gets paid the cash money that it generously favors by the NRA, USCCA, "Modern Barbarian," "Tactical Traps" and on and on... Just click around popular gun channels and watch all the targeted ads from money-paying advertisers that Youtube is not about to turn away. I can assure you they love money more than they hate guns.

From my understanding, the AdSense folks are the elite folks of Google and generate most of the profits and are largely left alone to maximize profits. These are the folks that both sell your information to businesses and the like and also target ads to you. They are the goose that lays the golden eggs for the company.

The trust and safety types, otoh, use their powers to block and hinder the smaller channels that represent unfavored positions by tweaking search algorithms etc. This came out recently as media reveals that Google has been jiggering search results and news feeds manually rather than through an algorithm (although an algorithm could probably be jiggered as well). I suspect it is because the AdSense people want the most popular channels left alone to feed ad dollars to Google. Thus, you have both a whitelist at google and a blacklist.

In reality, Youtube doesn't really make money as a stand alone product which was part of the demonetarization push as to lessen losses, the value to Google of youtube right now is the information about the viewers and how to target ads to them. Same thing really as television but with far greater amounts of information about their viewers.