Was watching a video of penguinz0 on youtube recently and it made me wanna talk a bit about the evolution of web2 platforms and their dependency on advertisers. Now I know what some of you may be thinking: "But acid, you've been complaining about how and why we don't have any advertisers on our front-ends, doesn't this post you're about to write contradict what you've been wanting for Hive?" So let me also talk about why it's different here and why our dependency isn't as crucial, although for most of you I'm sure it's obvious; the way our rewards work and have been working for the past 6+ years.
So basically Youtube is now coming down on content creators with even stricter rules, aside from all that DMCA stuff where everyone had to be careful about what video clip or song they add into their content and for how long. All the "community policing" drama's that have occurred over the years since they sought help from volunteers to help with copyright striking certain content and channels often demonetizing innocent users, the copyright owners themselves or other fiasco's. Now apparently they're going to start demonetizing people who use "swear words" or if the content is "too violent" in nature.
According to penguinz0 it's worse than he imagined it to be, while Youtube has remained quite silent about this new change and hasn't really committed to giving too much details it seems that content creators are once again at the point where they'll just have to fear for their livelihood being taken away from them if they "misbehave" towards stricter and stricter rules being enforced upon them. Do as we say or stop existing, basically. Altough not quite, cause the channels won't be deleted or banned due to this rule, although I guess there's extreme cases where that might happen too, but it's mostly targeting their monetization. As Charlie mentions here, if you say "fuck" too much or other words considered not PG, you may find your videos demonetized. Apparently, since youtube has those closed captions which have been added towards all videos they could've added them on in their database, meaning also older videos, people may start finding their older videos that have been generating them revenue over the years being blocked from that stream due to having said too many profanities in said video according to youtube's liking.
Naturally, this isn't what Youtube likes or doesn't like, considering the amount of creepy stuff one can find there if they knew or bothered to look and Youtube not having bothered taking more detailed look at such to do anything about it this doesn't come off as Youtube trying to be a "cleaner" website to me. I'm not going to get into the creepy stuff most people I'm sure are aware of why some watch certain content and what the prominent gender demographic of such content is, but let's, for instance, use the example of those "savior" videos. You know, the ones titled "we saved this puppy we found stuck under x", at first glance it's heartwarming, "omg I'm so happy they happened to find this puppy, it would surely have died if left at x, these kids are heroes", but then you start looking at what else that channel is posting about, kids, most of the time the same ones, constantly and consistently saving helpless animals, often around the same area, from harm or certain death. Many of them already hurt or injured, hmm, these kids must really be looking hard for these cases, spending all of their time coordinating and tracking down these unlucky pets, or, you know, they're all being planted because Youtube allows ads to exist on these channels and the content creators are aware of that this content gets them views which equals money. Of course, nowadays they've become a bit more clever and have started to spread the videos out over more channels, but yeah, that's basically the kind of content I'm talking about where you'd think youtube would actually care to hammer down.
So why is youtube doing this? It's easy, advertisers are the ones becoming more and more strict and they're the ones in control so youtube has to bend over backwards to please them without caring what the content creators this is affecting think about it. I'm not sure if the world is just becoming more "soft" in general, in many cases this is a good evolution in my opinion, but there's other cases where this mob cancel culture mentality is leading to some absurd power effect where companies literally fear doing something they'd want to do just cause a bunch of random losers who spend all their day on twitter go on these twitter raids. We've seen this happen with NFT's for instance. Remember when discord teased it was going to add ETH wallet integration and NFT's profile pic verification? Yeah well where did that go? Oh right, the tweets got so much hate from kneejerky internet nobodies who most of the time didn't even understand what NFT's were and only saw them as "scams that are destroying the ozone layer" that it lead to Discord backing down and never mentioning them again. How fucking absurd of a world do we live in where we just listen to "the masses" no matter if we know if these masses are certified to know what they're talking about or not, if they have any proof about what they're saying or not, then again considering all the conspiracies revolving covid and the vaccine I really shouldn't be too surprised to see it branching over onto anything so that some random users can get their 5 minute of fame to try to monetize their merch.
Okay so I went a bit off-topic there, so let's get back to the comparison to Hive and why I still think we should accept and build some relationships with advertisers here and why compared to Youtube and other platforms we don't have to bend over backwards to please them at every corner.
Adrevenue is just a Bonus for us, it's that simple. I've talked about how front-ends could try and compete vs another to use their opt-in ad revenue for their users and Hive stake holders to entice them to use their front-end over others. Eventually most front-ends are going to be similar in nature and performance anyway, they may derivate in other ways but I don't think it's going to be just about "this platform is better". My points were that if the front-ends could easily track traffic, user activity they could easily determine which authors are bringing the most traffic to their posts, both new and old, which users are using the front-end the most, thus which of them are generating the most ad revenue to then distribute said ad revenue towards authors, users and maybe even include hivepower in that equation to give holding Hive Power more substance.
If you look at Reddit, they've got quite powerful advertisement compared to other platforms from what I've heard, although I'm sure all the algorithm's are top notch on most platforms due to data mining and cookies tracking everything and anything, Reddit does it well because similar to Hive they have genre's split up over communities so they can target said communities with ads they may be interested in based on what the ad is trying to sell you. I wouldn't personally place a Crypto project ad on the Hive Pets community when I'd more obviously have a better chance at receiving some traffic towards the project by placing the ad in the Leo finance community. So not only would the adrevenue generated on our front-ends be quite "rich", but the front-ends themselves wouldn't have to be as greedy as Youtube or Twitch to take 30-50% of it since many of them are being funded by the DHF so they could instead use that towards marketing themselves or rewarding their authors that are generating traffic which fuels the adrevenue and the users that are the ones viewing the ads on a daily basis through their activity.
Most importantly if some of these advertisers became too demanding about certain things, like say they'd go to the Photography community and be like "we would like to not see our ads on "weed content", now apart from having smart ways to avoid that, the community or front-end that showcases the community could just say "okay, well, then let's stop the ad contract here because the front-end and community leader does not want to ban/mute/demonetize Weed content". What do you think the advertiser is going to do then? What they're doing to youtube right now of course, they're going to demand they abide by their restrictions or pull out and Youtube can't afford to have them pull out cause their whole system relies on adrevenue. Our front-ends could just be like "yeah well we only take 5% ad revenue, rest goes to the community so we don't really care much either way" and the community can be all "yeah, well your part of the ads with these insane demands is only 5% of all advertisers we have in this community, and even if most of those would demand the same thing and leave, we'll still be okay because we got Hive and Layer 2 rewards.
Sure if the advertisers were to leave en masse it would put a small dip on the income everyone may have gotten used to but it wouldn't be as bad as demonetizing your content or channel completely, shadowbanning you from getting onto trending, being recommended to others, showing up in people's feeds. Flat out banning/blocking/deleting your channel. If enough advertisers leave I'm sure new ones would pop up, who wouldn't care about the content everyone else left for and would now be able to advertise their product cheaper cause there's a hole to fill and it's just a "bonus" for us anyway.
Most importantly they wouldn't be able to strongarm us over how we run things and content creators could be content knowing that while our main token is highly speculative and rollercoaster-y with the rest of the crypto market, and while ad revenue may be a bit less volatile but still more than web2 platforms, you can rest assured that your content, the way you want to do things, your account, your following, your whole ideas won't get pushed towards change based on the platform or advertisers, but instead maybe your own fans/viewers, hive stakeholders or other l2 stakeholders/your own token holders.
