This is going to be ugly for people who do (did?) family-friendly content such as a lot of gaming-related stuff. I'll use as an example Trainer Tips, which is an intentionally noncontroversial channel about Pokemon Go.
As I understand it, if he marks his videos as being for kids, they end up effectively demonetized and comments aren't allowed. If he doesn't mark them as being for kids, he's at risk of massive fines. If he marks them as adults-only (or just starts swearing or the like), they're also effectively demonetized.
Guess this explains all the push by a lot of creators towards Patreon and the like - the simple solution is to have your videos on YouTube marked as for kids, but to push for people to support you on Patreon to get access to discussions, a channel-specific Discord, etc. for the kinds of things that would previously be in comments.
Edit: Oh, and no notifications when new kid-friendly content is posted, so if you want notifications 'Support me on Patreon'
I would expect that any non personalized ads being served on videos marked as being for children will also probably be targeted at children. I suspect that significantly reduces the pool of ads and also likely restricts it to much lower ad rates.
> I would expect that any non personalized ads being served on videos marked as being for children will also probably be targeted at children.
In a weird coincidence my SO told me a few minutes ago about how Youtube is cruel right now by showing her DisneyWorld ads. It's clearly happening because she watched a bunch of "Into the unknown" video clip from Frozen 2 recently.
It made me question 2 things, do they already implemented theses changes, because to me, any content from Frozen 2 is targeting kids, but more importantly does the COPPA thing apply to ads.
If it does apply to ads, any Disney ads are clearly targeting children, so any decision to show theses based on tracking should point toward tracking that target children.
It's not so much Patreon as some sort of outside discussion, notification and possibly discovery platform with YouTube reduced to serving media instead of discovery. That outside platform would likely need to be membership based or paid, probably both, because that "paid" bit may provide a lot of cover against children getting access - at least on the basis of T&C that say something like "as part of this membership you agree to not allow access by any persons under 13 and agree to cover fines and legal expenses we may incur as a result of you violating these terms or as a result of collection attempts."
That would be a combination of "get us in trouble and you're in it too" and "as you can see Your Honor, we've made strong attempts to enforce keeping children out of the community."
any centralized platform that gains significant traction will inevitably fuck w/ some of its users for their own ends. i think as a creator either owning the platform yourself (impractical for almost every1) or something decentralized would be ideal. that way you don't give anyone a veto over your destiny.
to replace youtube, it'd have to be both decentralized video delivery, discovery, social as well as decentralized monetization -- which i think could be patreon style or mayyyybe some sort of ad delivery.
not sure what legal ramfications would be exactly, but i certainly hope we aren't in a place were otherwise-valid enterprises would be banned unless you could (impossibly) prove kids weren't using it.
(also there have historically been lots of people making $ off providing targeted-to-kids content (toy unboxing, slime videos, tasting candy, &c), and it's not clear to me that's a bad thing...?)
Honestly the issue is how do you pay for a YouTube without ad dollars or it being the pet project of some billionaire benefactor? Youtube itself is reportedly "roughly break-even" even with all the ads and monetization without having any proper support for the people making the content. [0]
[0] The number of creators I've heard get within a few days or a week of permanently losing their account because of some weird combination of things and only got it back because a friend of a friend, not their official YT liaison even, was able to find out what was wrong and how they needed to fix it.
> Oh, and no notifications when new kid-friendly content is posted, so if you want notifications 'Support me on Patreon'
How about RSS? Each channel has RSS, and iirc it has only failed once (as in, a few days with no updates even though there were new videos) in the last 4-5 years. I don't use Youtube's system for following channels anymore, I just have a YouTube 'subscriptions' category on my feedly.
Sure there are options, and technically savvy viewers can use them. On the other hand, how widely used and recognized is RSS after Google managed to embrace it, kill the competition and kill the then-dominant RSS reading platform?
"Have your viewers use RSS for notifications" is going to work as well as telling them to have all their viewers use Opera or IE.
As I understand it, if he marks his videos as being for kids, they end up effectively demonetized and comments aren't allowed. If he doesn't mark them as being for kids, he's at risk of massive fines. If he marks them as adults-only (or just starts swearing or the like), they're also effectively demonetized.
Guess this explains all the push by a lot of creators towards Patreon and the like - the simple solution is to have your videos on YouTube marked as for kids, but to push for people to support you on Patreon to get access to discussions, a channel-specific Discord, etc. for the kinds of things that would previously be in comments.
Edit: Oh, and no notifications when new kid-friendly content is posted, so if you want notifications 'Support me on Patreon'