I don’t know why this didn’t occur to me sooner. Even if you just use a junk account to like and subscribe it’s the cheaper version of donating.
PBS Terra, for one, has actual climate change news and science. In addition to all the other cool things, and, ofc, PBS kids.
Here’s the list: NOVA PBS official, PBS, PBS Terra, American Experience PBS, Frontline PBS Official, PBS Documentaries, PBS NewsHour, PBS kids, PBS Eons, PBS Origins, PBS SpaceTime.
How does that work? Does YT pay out to creators based on the subscriber count alone? I've only ever heard "like and subscribe to help fund this channel" mentioned when the videos are monetized (e.g ads or sponsors).
Or does PBS monetize their videos and uBlock just shields me from that?
Not that I don't want this to be true since it's an easy way to help fund them, but I am curious how (or if) this works.
On monetized accounts (which PBS is) YT pays out creators based on advertising revenue. The way they calculate that is a complex, proprietary algorithm, but essentially it's based on view count and retention, and skip rate. So subscribing and liking doesn't actually directly help to fund the channel, HOWEVER more subs and likes usually translates to your videos getting pushed to more and more people (based on a totally different, complex proprietary algorithm), which usually leads to more views, and therefore more ad revenue.
I'm pretty sure us ad-blocking users are still technically contributing to the ad revenue, but over time it can affect the results that advertisers are seeing, and therefore could effect the amount of money they are willing to spend on advertising in the niche or demographic that your favorite creators fall into.
Does that all make sense?
No. But not because you didn’t explain it well. It’s because the way YouTube does things just actually doesn’t make sense.
I know :/
You explained it just fine with the information available to you. I understood it and I have a hard time understanding the meaning of statements over text
It's not your fault YouTube doesn't share how their algorithms work, so I kinda think the other person was pretty rude in their reply. Could have worded it a lot better
More engagement: more changes algorithm push video to recommended fronthome YouTube website
That gets PBS more exposure, sure, and that's great because they put out quality content, but do they get paid for that? I'm genuinely curious here as I know little of how YT pays content creators. I've had a recurring monthly donation going for years now, and I just don't yet understand if/how simply subscribing could replace even a portion of that.
Ads obviously, and people that pay YouTube premium also contributed to monetization but idk how much
as I understand, premium accounts are paid out per-user proportional to which channels they spend the most time watching. so if a user spends 30 minutes watching channel A and 1 hour watching channel B, and doesn't watch anything else, then channel A gets 33% of that user's subscription fee (after YouTube takes their cut), and channel B gets 67%
It's the exposure, which leads to more ad revenue (in theory, without adblockers). YouTube creators live or die based on the algorithm and two of the main things the algorithm looks at is frequency of posting and engagement. Since Google needs metrics to give advertisers some idea of revenue potential, someone liking your video isn't nearly as valuable to the algorithm as someone liking, commenting and subscribing (if not already subscribed obvi). As an example, ElectroBOOM just started making shorts of all his old content because he's in the middle of a big house move and doesnt have time to make regular content which he noticed led the algo to stop recommending his content as much. But as far as just making a junk account and liking every video Google has systems in place to ignore "stale" accounts that don't actually watch the videos. Ultimately what they want is viewers since eyeballs equals ads equals revenue and everything else is just a way of predicting future views.
There's also YouTube Premium which pays creators a cut that's more than they get with the ads. I bet they need to accept ads to get a cut of that.
Each channel needs 1000? subscribers to monetize at all. And then there’s the algorithm. Searches often include items with more not less subscribers, and monetization flows from there.
Your subscribe feeds the channel into the algorithm.
500 for first level monetization like members and super chats/thanks/3rd thing
edit: 3rd thing = stickers