So it appears that YouTube has decided to block the Blender Foundations YouTube channel in every country, after what seems to be a dispute around YouTube attempting to force them do display ads to allow their content to be visible in select countries.
Last night we received a contract from Google. You can read it here. It’s six pages of legal talk, but the gist of the agreement appears to be about Blender Foundation accepting to monetise content on its YouTube channel.
They mention that last year they were notified by US YouTube visitors that at least one of their videos was blocked in their country. They were told that they need to enable ads on their videos for the restriction to be removed. The back and fourth when on for a while with them trying to clarify if they needed to do this when they `[…] choose to use a 100% ad-free channel for our work, this to emphasis our public benefit and non-profit goals., Last week they asked for an update, received no reply but instead had their entire channel blocked in all countries on the 15th.
To us it is still unclear what is going on. It could be related to Youtube’s new “subscription” system. It can also be just a human error or a bug; our refusal to monetize videos on a massively popular channel isn’t common.
NotABot from the L1 discord was the one to bring this up originally on the chat.
And its worth a mention that Blender is currently trying out an alternative to YouTube, PeerTube. You can have a look https://video.blender.org
It would seem this goes further than Blender. YouTube have also blocked MIT Open Courseware as well. It looks like its going to be if you don’t have ads you’re not welcome on YouTube. (speculation of course)
Google/youtube just can’t win on this. Not at this point. They should have implemented a minimum 1 add per video policy from the start with the justification that infrastructure costs.
I don’t know about your numbers, but I understand what you’re saying. I remember a long time ago, they used to run ads occasionally, and it was supposedly enough to cover operating expenses. If they moved back to that, it would be nice.
I don’t understand their attempt at holding the content at ransom though. You’d think youtube is able to just check the box themselves.
Blender is a free tool to create content that might end up on youtube and generate ad money.
Which one next, Kdenlive? This is dumb as fuck, not even worth a slowclap.
Disclosure: I have Youtube Red Premium and I find it really nice because not only the elimination of ads while supporting everyone but the ability to download videos for offline viewing.
Advertisers should pay us (the viewers) credits to view the adverts, youtube should take a small cut of every transaction to help with infrastructure costs*, consumers should then pay those credits to the content creators they like most.
*Alternatively, youtube could just set a hosting fee to be taken from content creators after they hit so much bandwidth+storage rather than take a cut of every transaction.
The credit to dollar / pound / whatever ratio can be set by however many likes pewdiepie gets each day. Or on how many unicorns were spotted in any 24 hour period. Tidepod related deaths per day…?
Interesting concept, but I think that will leave a large category of producers who don’t get those credits. Maybe that’s what subscriptions are for? We split the credits amongst our subscribers?
I doubt it would happen or work out well, but it’s definitely an interesting concept nonetheless.
