Youtube's invalid traffic problem, Artlist.io is being called-out, MrBeast's exec is ok with deepfake ads

Hi! Welcome! Let's walk through last week's discussions and insights around creators space — things that might be too small for tech media to cover, but too important for us to overlook! 😏 

Youtube has an invalid traffic problem

This year, Youtube was hit by the "Invalid traffic" epidemic, which is when the platform decides that you are sending bots on your videos to cheat the monetization system, and slashes your ad revenue by reducing RPMs and the number of ads on your videos.

Hundreds of content creators suddenly lose half of their income. Some even as high as 90%. There are stories that some Youtubers just give up on producing content as most of their processes depend on Adsense revenue (another reminder to diversify your income streams).

The problem is actively discussed on Twitter and Discord chats, and though some channels do recover from these sanctions, no one seems to have an answer on how to avoid this traffic from bad actors in the fututre.

Rene Ritchie, YouTube’s Creator Liaison, briefly commented on this story in a recent Discord video meeting with Colin & Samir, but there’s still very little clarity. How is it technically possible that someone has a stable RPM rates for a few years in a row, and then it suddenly drops around 10 times? Does it mean that such creators have been earning frod income all these years? So many questions...

Maybe deepfake ads aren’t that big of a problem?

AI is going great! Deepfakes are everywhere. And they were brought up again after several people from the industry spotted a fake ad featuring MrBeast on TikTok.

However, the problem seems bigger than it actually is. At least that's what Brandon van Eeden, Marketing & E-commerce executive at MrBeast.store, thinks: “more people see the awareness posts about the AI content than people seeing the actual content”.

Who’ll benefit from ad-free social media?

As you may have heard, social platforms are thinking about implementing ad-free subscriptions (Facebook and Instagram in Europe, TikTok outside the U.S.). Should you be worried about that? Probably not, if you work in the creator economy space.

The point is, that one of the few groups of people who might benefit from this innovation are actually content creators. The more users turn off advertising on social media, the more budget might get redistributed to creator partnerships and influencer marketing, when brands realize they can’t reach some segments of users with paid ads anymore.

Artlist.io is being called out

As Gil Kruger, talent manager and the founder of Best Regard Media, was the first to point out last week, Artlist.io, a service that provides royalty-free music and sound effects for videos, has a very odd paragraph in the terms of its “$100,000 grant” for the content creators.

Basically, it means that Artlist.io will own full rights to the winner’s project, meaning that it is essentially… a paid work? Which doesn’t look fair if you think about it from the creator’s perspective.

The platform tried to explain their point of view, but still doesn’t seem to understand the nature of the problem that many industry folks in Gil Kruger's comments section are discussing.

Twitter video views don’t make any sense

There's an ongoing debate on Twitter about how it counts views for videos. Recently MKBHD started posting full videos on Twitter, and many people were a bit shocked by the insanely huge number of views comparing to his Youtube channel (38M vs 1.8M at the moment).

But then, they started realizing something weird is going on: views on Twitter correlate very poorly with the engagement rate (likes and comments).

The clue is that what Twitter calls “a view” is simply… “an impression” for Youtube. Twitter’s team clearly knows about it (MrBeast asked Elon Musk personally about it — he ignored), but doesn’t seem to have any plan to fix this.

Apart from this, many people are still arguing about how many seconds count as a view on YouTube, and MrBeast added even more confusion by saying it's 4 seconds.

So I asked Rene Ritchie from Youtube the same question, and his verdict is following: there is no set number of seconds, and it can vary from video to video. I guess it’s not the answer you expected!

So, after all, who ruined Youtube?

You’re not gonna believe this, but it's not “MrBeastification”.

Here's a hot take from Roberto Blake:

The end of 2023 is near. You know what time it is?

No, not “All I Want For Christmas” to blow up Google Trends.

It’s time for the 2024 Creator Economy predictions!!

And yes, I don’t care that it’s still mid-October, and neither does Matt Estes, COO at Uscreen.tv. Here’s his takes on what to expect in the coming year:

Btw, if you click the link below, you’ll find my meta-predictions for 2023 that I’ve made in January this year, taking notes from 20+ creator economy experts. It will be fun to go back to them in a couple of months and check who was right!

Wow, thanks for reading all the way to the end! ❤️

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