- Youtube Partnership -
Power Balance
As indicated in Google’s blog post announcement, the catalyst for this development has been advertising companies interested in tapping into this emerging online audience. This has a resounding effect on the relationship between YouTube, advertisers, and content producers. Although the user can choose which of their videos to monetise, whether they see any actual advertiser interest or revenue is entirely out of their control. In addition, the partnership agreement can only be offered by Youtube to the User. This is a top-down, one-way avenue of communication. There is no formal application process for the User to communicate an interest in a partnership with YouTube.
Due to the underlying motivations for establishing a revenue sharing partnership, this program establishes a clear hierarchy of control over the monetization of content. Decisions made in regards to which content will recieve partnership offers resides squarely with the advertising agents, with YouTube as the intermediary platform between them and the content producers.This automatically priveleges populist content with non-specific, wide-spread appeal, as this will generate the most market-share for the advertisers. While the possibility for effective niche advertising is present, the overwhelming scale of the potential glogal YouTube audience makes niche marketing almost negligible.
Commercial success through the partnership program is certainly a reality for many independent producers, but the underlying system that begins with content production and ends with a check-in-the-mail is to a certain extent counter-intuitive. On the surface, the process suggests a directly proportianal relationship between audience and revenue; ie the more views/subscribers a YouTube video/channel has, the bigger the audience, therefore the more revenue generated. Upon further investigation, however, this is quite simply not the case as there are many other factors that come into play before a content producer sees any revenue.
Due to the underlying motivations for establishing a revenue sharing partnership, this program establishes a clear hierarchy of control over the monetization of content. Decisions made in regards to which content will recieve partnership offers resides squarely with the advertising agents, with YouTube as the intermediary platform between them and the content producers.This automatically priveleges populist content with non-specific, wide-spread appeal, as this will generate the most market-share for the advertisers. While the possibility for effective niche advertising is present, the overwhelming scale of the potential glogal YouTube audience makes niche marketing almost negligible.
Commercial success through the partnership program is certainly a reality for many independent producers, but the underlying system that begins with content production and ends with a check-in-the-mail is to a certain extent counter-intuitive. On the surface, the process suggests a directly proportianal relationship between audience and revenue; ie the more views/subscribers a YouTube video/channel has, the bigger the audience, therefore the more revenue generated. Upon further investigation, however, this is quite simply not the case as there are many other factors that come into play before a content producer sees any revenue.