Paying YouTube for views on your channel

After Louis pinned and liked an anti masker comment under on of his videos and moving to Texas where the comment section on his video is starting to be filled by pro-gun right wingers and free speech absolutists, I stopped watching his content altogether.

That might not be his intention, but his libertarian views sure attracts certain crowds.

It's sad, because he's convincing and persuasive when it comes to talking about repair rights, anti-monopoly, etc. But I suppose that's the same sentiments experienced by people who listen to Jordan Peterson, before sliding down into the incel rabbithole.

“Libertarians” are those certain crowds
Yep he made a video talking about how his employee had some rare reaction to the vaccine and started to spew conspiracy theories and say that they aren't wrong. Sucks I agree with his right to repair stuff but his channel is a total cesspool of right wing nuts now. Not to mention he moved to Texas and doesn't seem to have a problem with some of their abortion and authoritarian laws.
What has any of that got to do with the video?
I was under the impression that he pins random shizzle to his YouTube videos. Sometimes he pins something and then replies to it, expecting everyone to see it.
I might be wrong here.

Eli the computer guy [...] had this show up in his dashboard: "grow your Channel's popularity and engagement by promoting your video on YouTube, running a promotion helps attract new viewers who can boost your subscriptions, views, likes, and other engagement" and the way this works is your videos will show up if you pay them. YouTube is trying to get people who make content on YouTube to pay for views now.

Isn't this kind of basic in terms of content marketing?

One entity makes content then pays another company to promote it?

What else would Luis being doing if he actually had to pay for the storage space YouTube gives him for free? Handing out CDs on the street?

Is he aware that companies like Pinterest already do this?

I can't say that the sudden huge drop in viewership isn't suspicious though.

It makes sense if you think about it like basic marketing
But the thing is Youtube already promoted channels through it's algorithm. Having to pay for it implies that something has changed regarding it.
- I think what's worse is that the content seemed to be less visible even to his subscribers. The discoverability of your content to new people who are not actively looking for it is one thing, bit hiding it from people who have actively said they want to view it is another thing entirely.
Google is triple-dipping at this point. Youtube advertisers are already paying, they want users to pay, and now they want content creators to pay. Might as well also ask their CDNs to pay at this point. Also don't forget to have the Linux Foundation pay for the privilege of having their source code in Google's proprietary codebase.
- What about it? Conventions already do this.
  Want to advertise at the convention? Gotta pay.
  Want to have a booth for your content at the convention? Gotta pay.
  Want to just go to the convention to see the advertisements and booths that companies paid to market to you? Believe it or not, gotta pay.
  Steam does the same shit, pay to list your games, pay to run promotions, and players pay for the game.
  IMO, YouTube is lagging behind on this one.
It is, but the idea of such is shockingly new to a lot of YouTubers. A lot of them will just trust the algorithm when they get good growth metrics and hate it when growth stalls.

To my thinking, it's time to get folks on a federated platform. Here is a graphic of the various fediverse platforms. I know off of the top of my head about PeerTube. I just learned about the others.

PeerTube would absolutely be the alternative here. It's challenging though - if YouTube can't make money hosting your content on a large scale, what makes you think you'll make money hosting it on a smaller scale?
Some might manage to finance it through crowdfunding, and as the Fediverse grows hopefully it'll manage to self-sustain content creators here so that discoverability of content on PeerTube will increase. The future is not necessarily all that bleak, but it's still a long way to get there.
- PeerTube and the fediverse at large do not lend themselves to earning a money. That is an appreciably difficult situation to be in. I suppose the most one could hope for is to gain some fame and having someone sponsor them through something like Patreon.
- I'm adamant the only viable YouTube replacement is a subscription service.
- @sab It's also about Quality, currently a lot of PeerTube Instances make you have a limit on how much space you have, if you self-host you can raise that limit to the amount of space you have. Most people who don't create quality content might not last and possibly would just shut down their servers removing their content from the Fediverse.
  But those who get donations and any other form of revenue would be able to keep going and even expand their storage if they need to allow their content to be a bigger part of the Fediverse.
  Let's take PewDiePie for instance, if he moved all his videos over to the Fediverse it would be only PewDiePie's videos across the whole Fediverse but because of his money behind him, he can host them. Merch, Donations, and any other sponsorship could keep him running the server for another month, especially if someone already has or builds up a community of people that are willing to spend money on them.
I don't think that professional content creators are going to like the Fediverse very much. The design inherently limits their reach and there's significantly less money in it for them. I don't think it works as a profession here in its current form.
- Agreed. The Fediverse does not lend itself to earning a living, at least for now. Maybe one day it will be possible.