You know what's interesting? A Decentralised media platform used to be huge and actually is still huge: Torrents.
There's a huge community that consumes media that's not hosted anywhere particular and there are apps like Popcorn Time that offer viewing experience almost as good as Netflix.
The problem, of course, is that up until now there was no way to reward the creators and almost all the media consumed on Torrents is illicit copies of copyrighted material that don't bring direct benefits to its creators.
It is a huge topic in the blockchain community to find a way to reward content creators and we see early attempts that may or may not succeed at this.
Another issue is the "Averagisation" of the content. The moment that you make a content that advertisers might find controversial you risk losing your reward for that content so advertising financed media fails to capture anything beyond the mainstream entertainment. This has another unfortunate outcome, which is that people who don't want to get a direct reward for their content but hoping to be rewarded with political influence can afford to continue producing content that tends to be extremist(veganism, left and right politics, racism, conspiracy theories - you name it). So we end up with extremely light content that's something between product unboxing and funny videos not touching any sensitive topic and extremely edgy content that depicts the world as black and white and if you are not one of us you are one of them. Your average monetised content on Youtube is extremely light and your average popular non-monetised conted is extremeley heavy.
At this time you'll find that these new decentralised platforms are full of the extremist's stuff, as it is just another platform to spread their influence but in the long run, I believe that they will be diluted and will offer a platform where non-extremist but alternative cultures can flourish.
You certainly don't need blockchains and distributed databases to reward creators, centralized solutions like Patreon work perfectly fine. If you want Netflix style monetization, that is not a technical problem but a social one, Netflix relies on the concept of copyright. Any community that does not respect copyright will switch to the free alternative, leaving voluntary donations as the only monetization option.
Maybe there is a blockchain niche where content is offered freely but ad supported, with the experience painless enough not to motivate users to switch to the ad-free alternative. The revenue would then be necessarily modest, but would be redirected to the creators almost in full, compensating the massive Youtube cut.
I don't agree with your Netflix story. Most people don't prefer free, they prefer convenience.
Spotify almost works properly as a centralized platform because almost all music is on there. But I know a few albums that aren't, and it's too bad.
For Netflix, I have a subscription. But guess what I do when I want to watch the latest Walking Dead or Game of Thrones. I want it convenient, preferably legal, but most of all convenient.
For Game of Thrones it's not such an issue, but I do feel bad if there's e.g. an old BBC film I want to watch, but there's no way to get it legally, sometimes at all. Other times it's £20 for a DVD. No way I'm paying three months of Netflix subscription (or a large fraction of a license fee) for that.
The BBC has such an extensive and amazing back catalogue of content they wholly own. Why they don't chuck it on iPlayer is beyond me. I know they have it all on a digital platform internally already, format is not an issue.
The BBC has such an extensive and amazing back catalogue of content they wholly own. Why they don't chuck it on iPlayer is beyond me
The infuriating thing is, we’ve already paid for it. Anything BBC should be “free” to anyone who had paid their TV license in the last year it was broadcast. We own it already, it’s sheer extortion to make you pay full price for a DVD.
> The infuriating thing is, we’ve already paid for it.
No you didn't. For the example, the BBC typically only pays independent production companies (which is about 40% of their output) a fraction of what the content costs to make because the indie retains distribution rights afterwards and can make up the rest with sales. Same with scriptwriters, or actors.
And more importantly, the things it does wholly own, it very rarely knows, legally, that it does wholly own, as the records aren't reliable. So it would involve a vast amount of legal time and risk to investigate.
It would be awesome if blockchain could solve the issue of rights management at the scale of media content. Tracking ownership of the individual parts (script, logos, video, etc) as well as the transfer of ownership of those parts.
> Why they don't chuck it on iPlayer is beyond me.
Because they would devalue new productions. The more license-payers watch old movies, the less they will watch Top Gear or Strictly or whatever it's supposed to be big now. This would mean less interest in new productions, less stuff sold by BBCWorld (or whatever it's called these days), less money going around... like all companies and organisations, the BBC wants to grow, not to stall.
No, it's not that. The BBC is tied up in the same licensing mess as everybody else in the media industry. Everything is licensed... scripts, individual rights, director rights, ownership is transferred, tracked, ends up with third parties. It's a complete, unholy, worldwide mess of ownership spaghetti under the hood, and that's at some level why the only alternative is torrents.
And much of it predates people even thinking about this stuff. Thus, you have a TV series like Northern Exposure for which the music was a fairly integral part and you can't even buy DVDs with all the original music included.
Even today, I was reading that one Black Mirror episode for which the closing song was just so on had licensed it for 15 years. Which is a long time but hardly forever.
The problem is that when it comes time to relicense, there's probably very little value in the show left to the studio. And whoever is negotiating the relicense couldn't care less about the artistic vision of the 10 year old show's creator who picked the original songs. And whoever the right holder of the music is probably doesn't want to offer steep discounts because it weakens their negotiating leverage on other matters.
The main issue is that it's very rare for someone to "own" a song. The publishing, label, composition, mechanical and performance rights might all belong to different entities in different territories and sometimes even in different windows. Relicensing is pretty common for films, but less common for TV, because there's less margin. And collective licensing for broadcast happens in lots of territories and not for on-demand or internet distribution.
Licensing is generally complicated but it's often for some fixed period of time. I expect part of the problem is in the incentives. I get the credit if I can negotiate a lower licensing cost today. If the license expires in 10 years rather than 50, that's probably not my problem.
This idea is based on the assumption people who'd watch stuff from BBC's old catalogue would, instead, watch Top Gear or Strictly. These are probably a couple different demographics, distinct enough to warrant separate delivery options.
The Charter calls for "distinctive output" but it also calls for umpteen other things including innovation in service delivery. They cannot "distort the market" but if the market is minuscule or simply does not exist (how many streaming services have access to the BBC back-catalog?), there is nothing to distort.
I do share the political outlook but I don't think that's what really matters in this particular circumstance. There might be occasional issues with royalties/copyrights and whatnot (production contracts in the media industry are notoriously byzantine), but imho the main factor remains a strategic choice.
> Or maybe it's because it's not the government's job to run TV channels and radio stations, nor is it the public's job to fund them?
Public broadcasting is great, so many wonderful shows in the US would not have been able to have been made without it. But go ahead, sacrifice public media to the god of market economics. You might not miss it when it's gone, but it will be a sad day indeed.
HBO Now is a much worse experience than torrents. The navigation is slow, the updates to new episodes are poorly placed under a bunch of clicks, there are ads for other hbo shows over and over (even after I watched every single West world episode they still show me ads about a “new show”), streaming bugs (Although this improved quite a bit).
It wasn’t the price that moved me away from HBONow, it was their lack of convenience compared to a torrent rig.
It ended up being HBO’s design was more for themselves rather than me (“we want to show you ads” vs “you want to watch your shows”). It was still very old in its philosophy of content.
Netflix however is awesome because it’s very UX focused.
Ultimately, I think only OSS/pirate are closest to the use desires.
> Netflix however is awesome because it’s very UX focused.
Except for the thousands of A/B experiments that incessantly drive you to spend every ounce of attention on Netflix. E.g. the auto-playing preview that starts whenever you stop moving the active selection. It strongly encourages you to start playing the thing rather than being thoughtful about whether you actually want to or not. Personally I hate this - it drives my anxiety nuts - and I find HBO's tactics much less user-hostile (although agreed the ads for HBO's own content are outright stupid).
HBO has long been against providing streaming service, and only seemed to begrudgingly with a "fuck you, this is going to be an awful experience" attitude
Yeah, the HBO UI is terrible. Netflix is great except it seems to constantly change what it is showing on Roku. Sometimes my "continue watching" is up top. Sometimes it is nowhere to be found. I've had to literally search for a show I started the day before to continue watching it.
Well for me, in my jurisdiction HBO just simply isn't available. That's hands down about as inconvenient as you can get.
In jurisdictions where it is available it's often only available as a part of a larger cable package. If you're signed up with another provider that's pretty inconvenient also.
There is a well worn cartoon on this topic that sums up the position of many quite well [0]
Don't even know what a "HBO Go" is - never seen or heard of one before.
EDIT Actually, I'm going to put aside disingenuity for a second.
I actually have the closest equivalent of HBO with my provider, it's called "Sky Atlantic" and it's only available through Sky, of course.
So I'm fully paid up and legit as far as GoT is concerned but only coincidentally. If a competing network were to start showing $competing_popular_tv_show you can be guaranteed I wouldn't be switching, or taking on a second subscription ...
Take my $$$ by all means, but if you get greedy you'll get nothing.
"To access HBO GO℠, you must reside within the fifty states of the United States of America."
Some time ago while traveling I actively tried to find a way to pay to watch Game of Thrones. I failed miserably.
Also I really don't like having to have and manage subscription for various providers, nor do I like to be locked in with one. I would love to have a single subscription or even better pre-paid option somewhere which can be used across services and my money gets distributed accordingly.
Same with news media. I would be more than willing to pay a set amount per year for consumption, but I'm not willing to pay that amount exclusively to you.
Basically this - a lot of the time the options just aren't there for the rest of the world.
I think stuff like Netflix, Spotify, Steam, etc have proven that when content is priced right and delivered in a convenient manner folks are more than happy to pay.
News media is one of the worst for not figuring out how to adapt. I'd love to read some newspapers, watch a couple news networks, etc - but i'm not willing to plop down $100 a month and deal with a bunch of different apps to do this so I stick with online.
In order to subscribe to HBO in Canada, I'd need to call CTV, get a cable hookup to my apartment, schedule a time for the cableman, stay there while he's there, he'll hook up some box to the wall, I'd set up one account with CTV then another with HBO, and then after paying two companies and a real-world three-week delay, I'd be able to watch HBO. (Not to mention this would cost around $80/mo.)
People are willing to pay for convience, but only so much. A lot of what gets torrented is easily and very conveniently available on iTunes, Playstore, or Amazon Instant, but it costs 5 bucks.
What isn’t convient about HBO Now (assuming you are in the USA)?
Pay per view is not convenient. You have to make a decision each time "do I really want to watch this, is is worth it" and then have buyers remorse afterwards.
Pay a monthly, automatically recurring, fixed fee is convenient. Out of sight, out of mind.
I generally feel the opposite. It's much easier for me to buy a movie or box set outright than subscribe to a streaming service. It's pretty much the same with all fixed recurring payments -- I always feel pressure to use the service and I'm constantly evaluating whether its worth it.
I'm very skeptical about arguments that it's about convenience and not price. Yes, especially outside the US, there is some content that is difficult to get legally for any amount of money. But there's also some upper limit to what I'm willing to pay for physical media that I'll watch once (even if I can acquire it with one click on Amazon) or what I'm going to pay for a monthly subscription even if it were a hypothetical all digitized content ever made for one monthly fee.
> For Netflix, I have a subscription. But guess what I do when I want to watch the latest Walking Dead or Game of Thrones. I want it convenient, preferably legal, but most of all convenient.
What is inconvenient about subscribing to HBO Now? You have to do more work to find/download an episode of GoT compared to streaming via HBO Now. Or you could stream the episodes from Prime. Same with Walking Dead. There are rarely inconvenient streaming options.
Exactly, convenience is the most important part and here is where netflix et al has failed miserably.
1. All clients suck immensely.
2. The catalog is really poor.
3. DRM. I don't think you could describe inconvenient better than with those three letters.
If I could pay, say $30 a month, to legally pirate (not from any official source even) any movie/series I want I'd pay that in a heartbeat ($30 is still more than I consume if I were to buy it in a store). But now I don't have any service because it isn't worth it. I don't get the convenience and I don't get a decent catalog and I would have gotten it with DRM.
I'll grant you #2 since tastes vary and even the catalog varies from month to month. But for the vast majority of people, #1 isn't true, and #3 is irrelevant. Neflix's (growing) subscriber numbers are all the evidence you need for that.
Netflix's client has some warts but if you're looking for a specific movie or show it completely gets out of your way. HBO and APV have somehow managed to make it difficult to find things you know are already there.
I'm not really sure what you're looking for, then. Your wish for the ability to "legally pirate" content makes no sense, since by definition that's an oxymoron.
I don't agree with that. I'm a technically inclined person who has in the past done a ton of pirating, but nowadays I will always reach for a legal streaming service first. I actually do find, say, using Netflix much more convenient than firing up a usenet or torrent client and pulling down a video that takes 5-10 minutes to download.
And that's just me. The masses of non-tech-savvy people out there don't want to deal with pirating things. For these people, paid services are far, far superior.
Patreon has on a multitude of occasions exercised its centralized right to block creators and payments across its platform. This is why centralization is bad.
With centralization we're delegating the act and responsibility of filtering to third parties.
> With centralization we're delegating the act and responsibility of filtering to third parties.
Assuming that third parties have better information than the average person, that's not a bug, but rather a feature. The issue is that information asymmetry makes it difficult for average consumers to know which third parties actually do have better information and which ones are just gatekeepers collecting tolls.
In general, I'm inclined to believe that centralized third-parties are better at keeping out shysters and low quality content than a free-for-all. People always like to claim that 5-star scales driven by normal consumers are adequate filters, but the fact is that these are easily gamed by sockpuppets or the end-user's ignorance of what they're rating (i.e., you can go to one dentist with many 5-star ratings who was a good bedside manner, then go to a better dentist who has to undo all the fuck-ups that the first dentist made, and which you, as a non-specialist, were ignorant of). Crowdsourcing doesn't triumph over the groupthink, pluralistic ignorance, and other failings of collective intelligence.
The primary reason decentralized solutions are enticing is because of a lack of centralized control. That control not only functions as a single point of failure, but also as a single point of corruption or otherwise negative influences.
Patreon has had, to a much smaller degree, the same issue as YouTube. Somebody posts something somebody else doesn't like on the site. One group argues for removal, another group argues against it. In the end the company can do literally nothing to please everybody. Decentralized solutions remove any notion of implied endorsement and so what is there is simply what is there. And of course there are monetization issues. Companies want to increase their profit, users want to pay as little as possible (outside of what is donated). These interests can and do come into conflict. But more importantly, even if they had not had such issues, experience is showing us that it's only a matter of time until they would. So by suggesting some alternative to Patreon, it's just kicking the can rather than actually solving anything.
Which often leads to calls to censor the platform altogether. Further down the stack then you do have centralisation, e.g. ISP, where this censorship can occur. We've seen this with various torrent sites in the last few years.
Not so well for small amount donations, in case you forgot the recent controversy surrounding Patreon.
Also, I think it's better not to depend on a single company for such transactions (remember PayPal, and it's awful censorship?). Plus, I believe cryptocurrencies offer much better liquidity once you start to use any cryptocurrency.
Patreon, like existing solutions, is willing to remove people they don't like. In order to fully disassociate yourself from the whims of a corporation, you need to have a decentralized solution.
You have people trying to mix cryptocurrencies and torrents as well to achieve this exact purpose. The two main ones I know are Upfiring (https://www.upfiring.com/) and VTorrent (http://vtorrent.info/)
It depends what you mean by "discoverability". YouTube's algorithmic search may surface related videos, but what if you want to discover other views of a topic, for example, a timeline of all the news, including videos, on a topic[1]? That's not really a decentralization problem, more of a curation problem.
Good question. For discoverability to work well, you'd have to be able to identify a particular user, then track their viewing habits, then develop a viewing profile for them that you can do matching against.
The technical aspect of this is a mostly solved problem (YouTube and other distributors do it) but getting past the privacy aspects will be challenging - the type of person to use a distributed platform will also likely be using it to avoid this sort of tracking. Or they're in a country that has GDPR-like laws.
Why does the algorithm have to show you what content to watch? Just have it a good search and tagging system and the user will figure out what they need.
Surfacing content you don't know you want is something an algorithm can be quite good at. I don't know that I would have ever discovered HISHE, for example, without it.
A search system cannot replace a recommender system and vice versa, they are very different use cases with very different needs.
For any type of media, whether it's songs/bands on a music streaming service, video content on youtube, or even complementary goods in an online store, a good recommender system can and will suggest things that I would never have thought of (because I didn't know it existed) and thus could never have found with any search or tagging system.
How do I search for a song that's similar to those that I listened just now (and genre tags don't really work, they're far too broad, subjective and inaccurate) and that's explicitly not one of the songs which I remembered and just heard already?
They’re probably referring to the political and social activist subset of vegans that make a lot of noise and aren’t of the “live and let live” variety.
Bitcoin and bit torrent suffer from the same decentralization problem. Centralization will always be cheaper or the system will fail to sustain itself. Either these systems are not profitable to participate in and no one bothers, or it is profitable at which point it will be dominated by key players that either participate in the network or simply launch a centralized competitor. Specialization leads to cost cuttings and the large actors increase their quality, margins and market share squeezing out the decentralized players.
The one caveat to this is that torrents are cool because its a system that can arguably edge cache better than CDN locations but with today's low upload speeds and pings for consumer connections it seems the CDNs do win.
Vegans are not that extreme—some people do it for religious reasons (i.e. Hinduism), some for health reasons, and some due to their moral beliefs.
Maybe you are referring to the extreme actions by the vegan recently?
This is exactly what TRX (Tronix) cryptocurrency is trying to achieve. They want content creators on their blockchain to distribute content and want to reward them with coin as payment.
> It is a huge topic in the blockchain community to find a way to reward content creators and we see early attempts that may or may not succeed at this.
What of the "information wants to be free" faction which is indifferent or hostile to the idea of content creators being rewarded?
I expect there continue to be polarization where most creators of commercially viable content remain within establishment channels despite all their problems. Both hand economic power to distributors over creators, but only the upstarts pursue the ideological delegitimization of creators.
I don't think the faction is "hostile to the idea of content creators being rewarded" per se, but people are hostile to content middlemen being rewarded, and they're hostile to what I call "content prevention services": the real work of MPAA et al is not in distributing content, but in preventing content from being distributed.
They're fine with content creators selling t-shirts, but they are hostile to the idea of creators being compensated for the distribution of their creations, or having any control at all over the propagation of their work -- because that necessarily constrains the ability to copy "information" at will.
The big winners in a world without copyright are ISPs, who achieve instant vertical integration of both content and distribution -- facilitating end-user lockin to their portals.
> that necessarily constrains the ability to copy "information" at will.
Well, yes. The alternative would have been to give the music and video industry a total veto over all consumer electronics, including computers, all operating systems, all content manipulation software, and so on. This would also have included repeated charges for moving media between devices and premiums for certain types of use; setting a song as your ringtone would cost several dollars, for example. There would be no Spotify and no Netflix. There might not be a Youtube, but if there was it would be impossible to watch it on Linux using only Free software. There might be iPods, but you'd have to re-buy all your music for each device. There might not even be videotapes. The end-user lockin would be at absurd levels.
The only middle ground is a scorched no-mans-land.
I'm confused by this response. We live in a world with copyright and so creators have a say and copying information cannot be done at will, yet what you describe did not come to pass: Spotify exists, etc.
Did it sound like I was advocating that creators be compensated for every last copy? That would not make sense: copyright holders can and do license content to allow such usage, and of course copyright law itself allows for copying under certain circumstances.
Well, until creators of commercially viable content get offered a better deal, they'll remain allied to the establishment copyright middlemen and will continue trying to make life difficult for the upstarts. Better to be exploited than to be decimated.
I hope for a future where the innovators in this space do find ways to reward creators. (Patreon is a good start, and maybe there's hope in the blockchain.) That might actually win powerful allies as commercially viable content authors migrate, and the long-hoped-for disempowerment of the current copyright middlemen comes within reach.
I don't see that happening when content creators are treated as acceptable collateral damage in the war to found an "information wants to be free" utopia, though. It will have to be a different faction that successfully negotiates the alliance.
<s>
Such a big problem with people hoping to be rewarded with political influence. Even Paul McCartney has been diluting Youtube with extremist videos[1] about veganism.
</s>
I have respect for Vegans despite being a huge meat lover. What I mean by extremism is that Vegans are extreme and controversial form certain philosophies and eating habits and those serious about Veganism more often than not claiming that people who eat meat are murderers and should be treated as such, framing this as "Us the spotless goodies vs them unredeemable baddies". In my books, that's extremism.
But hey, I get your point and I'm more than excited about lab grown burgers so we can have all the meat we want without harming the animals.
We already have Quorn burgers and they're great. The problem with going vegan isn't burgers; it's decent cheese, and milk to put in my tea. And something to replace eggs in cake. And something to make boots out of if veganism is to go beyond food. I hope these problems will be solved one day.
We can't stop animals from getting harmed. They harm each other in the wild in terrible ways. All we can do is keep our own hands and mouths clean and avoid trashing the environment with livestock farming on an industrial scale.
Those other things are actually easier than lab-grown meat. There are startups right now working on lab-grown milk, egg whites, and leather, expecting to get products to market in the next couple years. For details, see the excellent new book Clean Meat.
It is already true that most (nearly all?) breeds of domestic animal are no longer used for food: they are kept as pets, in effect, in farms that specialise in preserving unusual breeds and displaying them to the public, with notices next to the pens explaining how there are only 150 of them left and feeding time is at 3.30pm if you want to watch. The same fate awaits today's popular "production" breeds, whether they are replaced by Quorn or by an improved breed.
You also (unintentionally?) shed light on a potential link between cryptocurrency rewards and piracy authors. Given the progress in the Confidential Transactions world, e.g. RingCT and Bulletproofs, which could – whether you think this is bad or not – significantly incentivise pirates.
I just coined that word, but you are right that it is polarisation in a sense that it's either too light or too heavy.
However, what I mean by "Averagisation" is that all the content begins to look like the previous one and as the trend is to drift either to the most monetizable or most politically extremist.
I wouldn't call this polarisation because these are not polar opposites. The "nice, advertisers friendly" content is not polar opposite to the extremist content, they co-exist without any conflict. So, the content becomes more from the same, just they are in two categories.
What you're describing seems to be pretty much exactly polarization.
You get one set of creators who want monetary gain and so their content fits within certain limits. Over time this will create more similar content as they watch what works for other people.
The other set of creators have different goals and don't care about monetary gain. The popular parts of this content will also tend to local maximum based on the level of extremism that's popular.
An iPhone unboxing video is not a polar opposite of a video complaining about feminists.
I wouldn't call this polarisation even if it can be described as the polarisation of income models because my concern is about the content of the videos.
I find it disturbing to see comments on HN completely disregarding the content and context and default to monetary optimisation.
I believe that people and their creations are what matters and the business models around those are incidental, despite the fact the business is influencing the content.
People always sing songs but the way they profit from this keeps changing over time. Selling tickets, selling recording, selling streaming, selling right - all change as the technology and society changes.
Therefore, I think that the polarisation is not the right word here as there is no polarisation of the content of ad-friendly and controversial content. They might be polarised among themselves tho, like iPhone vs Samsung and MAGA vs Antifa.
The content of two videos don't need to disagree with each other for the general effect to be called polarization.
The polarization isn't about income models, it's about the different kinds of content (light hearted safe content that aligns with advertisers vs extreme content that doesn't). I may have confused things by mentioning gain. The different goals of the creators was just my basic explanation as to why similar content continues being created because the effect is already in place.
I find it disturbing that you disregard the effect of capital. Advertisers are 100% focused on monetary optimization, and they're very good at driving creators to what will work best for them.
Of course content and context is important. But, money drives the content creation. Even when it isn't used to pay for the original content. Advertisers want impressions and clicks. Content creators want more viewers. The type of content aligns with advertisers goals -> money becomes involved -> more similar content. And other creators see this and want part of it.
No, I don't disregard the effect of capital. Actually I clearly said that the capital influences the content, just on the next sentence.
Anyway, the content is a cultural product and if not treated as such you'll end up losing your business to someone who does. In that case, if the blockchain people figure out a way that to reward content in a different way than pleasing advertisers then there's a huge opportunity to disrupt Youtube.
At the end of the day, despite what your analytics software says, it's not just impressions what your product gets - it's people watching videos. Content creators don't necessarily want more viewers, they want more influence or more money or more appreciation.
After all, there's a reason why don't consume the same content since the invention of camera and advertisements.
> What you're describing seems to be pretty much exactly polarization. [...]
It is, but its also more.
OP wrote:
> The moment that you make a content that advertisers might find controversial you risk losing your reward for that content so advertising financed media fails to capture anything beyond the mainstream entertainment.
This described self-censorship. Wikipedia has a nice article about that, including many examples. [1]
Maybe. I just don't want to use a well-established word to tag a new phenomenon because people can start judging the situation by the wider meaning of the word "Uniformization" or maybe different people will understand something different.
Instead, I coin a word and proceed to explain it. I find that using words with precise technical definitions or words that are jargons is dangerous in an informal context.
You might find more results if you look up "self-censorship" [1] although averagisation might be more subtle than that.
There are certainly examples of things like UK newspapers downplaying reports of crime by their advertisers [2], newspapers with advertorial "the real russia" supplements being less critical of russia, local newspapers that rely on ads from estate agents not reporting on crime by local estate agents, and suchlike. There's not much reporting of this stuff online (who'd report it, after all?) but if you can get a paper copy of Private Eye, there are regular reports of this sort of thing.
And of course, you can easily imagine Youtube video creators not wanting their videos demonetised - while demonetising seems pretty inscrutable, "don't offend advertisers" seems to be the name of the game.
There's also a subtler process at work than reports just not getting run; it's that journalists know they won't find it profitable to focus their career on scrutinising big businesses, and youtubers know channels that talk about sexual health and prescription drug costs tend to not do well - so they focus their careers/channels in different areas.
In this case, there's no spiked report or tagged video serving as a smoking gun - just a "lack of interest" as interested people focus their energy elsewhere.
Just the opposite. The content becomes more bland and inoffensive over time, as advertisers don't want to take the risk of offending even a very small subset of viewers.
Conforming, consciously or subconsciously, due to the ubiquitous presence of surveillance. Averagization is a great euphemism for the beginning of the slippery slope to censorship.
There's a huge community that consumes media that's not hosted anywhere particular and there are apps like Popcorn Time that offer viewing experience almost as good as Netflix.
The problem, of course, is that up until now there was no way to reward the creators and almost all the media consumed on Torrents is illicit copies of copyrighted material that don't bring direct benefits to its creators.
It is a huge topic in the blockchain community to find a way to reward content creators and we see early attempts that may or may not succeed at this.
Another issue is the "Averagisation" of the content. The moment that you make a content that advertisers might find controversial you risk losing your reward for that content so advertising financed media fails to capture anything beyond the mainstream entertainment. This has another unfortunate outcome, which is that people who don't want to get a direct reward for their content but hoping to be rewarded with political influence can afford to continue producing content that tends to be extremist(veganism, left and right politics, racism, conspiracy theories - you name it). So we end up with extremely light content that's something between product unboxing and funny videos not touching any sensitive topic and extremely edgy content that depicts the world as black and white and if you are not one of us you are one of them. Your average monetised content on Youtube is extremely light and your average popular non-monetised conted is extremeley heavy.
At this time you'll find that these new decentralised platforms are full of the extremist's stuff, as it is just another platform to spread their influence but in the long run, I believe that they will be diluted and will offer a platform where non-extremist but alternative cultures can flourish.