Huh? The situation’s changed over the years, and since it doesn’t concern nor affect me, there’s no reason I’ve needed to keep 100% abreast.
I will grant it is a bit confusing I suppose, but I wouldn’t say it’s anything broken.
I didn’t phrase that right. No insult intended to the commenters here. I just meant that it’s not an easily digestible, “here it is” type deal, and I blame YouTube for that.
There are two reasons why YouTube Partners don’t know the precise details of how their payments get calculated:
Firstly: it’s complex. There are multiple price brackets for ads, and Google inserts whatever ads it deems ‘best fit’ - based on their own proprietary algorithms that probably involve theme and popularity of the video content, geographical spread of the viewership, etc. Ads that get more clicks may also pay more for simple views than ads that get fewer clicks - ads that get clicks that lead to an actual transaction for the advertiser may pay more still.
Nextly, it’s secret. Google isn’t going to divulge exactly how its algorithms work, because that’s an invitation for the less scrupulous side of the internet to try to game the rules.
I would say this is an issue. If I were “partner” to something I would expect to know how the amount of money owed to me is calculated.
I think it sounds more confusing because a lot of the people posting in this thread started in an era where it was more confusing and you had to jump through hoops. Now you go to your channel management page, click “Monetize” and go through a bunch of legal stuff and information of where payment goes and such.
So you do that, post your cat video which goes viral, and then you find out that you left the radio playing when you were filming, so it gets flagged by content-ID and all the money goes to a record company.
You don’t know anything about the OP’s question. Why would you post? Why would you post first?
I think I had read somewhere that if an ad plays before a video, but you click the “Skip Ad” button, then the video’s creator does not get paid. So, if the ad is 30 seconds or less (sometimes even 1 minute), I just let it play to the end to thank the person who created the video.
Any truth to this or have I just been wasting my time?
As far as I understand it, that is 100% correct. As a video creator, I appreciate you watching them 
To get paid from youtube channel you have to become a member of that channel. In major, associate adsense account with your youtube account.
From the moment you to monetize your video, you are able to earn money. If you already have millions of views before you monetize it, tough luck – it does not work retrospective.
The money gets generated via these annoying ads being played before the actual clip starts and then these overlay ads you see during the video.
The more views, the higher is the cost/value of these ads.
You need a LOT of views to actually make money via youtube.
There’s a website (Socialblade) that tracks how much Youtube channels earn - it takes a lot of views, but it doesn’t seem like a lot of views is difficult to get. KSIOlajideBT and Pewdiepie film themselves playing games, ffs, and the latter is estimated at making $108k/month. There are people similarly popular who basically just vlog a lot. The big Youtubers talk about how there’s a ton more content now, but the field still seems pretty open, especially in niche areas - there’s little truly entertaining content on cars and motorcycles, for example.
What seems to stop most people’s success is not committing to create content regularly to build an audience and keep it. Paint has over 1.5m subscribers and when he applies himself (After Ever After, Harry Potter in 99 Seconds) he racks up the views - and he does maybe two videos a year.
<shrug> Google is big enough to say “here’s the deal - take it or leave it”. What are you going to do?
You’re not wrong. Back in the day, you couldn’t even apply for it - you just had to upload videos and wait/hope for YouTube to invite you.
A related question…
What if other people have uploaded your own copyrighted works?
Should YouTube be allowed to set the price when they’ve been made available without authorization from the owner?
I don’t have personal experience, but from what I’ve heard there’s also no competitor offering the kind of deal Google is. It’s a lot easier to accept practically any conditions if the alternative is getting nothing or a fraction of what you’re making on Youtube. If someone has to choose between making 10k/month on Youtube or 500$/month putting videos on a competing website, then things like secret algorithms for calculating your pay check are pretty easy to accept.
There’s people making money streaming on Twitch.tv for example, but AFAIK they make most of their money from viewer donations and such, and not from the provider itself.
…this was truly an entertaining motorbike review
True. Metacafe was lucrative for a while, but that was because they threw all their investors capital into their producer rewards scheme (then they ran out of money and everything changed). Blip offers a little trickle of income (although they just shut my account and deleted all my videos recently, without much explanation - no great loss).
YouTube is pretty solid and in my experience, the payments I receive vary in proportion with the views for any given month, so I’m fairly happy to trust them. Ultimately, if a video host wanted to scam their contributors, they could just do it by deliberately miscounting the numbers of views - and I’d have no way to tell.
so if you think you have a one-time hit viral video and you don’t have a Youtube account; what do you do, and would Youtube be the correct choice?
I would say yes. Set up an account, make sure you’re registered as partner, upload the video and check that it’s flagged to be monetized - I don’t think there’s any easy way to make money(assuming you do actually want to) from it anonymously or by just uploading it to any old video host.
Nearly any video network would love you if you did just give it to them for free - because if it goes viral, that definitely results in $$$ for them.
As I understand the content-ID system, part of the process when you upload something would be to add it into the content-ID system. Then YouTube’s automated algorithms look for any other uploaded content that has the same stuff, if it does, then the ad revenue comes to you instead of the uploader. (there may be an option to just have YouTube block the offending video instead of diverting the ad revenue, I’m not sure).
Now, if you are talking about cases where you as the owner haven’t make YouTube aware of your ownership, well, YouTube can only know what it knows. Part of the agreement when you create accounts and monetize them is that you can only post stuff you’re legally able to post and whatnot.