YouTube’s Power of the Purse
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Facebook is a place where people get attention — but not typically where they make much money. YouTube is both.
The video site, owned by Google, shares the money it earns from its commercials with its video creators, making it a potentially lucrative place for people airing comedy shows, animal documentaries or beauty tutorials. Even though Facebook has a huge audience, it can be harder to make money there.
This gives YouTube the ability to shut off the money for people who spew vitriol or harassment. Exercising its power of the purse can be a significant way to assert control over people who use and abuse the site.
We’ve seen that deliberate designs of our internet spaces, such as rewarding posts that generate a high number of interactions, can help the most provocative and potentially harmful messages spread more widely. But YouTube shows that some constructions of online spaces can help combat the nastiness, too.
Let me explain this big difference between YouTube and Facebook and most other social media sites: If you watch a lot of YouTube, you know that commercials appear in most videos. Typically, Google sells those ads and splits the money with the person or organization behind the video.
Facebook sells more than $70 billion worth of ads each year, but it doesn’t typically share that money with the creators of the posts. (The fairness of this arrangement between Facebook and the people who make the stuff that is read and watched on the site is a sensitive subject, including for news organizations. Facebook does in limited cases split ad money or let Facebook and Instagram users find other ways to make money from their posts.)
YouTube’s widespread advertising revenue sharing gives it a form of punishment that Facebook doesn’t have.
To get people to stop harassing others, inciting violence or spreading false information, Facebook can delete offensive posts, apply warning labels to them or limit how often its computer system circulates them. Or it can kick people off Facebook entirely.
YouTube can do that, too — plus it has the power to turn off ads. Think of it like a middle ground between mild scolding (muting a post) and going nuclear (banning an account). This can be a powerful motivation for habitual offenders.
Having this power doesn’t make YouTube free from horribles. Far from it. Internet companies can have all the rules and punishments in the world, but they’re toothless if they can’t effectively enforce them. And it’s not always easy to draw a line between providing an open forum for ideas and giving a megaphone to divide and incite people.
I do think, though, that banning ads is an effective middle ground. It’s also an argument for Facebook and online hangouts like it to start sharing more revenue with the people and organizations that are big draws there. It might be more fair, yes, and it would give Facebook another way to hold bad actors responsible for what they say and do.
Tip of the Week
How to connect your fan to the internet
It’s barely July, and I’m meltingggg. Brian X. Chen, a personal technology columnist at The New York Times, walks us through how to control our fans and home air-conditioners over the internet.
It’s that time of year when, for many of us, our air-conditioners and fans are set to full blast. Smart home gadgets like the Nest Thermostat are useful for creating a schedule for an air-conditioner to turn on and off at certain times of the day to save energy and money. But what if you can’t or won’t use a smart thermostat at home?
There is a way to turn a dumb home appliance into a smart one. It takes a few tools, and some imagination.
I’ll walk you through this process using a fan and some gadgets as an example:
You will need:
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An Amazon Echo product, such as the $25 Echo Flex.
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A smart plug such as TP-Link’s $17 Kasa.
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A plug-in fan with a physical power switch that can stay in the “on” position.
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An Apple or Android smartphone for setting up Alexa to talk to the smart plug.
Here’s what to do:
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On your smartphone, download the Kasa app.
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Open the Kasa app and register for an account. Once logged in, tap the Smart Plug icon, then tap the + icon and then the Smart Plugs icon. Select your Smart Plug model.
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Plug the Kasa smart plug into a power outlet. Plug your electric fan into the smart plug. The light on the plug will turn amber. In the Kasa app, follow the instructions to connect the plug to your Wi-Fi network.
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In the Kasa app, select your Smart Plug. Then click the gear icon and click Name and Icon. Give the smart plug a friendly name like “Fan.”
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Open the Amazon Alexa app. Tap the menu icon and select Skills & Games. Search for the TP-Link Kasa skill and enable it.
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Standing near the Echo, say “Alexa, discover my devices.” Alexa should detect the device named Fan.
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Now test the fan. Make sure the fan’s power switch is in the “on” position. With your Echo nearby, say “Alexa, turn on the fan.” Then say, “Alexa, turn off the fan.”
With this setup, you will have essentially created a remote-controlled smart fan. The Kasa app also includes the option to set a schedule for when the fan should turn on and off. Come winter, you can use this same setup with a space heater. Pretty neat, huh?
We encourage readers to check the wattage on their AC or heating unit before using any plug.
Before we go …
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The great food delivery embiggening: Uber is combining with the food-delivery company Postmates, my Times colleagues reported Sunday and the companies confirmed Monday. Remember what I said last week: The food-delivery companies are merging to improve their dismal economics at the expense of restaurants, couriers, and diners like you and me.
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What to do about Hong Kong now? Civil-liberties experts worry that a new law will let China’s government crack down on political expression and dissent in Hong Kong. This is creating a dilemma for internet companies. Facebook, Facebook-owned WhatsApp and the Telegram messaging app said that they would pause law enforcement requests for data about online users from Hong Kong authorities until there was an assessment of the human-rights implications of what some critics say is China’s takeover of Hong Kong, my colleague Paul Mozur reported.
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Summer camp. Sort of. My colleague Nellie Bowles looks at the implications of summer camp conducted through computer screens because of the coronavirus. From mailing boxes of baking supplies to synchronized virtual soccer routines, camps have to be a lot more creative to keep kids’ attention.
Hugs to this
Make way for ducklings, the sequel: Mama duck and her babies — with the help of a few traffic-stopping humans — safely cross the street to New York City’s Central Park.
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