Youtube must pass on more advertising revenue to content creators: Shekhar Gupta

In one of his recent news report, veteran Indian anchor Shekhar Gupta has raised an important issue which several bloggers and other content creators have already been raising since long which relates to the revenue model of Google, the company who owns the Youtube platform.

As Shekhar rightly elucidates in the report, advertising is about the only revenue on which the content creators depend and these are desperate times of COVID-19 crisis. One of the first expense the advertising companies cut during this crisis is the advertising expense. So naturally, everyone looks up to big companies like Youtube to show a large heart, and pay content creators their due share of income, so they can start lighting their stoves and eating their daily bread.

Shekhar also explains why is it that content creators aren't getting their fair share. If you think about it, Youtube is just a medium or infrastructure that delivers the content (in this case creative videos) to their audience. The advertising revenue they earn is also a direct function of that content because ads are always part of the content irrespective of whether they are content related or based on some other factor (such as user's preferences).

However, Youtube has a monopoly in large scale content delivery infrastructure owing to which it is able to retain whatever share of the advertising kitty it wants. Now, one might argue that Google being a private company has the right to retain its revenue but companies like Google, Facebook, etc. are too large for that argument to prevail when public good is concerned.

Coming to the topic of monopolies, one ceases to be a regular monopoly and starts entering the sphere of natural monopoly when it comes to the question of public good and utilities such as power and water supply, communication, roads, etc. In recent times, both internet and content publishing are gradually entering into the sphere of this public good. When that happens, it becomes more and more difficult to justify a regular monopoly for even the most capitalist governments of the world.

Often being dubbed as the omniscient and all knowing due to the vast reaches of their search engine, Google must already be aware of this problem. I urge them on behalf of several honest vloggers like Shekhar Gupta and others to start sharing more and more revenue with those who supply content to their platforms.