Hey guys, I recently spoke with Jesse from AdRev on all of this a while back, but I just haven’t had the time to post here, as simply very busy with other things. I can’t copy/paste our discussions verbatim here, because it’s confidential, as per the footer on their emails, but here’s a gist of what we discussed.
So firstly, he explained that YouTube earnings dropped significantly the first quarter of the year due to advertisers not having the expected budget compared to what they have in the last quarter of the year.
This is mostly because of the holiday season when advertisers spend more money. Once the new year arrives, the advertisers hold back on expenditure to recoup their expenses and then continue to invest in advertising come the second quarter. However, this year they’ve seen a lower than normal December as well. So the drop in earnings is actually across YouTube as a whole and as a result are down an average of 50% since 2014.
He went on to explain that YouTube also requires any royalty free, creative commons ND NC, and any other music that is either given away for free, or sold for a license to be used in YouTube videos, be assigned a manual review custom policy, which is a relatively recent policy, seemingly unique to AdRev.
This means that a video containing this type of music won’t immediately be matched until it’s verified that the video owner has a license or not. Once verified that a license has not been purchased, the video will only then be claimed. And the same rules apply with automated claims. As I suspected, newer and higher viewed videos get claimed first, followed by older/lower viewed videos.
AdRev worked with YouTube to allow this policy for RF musicians a while back when YouTube forced AdRev to remove large RF catalogues of AdRev registered music. After some pleading and explanation from AdRev, they allowed RF music to be monetized as long as they follow this custom match policy and strictly follow the rules set by YouTube.
Also it’s worth noting that other aggregates such as Audiam, CD baby, etc, apparently don’t have this manual review policy in place on RF music however, so any RF composers using those systems are actually at a greater risk of having their catalogues permanently banned by YouTube. Good to know that important bit of information.
Another factor he mentioned was AdRev now only reports on videos that earn over $.01. Based on the global wide revenue drop in YouTube, a lot of artists are seeing the number of claimed videos being drastically lower than normal. This is in direct relation to these videos not earning over $.01 in the month of January, hence the low video count being displayed in the earnings. They said It’s not that they released the claims on these videos, it’s just that they don’t have any earnings to report in the first place.
So hopefully that throws some light on things. I’m still not entirely sure where this is all heading, but I still stand by my belief that all our intellectual property should have the capacity to be monitored online. As I’ve always said from the start, this shouldn’t be about the money, but rather to have some system in place where we can keep a closer eye on our belongings! 