I can't help wonder if Google discovered that the banking and legal fees involved with paying channels that are below said threshold were eating their profits.
I suspect it has to do more with human moderation. As much as Google hates using humans for anything, moderation still has a human element. As low as the minimum wage is in countries with a workforce educated enough to do this unpleasant work, it still costs something. Drawing a line in the sand and saying "your videos are so unlikely to generate views that we won't even spend a couple of cents making sure it doesn't violate our policies" probably saves them several millions per year.
I can't remember the proper accounting term for the practice, but businesses do not like to postpone/buffer payments like this. These legally count as on-the-books debts, and no business wants to track millions of dollars of tiny debts, each of which may one day need to be paid out. Particularly when these debts roll over year-after-year across tax years.
I previously worked for a business where both the marketing and customer service departments handed out promotional credits to users like candy, without accounting for them. One day we got a new CFO, and a report on these credits was one of the first things he asked for. He sure wasn't happy to discover over $2.5 million dollars worth of credits idling in users' accounts with no expiration. While it's unlikely any significant percentage of them would have ever been cashed in, there is no guarantee and legally the business is on the hook to cover them.
I can't remember the proper accounting term for the practice, but businesses do not like to postpone/buffer payments like this. These legally count as on-the-books debts, and no business wants to track millions of dollars of tiny debts, each of which may one day need to be paid out.
Is the term "banking", by any chance? This is the entire business practice of banks.
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I can't help wonder if Google discovered that the banking and legal fees involved with paying channels that are below said threshold were eating their profits.
I suspect it has to do more with human moderation. As much as Google hates using humans for anything, moderation still has a human element. As low as the minimum wage is in countries with a workforce educated enough to do this unpleasant work, it still costs something. Drawing a line in the sand and saying "your videos are so unlikely to generate views that we won't even spend a couple of cents making sure it doesn't violate our policies" probably saves them several millions per year.
I don't get it.
Why doesn't YT just rephrase it as "you earned $1, but reviewing and administration costs are $10, so you get $0"?
Because then it wouldn't be "you get $0", but "you pay $9".
Wouldn't it be more sensible to have a minimum withdrawal amount in that case?
I can't remember the proper accounting term for the practice, but businesses do not like to postpone/buffer payments like this. These legally count as on-the-books debts, and no business wants to track millions of dollars of tiny debts, each of which may one day need to be paid out. Particularly when these debts roll over year-after-year across tax years.
I previously worked for a business where both the marketing and customer service departments handed out promotional credits to users like candy, without accounting for them. One day we got a new CFO, and a report on these credits was one of the first things he asked for. He sure wasn't happy to discover over $2.5 million dollars worth of credits idling in users' accounts with no expiration. While it's unlikely any significant percentage of them would have ever been cashed in, there is no guarantee and legally the business is on the hook to cover them.
Is the term "banking", by any chance? This is the entire business practice of banks.
Perhaps, though it may be related more to the number of payments than the amount pr payment.
That's partially the point. Increasing the minimum withdrawal amount will reduce the number of payments, absent any increases in revenues.