It's how much they've earned for that particular video so far. I've been saying it for a while here but nobody seemed to listen. d.tube is way better for smaller creators than YouTube is right now, and with a tiny fraction of YouTube's audience.
Plus, YouTube is only going to get worse for small creators, as Google tries to cater more and more to the big companies and punish the creators for "advertiser-offensive content". Meanwhile, d.tube should get better and better as both it and STEEM (the tipping mechanism) rise in popularity.
The nice part is the creators don't even have to give-up YouTube to try out d.tube. They can just upload the video to both and see for themselves what's the difference.
With a new monetised platform, with money being incredibly obvious on the UI, the incentive is pretty high to just steal popular content from YouTube and repost it. How do they ensure original content or ownership?
how is an "AI algorithm" going to figure out a newly uploaded video is a dupe of a Youtube video that is in the process of trending? How would you effectively contentID every single popular video on Youtube and run it against a fully distributed video platform? Just magical AI things I guess?