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YouTube gearing up for change

Love them or hate them, I am dependent on YouTube for my living.

I've gritted my teeth through countless changes that have created significant disruption and loss for myself and huge numbers of other full-time YT content creators.

Now they're doing it again but interestingly enough, it's almost like they've been listening to my gripes (yeah, I know it's just coincidence).

The new changes will be good for almost everyone (woohoo!), except those who aren't already running a popular channel. Okay, that's wrong.

The new changes will be bad for almost everyone... because the vast majority of YT channels are very small, both in terms of subscribers and views.

However, since I have about 300,000 subscribers and 100 million views between my two channels, it's nothing but good news.

It's also good news for YT viewers because a huge swathe of the content will effectively become ad-free.

Under the new changes, YT now requires a channel to have at least 1,000 subscribers, 10,000 views and at least 4,000 hours of "view time" during the previous 12 month period before it qualifies to carry advertising.

In effect, this will hugely prune the number of channels that qualify to run ads and that's got to be a good thing for everyone but the small-fry.

Since far fewer channels will qualify to carry advertising it will mean less ad-space available and hopefully the laws of supply and demand will kick in to raise the price such advertising fetches. That could mean more money in *my* pocket.

Just as importantly, it will deal a blow to those "cloners" who regularly copy other people's videos and upload them to their own channels. This has been a huge problem within the professional YouTuber community and I spend several hours a week just reporting copyright infringements by those who think they can make a buck by re-uploading my videos and monetizing them. Under the new system, they won't be able to do so until they've met the criteria.

Now to the really bad stuff.

These latest changes have been made as a reaction to the recent posting of a video by a popular YouTuber (8 million subscribers). The video in question showed a dead body hanging from a tree in Japan's infamous "suicide forest" and was a clear violation of YT's community guidelines. I actually found it ironic that this video was online and earning money for several weeks before it was taken down -- yet my video of a small toy Santa on a drone was refused monetisation right from the get-go.

Anyway, YouTube claims that this new (higher) threshold before channels can monetise videos will address the problems they're facing with offensive content.

WTF?

How does withholding money from millions of small channels affect the behaviour of the big YT "stars" such as this guy Logan (the suicide vid), Pewdiepie (the anti-Semitic vids) and others?

What are they smoking over at Google?

Now I'm not complaining about the changes... but I do question the claimed reasons for implementing them.

I also find it amusing that YT claims it is family-friendly and acts quickly to remove material that breaches its rather strict community guidelines -- yet we have channels producing and monetising videos like this one: Unboxing and Review- ES121 Open Source Electric Screwdriver which must be a bit of a grey area.

Come on, admit it, the best part of that video was the bit where she just stopped talking and started screwing -- right?

The big risk I see for YouTube and other video platforms is that they're now all trying very hard to please their "stars" and, in the process, risk alienating the smaller channels which may well become tomorrow's "stars" if given the chance to do so.

With Amazon rumoured to be working on a social-media video platform to rival YouTube I have no doubt that the "stars", those who can bring with them millions of subscribers, will be made lucrative offers and be in huge demand.

Unfortunately, this could see a massive "dumbing down" of online video content. Instead of the raft of incredibly valuable informational videos that we now have, covering all manner of subjects, we'll end up with a hundred and one inane "jackass" channels catering for teenagers and idiots.

There's far more money in Pewdiepie, Casey Neistat and other equally mind-numbing personalities than there is in archived university lectures, DIY videos and such so we can expect to see the equivalent of reality TV being inflicted on these platforms.

I guess YouTube figures that if it's going to compete with NetFlix and Amazon Prime, it has to lower the quality of its content and go for the eyeballs of "the great unwashed masses".

Ah well, I'm sure there'll be more lunatic changes from YT soon and when they come along, we'll realise just how lucky we are right now.

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