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YouTube ripping off its creators (again)?

I probably have more of an interest in the inner-workings of YouTube than most of my readers do. That's because it's how I earn much of my income.

Having said that however, I have to acknowledge that a lot of people, including the old sheila, now watch far more YouTube than Netflix, Amazon Prime or Disney+ so this column may be relevant to quite a few others.

I have written previously, perhaps too often, of the rather poor way that YouTube treats the very people that made its plaform the outstanding success that it has become -- the regular folk who create and upload the myriad of videos that attract the eyeballs and attentions of others.

I'm one of those creators and have been since I uploaded my first video way back in 2006. Since then I've actually uploaded thousands of videos to my various YouTube channels and accrued around 150 million views, many of those views putting money in Alphabet's bank account.

Of course I'm just a small-scale creator. There are some channels out there which have scored billions of views and have tens or hundreds of millions of subscribers. These folk are "doing very nicely" as a result of their partnership with YouTube and YouTube is doing very nicely as well.

Although the big-numbers channels seem to gain a lot of attention, the vast majority of views and revenues generated by the platform come from the small to medium-sized channels, like mine. Because there are so very many of these channels, their cumulative totals dwarf the large channels by orders of magnitude.

The vast majority of channels, both large and small, are members of the YouTube Partner Program, a system whereby YouTube agrees to share the advertising revenues with those content creators. I've been a member of this program since the early days, when it was "by invitation only" and as a result it has become a full-time gig for me. I spend many hours every week planning, filiming, editing and uploading videos that generate almost enough money to live on. A whole bunch of other folk are in the same boat and consider YouTube to be their primary source of income.

In the early days this arrangement worked well. Many folk gave up their day-jobs and focused solely on content creation. Some earned significant amounts of money, others, like me, earned just enough to pay the bills but really enjoy what they do so were still happy.

Sadly, things are changing for those who were once happy as small but full-time YouTube content creators.

Successive instances of bad management on the part of YouTube has seen the earnings of many small creators crash and burn. There was the "adpocalypse" which slashed those earnings overnight, through no fault of those affected and other changes at YT have further dented most creators' income streams in recent years.

Now, it seems, there is another problem that appears to be causing a growing number of formerly happy, prosperous creators to give up and go back to flipping burgers.

It's a thing that YouTube calls "Invalid Traffic" and it's striking a growing number of channels in a way that effectively kills up to 90 percent of the money they were earning from the ads running on their videos.

YouTube is informing these channels that their system has detected "invalid traffic" and for that reason it is opting to demonetize them or significantly restrict the number and value of ads being run on their videos.

When trying to find out what's causing this "invalid traffic" and how they can fix it, creators are finding that YouTube simply refuses to provide more information, instead sending them to a webpage that basically blames the creator for the problem.

The channels affected are at a loss. They've done nothing different, engaged in no deceptive practices such as purchasing views or artificially generating traffic to their videos. Indeed, in most cases there videos are getting no more traffic than before but suddenly YouTube says a significant portion of that traffic is "invalid".

When challenged that this could be a bug in their systems, YouTube has doubled-down and stated it most certainly isn't a bug and that's the end of the story. No appeals, no discussion -- you're effectively out of the (revenue) pool.

Most of the channels affected by this have around 20K-100K subscribers with the largest being around 400K subs. This makes them part of that pool of talent that collectively generates most of YouTube's revenues and traffic but ensure's they're small enough that they have no clout or influence with the company. They can bitch and moan all they want but indivudually, they just don't have enough subscribers for YT to worry about.

As these creators watch their revenues plunge to levels where they can no longer live on those earnings, YouTube continues to run ads on the vids so I can't help but wonder if this is maybe more of a "revenue reapportionment" situation than one where the ad revenues themselves have been reduced. Could it be that YT (having long ago thrown out the Google mantra of "don't be evil") has decided to simply give themselves a larger slice of the pie and is using this illusory "invalid traffic" as the excuse?

They certainly wouldn't try such shenanegans with the big channels because they have too much to lose and it would be a much bigger fight -- but by doing this to countless small channels (where the collective majority of revenue is earned) they are pretty much untouchable.

YouTube's silence on this subject speaks volumes.

This appears to be just another example of the way that the platforms "partnership" with its creators is dissolving into a relationship of contempt on the part of YouTube. They no longer really care about the folk who made the platform the giant it has become. Small to medium sized creators are now being cast aside, in favour of mainstream media channels and a few mega-sized channels such as Mr Beast.

People have been predicting (well "hoping" for) a real competitor to YouTube for quite some time now. I can't help but wonder whether this latest fiasco, combined with their demontization of Russell Brand on nothing more than "allegations" of impropriety may be the straw that breaks the camel's back. If enough creators find that YT has pulled the revenue rug out from beneath their feet, they'll probably jump-ship to other VOD sites and that could create a whole new situation.

Without these innovative and often very creative video-makers, YouTube will become tired, stale and "so last year". All the cool kids will move with their favourite creators to whatever platform picks up the slack. YouTube will turn into just another Netflix, peddling the same old mainstream-media generated dross while those with imagination, passion and enthusiasm drift off to pastures green.

There could be "interesting times" ahead for all.

Carpe Diem folks!

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