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YouTube sends a message

This week YouTube announced some sweeping changes to its monetization policies.

Since I doubt many people reading this column are earning money from uploading YouTube videos you might wonder why this could be important to you.

Well this change will also affect each and every person who merely watches YouTube videos. What the platform is doing may well have far-reaching negative effects on the type, variety and quality of content you get to watch.

This change also reinforces my predictions that YouTube as we've known and loved it for over 20 years, will soon change forever.

So what exactly is it that YouTube have announced and how does it speak to the evolution of the platform and its content over the next few years?

Basically, YouTube is making it harder for content creators to qualify for monetization, something that will likely turn away many newer creators who are already struggling to meant monetization thresholds.

Both the number of subscribers required and the watchtime needed to become eligible for monetization have effectively been doubled. This means that many nascent creators may end up throwing in the towel long before they reach a point where they can earn some coin for their efforts.

As an already established creator with a couple of monetized channels I should be overjoyed because this will mean less competition for the finite pool of advertising revenues that are on offer.

I suspect the operators of some existing YouTube partner channels are jumping for joy but their elation will likely be short-lived because this is the start of something I predicted some time ago -- the total elimination of revenue sharing with creators.

YouTube is under extreme pressure to increase its earnings year on year. In the world of "big tech" to have your earnings stagnate is to have failed and there's no room for failure in the corporate world of Alphabet.

Now that the video on demand marketspace is totally saturated and YouTube has become the dominant player, how can YouTube hike its profits? With ad-spend looking as if it may actually decline over the next 12 months due to a general decline in the economy, the only way for YouTube to show better profits is to cut costs.

After hosting and bandwidth, what is YouTube's single biggest cost?

Yep, it's sharing revenues with those pesky content creators who are in the YouTube Partner Program (YPP).

The very clear goal therefore, is to whittle down the amount that the company pays out to those who create videos for the platform and this raising of thresholds is the thin end of a wedge that I believe will ultimately see the elimination of the YPP.

YouTube CEO Neal Mohan has already publicly stated on many occasions that his goal is to make YouTube the new "television" and he's working very hard to achieve that. He's also a great fan of using AI to simplify and speed up the job of content creation. This becomes very clear when you see just how many AI services are now part of the YouTube Studio used by content creators. Thumbnails, ideas for new videos, AI avitars and even entire "shorts" videos are now all created by AI agents within the platform.

Now that YouTube has normalised the use of AI for content creation it's only a very small step to take the human element (the content creator) out of the loop. All YouTube has to do is connect the AI agent that thinks up video ideas to an agent that writes a script to an agent that renders the video and voila... a fully automated "no humans required" content creation system that produces output which requires no revenue sharing.

This will be topped up with video material repurposed from mainstream media sources who will get some kind of financial compensation but when it comes to the small guys with a few tens or hundreds of thousands of subscribers -- well they can go beg for their dinner.

For some it will still be possible to earn a living on YouTube but the money will no longer come from a share of the ad revenue. Instead, creators will have to attract sponsors to strike "brand deals" (which YouTube will arrange for a clip on the ticket). There's already a push by the platform to get people to run their own shopping service where they can flog merch or other wares. YT is only doing this because they figure that if they've lined up other sources of revenue for creators, those creators won't simply stop making videos when the ad-share revenues are withdrawn.

So what does this mean to you, the YouTube viewer?

Sadly it means that the ads won't go away but sponsor segments will increase markedly, as will channels flogging their own merch in videos. Your viewing experience will become far more like a shopping channel than a place where you can watch genuine, authentic content made by passionate creators who scrape a living from adsense revenues.

You'll also notice a lot more covert AI material. I've already talked about the slopumentaries that now proliferate on the channel, watch for a lot more of these. I also expect we'll even start seeing some "YouTube Shows" that are totally AI-generated with weekly episodes that are churned out by VEO3 or whatever video rendering engine they're using this week.

If you're using YouTube Premium to try and avoid the ads you won't escape this enshitification, in fact it'll be worse for you because those sponsor segments and segments of videos that are simply hawking merch will grow dramatically.

Sigh... we have passed peak-YouTube. Fortunately, every step that the company takes down the road of further enshitification becomes more incentive for a competitor to come out of the woodwork and steal a massive share of YT's market.

I can't wait!

Carpe Diem folks!

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