In my 2000 word rant piece about how youtube gives no fucks about the smaller creators in their community, I talked about how they only care about getting smaller channels that violate guidelines while giving bigger channels many many passes. This is regardless of the fact that many of their activities violate guidelines for monetization and their own terms of service. These little things which get smaller channels taken down in short order seem to not apply. I took aim at Logan Paul because he was the most egregious YouTubers who seem too rich at this point to care cause he is that big. I also had a conversation with someone where they told me just cause someone does something doesn't mean you should throw them under the bus, even if it's repeated in the past. My counter-argument was and still is, once a smug YouTuber, always a smug YouTuber. Logan Paul was so kind to back up my point of view.
Between the suicide forest videos and this, he should have a minimum of two strikes on his channel. For the first incident, Youtube initially pulled him from their higher tier ad program, which is akin to pinching a child to reinforce the fact that they are doing something bad. They felt like in response to these two incidences, they should…remove ads entirely from his channel. This is unprecedented in the sense that youtube (to my knowledge) has NEVER pulled ads from a creator on the partner program. In a sense, this should serve to teach a lesson right? Essentially Logan Paul is like all the other creators that now cannot be paid but still have ads run on their channel right?
Wrong.
There are a couple reasons why this is not a big deal at all. The biggest one being the verbiage that youtube uses. Here's a direct quote:
“After careful consideration, we have decided to temporarily suspend ads on Logan Paul’s YouTube channels. This is not a decision we made lightly, however, we believe he has exhibited a pattern of behavior in his videos that makes his channel not only unsuitable for advertisers but also potentially damaging to the broader creator community.”
Note the use of the word temporarily. Not permanently, not even indefinitely. TEMPORARILY. To me, that is code for "we are going to make a statement that makes us look good in the press until this dies over." Which is exactly in the same tone as what they did the first time this happened, just now it applies to all of his ads. While Logan Paul is estimated to make about 1.2 million a month from YouTube ads, which is definitely nothing to sneeze at, let's remember that that is not including other forms of revenue such as merchandise and other things. YouTubers love to promote the fact that they have other revenue streams due to the fact that youtube could shut off tomorrow and screw them, so it would be naive to think that Logan Paul doesn't.
Youtube doesn't want to lose advertisers due to controversial content. They also want to keep being able to have creators with extremely high subscriber counts to sell ads for. These two things are in a direct conflict with each other. Instead of building up their smaller creators, they would rather keep selling ads on a profitable platform now, regardless of the character of the person. If this was not true, Logan Paul's channels would be deleted at this point due to multiple guideline violations and terms of service violations. But companies gotta make money right?
This is why I will continue to preach until I turn blue in the face about independence and creating your own platform. Having your own platform to control your content means your community is yours and you control all aspects of it, including how you monetize it. Collaborating with other creators and putting things on a website together also builds community by giving a chance for many different audiences to intermingle with each other and share fanbases (like what I try to do here on Cozy Productions - shameless plug I know). Just be aware that unless you're at the top, you're fighting an uphill battle