*If you Don’t like reading, stop now. This is a very long rant fueled by nothing but pure rage from multiple Fortnite defeats at 4 in the morning.*
As if it wasn’t hard enough to get views, YouTube just made it a lot harder. Effective immediately, YouTube has changed their monetization policy so that in order to be monetized, you must have 4000 hours of watch hours on your channel over a 12 month period and at least 1000 subscribers. I have a lot of problems with this but let's start with the few positives that come out of this. With the previous 10,000 view threshold for monetization, it made the following things easy to do:
1. Post clickbait thumbnail/title videos and get monetized instantly due to deception
2. Post controversial content that generated a lot of good/bad coverage (and subsequent subs/views)
3. Post Vlogs that made fun of dead people as part of an overall series where a creator acted like a buffoon in a foreign country
What this also did is make the pool of ad revenue stretch to more and more creators. Since Advertisers already pays Google for the ads, and Google then splits the revenue 55% with the creators, this meant that 55% equated to less revenue overall for creators. Now that there are fewer creators that qualify for the YouTube Partner Program, this means that the potential pool of revenue is larger for each creator, making it more profitable.
But here is why I think that this only allows for the top percentile of YouTube creators to keep profiting from the status quo at the expense of the smaller creators who have a specific niche. The proverbial glass ceiling of 10,000-lifetime views was one that was easily broken, but having a double requirement of both 1,000 subscribers AND 4000 hours on your videos annually is a death blow to many, many creators. Niche channels that will be affected by this due to the fact that they may either have one or the other. More likely will be the case that they will have only the subscriber count and not the hour requirements.
Let's do some quick maths. 4000 hours times 60 is 240,000 minutes. 4000 hours divided by 60 minutes is approximately 67. You would need to make 67 hour long videos viewed one time each (or 67 people watch an hour long video) in order to meet YouTube requirements for hours viewed. Since not everyone has that type of attention span to watch that type of long-form content, let's assume everyone makes 5-minute videos average. You would have to get 48,000 views on that 5-minute video in order to fulfill that time requirement. This is compounded by the fact that even if you have a viral hit, you will still now have to have 1,000 subscribers. But this isn't even my biggest issue with the change. My issue is the verbiage of the blog post that explained this change.
Where to even begin….let's start with the first paragraph:
"2017 marked a tough year for many of you, with several issues affecting our community and the revenue earned from advertising through the YouTube Partner Program (YPP). Despite those issues, more creators than ever are earning a living on YouTube, with the number of channels making over six figures up over 40% year-over-year. In 2018, a major focus for everyone at YouTube is protecting our creator ecosystem and ensuring your revenue is more stable."
You mean, the sameYouTube Vloggers and personalities that caused at least half of those issues? Hmmm….
But it gets better:
"As Susan mentioned in December, we’re making changes to address the issues that affected our community in 2017 so we can prevent bad actors from harming the inspiring and original creators around the world who make their living on YouTube. A big part of that effort will be strengthening our requirements for monetization so spammers, impersonators, and other bad actors can’t hurt our ecosystem or take advantage of you while continuing to reward those who make our platform great. "
Going by this logic, you should be doing more than just removing the top-tier ads from Tubers' like Logan Paul and PDP right? Who exactly is being "rewarded" by these changes??? Let's continue though:
"Back in April of 2017, we set a YPP eligibility requirement of 10,000 lifetime views. While that threshold provided more information to determine whether a channel followed our community guidelines and policies, it’s been clear over the last few months that we need a higher standard."
Notice that this would still not stop most people from making controversial content, just prevent them from making money from it….I have more to say to that point in just a bit, but this part is what really triggered me:
"Starting today we’re changing the eligibility requirement for monetization to 4,000 hours of watchtime within the past 12 months and 1,000 subscribers. We’ve arrived at these new thresholds after thorough analysis and conversations with creators like you. They will allow us to significantly improve our ability to identify creators who contribute positively to the community and help drive more ad revenue to them (and away from bad actors). These higher standards will also help us prevent potentially inappropriate videos from monetizing which can hurt revenue for everyone."
Conversations with who? YouTubers who already meet those requirements? Who the actual fuck did you talk to?? Whats worse is that going by this paragraph, removing monetization from "bad actors" (remember, the same smug "bad actors" who contiune to make content that grosses many, many views on YouTube). Let's take the Logan Paul suicide video for example. Under YouTube policies, he should not make money off that video (which he did until he deleted it amid public outrage). Oh, but it gets better:
"Though these changes will affect a significant number of channels, 99% of those affected were making less than $100 per year in the last year, with 90% earning less than $2.50 in the last month. Any of the channels who no longer meet this threshold will be paid what they’ve already earned based on our AdSense policies. After thoughtful consideration, we believe these are necessary compromises to protect our community. Of course, size alone is not enough to determine whether a channel is suitable for monetization, so we’ll continue to use signals like community strikes, spam, and other abuse flags to ensure we’re protecting our creator community from bad actors. As we continue to protect our platform from abuse, we want to remind all of you to follow YouTube’s Community Guidelines, Monetization Basics & Policies, Terms of Service, and Google AdSense program policies, as violating any of these may lead to removal from the YouTube Partner Program."
So because niche channels were not making a lot of revenue off their videos, you find it appropriate to just take their piece of the pie for the sake of the community that does fall under your new guidelines? The hilarious part of this paragraph is that YOUTUBE IS STILL RUNNING ADS ON YOUR CHANNEL, PARTNER PROGRAM OR NOT. You can't even opt out of the Ads being run!
Notice how you can change every ad type from appearing on your videos except display ads...
You just have to deal with it. (remember, this change does not affect the 55% split Google gives to all creators, just makes the pool of creators that can get a piece of that split smaller). Here's where you should really be triggered though if you are a creator:
"While this change will tackle the potential abuse of a large but disparate group of smaller channels, we also know that the bad action of a single, large channel can also have an impact on the community and how advertisers view YouTube. We'll be working to schedule conversations with our creators in the months ahead so we can hear your thoughts and ideas and what more we can do to tackle that challenge."
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH yeah okay. Are these the same creators you talked to come to the decision to make this change in the first place? Just curious.
"One of YouTube’s core values is to provide anyone the opportunity to earn money from a thriving channel, and while our policies will evolve over time, our commitment to that value remains. Those of you who want more details around this change, or haven’t yet reached this new 4,000 hour/1,000 subscriber threshold can continue to benefit from our Creator Academy, our Help Center, and all the resources on the Creator Site to grow your channels."
Or just make videos with clickbait thumbnails. Also works well to build an audience quickly. Call me a cynic, but the creator Academy is NOT going to build you up to 1000 subs. But it's not enough to shit on your entire channel, got too big up the top dawgs too just for good measure:
"Even though 2017 was a challenging year, thanks to creators like you, it was full of the moments that make YouTube such a special place. Creators large and small, established and emerging, transformed their talent and originality into videos that captivated over a billion people around the world. They made us laugh, taught us about our world and warmed our hearts. We’re confident the steps we’re taking today will help protect and grow our inspiring community well into the future.
Neal Mohan, Chief Product Officer and Robert Kyncl, Chief Business Officer"
So, on the one hand, you talk about how "Creators large and small, established and emerging" are creating captivating videos, but the 3 videos cited in the links are from
And of course, vlogger extraordinaire Casey Neistat (8.7M Subscribers)
Neal and Robert, you should truly be ashamed for even putting your names at the bottom of this post.
Now I bet at this point like "wow, Cozy sure is a salty dude right now" or "why don’t you just grind harder to get more subs" which is a fair thing to say, considering that this is the stats for my main channel (new content coming soon)!:
LOL
And my gaming channel:
LOL
But the point wasn’t just to shit all over YouTube (okay, it sort of was) but to make a point. This shows that they actually don’t understand the problem. How can you, on one hand, punish smaller channels by removing their monetization, but not address larger channels who have, in many cases, directly violated YouTubes own Community Guidelines and AdSense policies by removing their monetization entirely?? This is a severe disconnect between YouTube and the top tier creators, and the rest of us. I believe that this will actually encourage even more shady behavior as people will be trying (and likely succeeding) to game and manipulate their videos in order to meet this threshold. All in all, it’s a pretty rough situation to be in as someone that may one day like for YouTube to pay the bills using your creative vision.
So what do we do about this?
The first and most obvious thing to do is to encourage more collaboration, this is already happening in the comment section of the post I just cited:
<3
The second thing we should all consider is building our own communities and our own platforms that exist independently of YouTube, so that YouTube is only a driver of traffic and not a generator of revenue. (Shameless plug ahead) My vision for Cozy Productions aims to be such a platform where people can share their ideas with people of different interests and hobbies and hopefully intermingle with different types of audiences and creators. I encourage everyone to try to make their own presence outside of YouTube as a way to generate revenue for your creative endeavors.
Lastly (and sadly), since YouTube is still the biggest source for online videos, and to their credit, YouTube does host hours of videos for free, the only other thing to do is to pound the pavement and get to work making the very best content you can make. YouTubes algorithms may be annoying at times and make it seem like it's incredibly hard to get exposure but if you keep going, you just might make it. Your talent for creation is not defined by statistics or ad revenue, but by the limits of your imagination. So get out there and start/keep creating.
