YouTube's New Policy

Hello all,

I believe some of you might have already learned this, but effective 20 February, YouTube is cutting monetization from all channels with less than 1,000 subscribers. I heavily object to YouTube's new rule and feel that most likely, it would be harmful to a large part of this community.

First of all, let's take a look at YouTube's justification behind this new regulation. On their blog, they wrote that these new guidelines 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)" and "also help us prevent potentially inappropriate videos from monetizing which can hurt revenue for everyone." First of all, having a large following does NOT equate to a positive impact on the YouTube community. While many of you who are reading this are, in my opinion, passionate individuals who spend countless hours on their projects with a small YouTube following, other YouTubers, who have millions of subscribers, are rewarded for posting offensive content that gets lots of publicity (Logan Paul for example).

At the same time, YouTube claims that "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." Well, it just happens to be that my channel has earned $56.22 since I started monetizing my videos on the 17th of November, exactly 2 months ago, so I would definitely be at a pace for over $100 per year. And this would likely be especially bad for Marble Blast video creators, since viewers often re-watch videos to completely understand how to beat a level/perform a difficult trick/etc. which could easily be missed on the first viewing of a video. In fact, it seems that many Marble Blasters have a higher view count than their subscriber count would suggest. According to SocialBlade, 10 of the 13 channels in my "Featured Box" have a higher position in the "most viewed" rankings than in the "most subscribed" rankings. Thus the reliance on the number of subscribers in the new policy is unfair to the majority Marble Blast players.

Lastly, this article states that "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." First of all, these new policies could discourage a lot of new YouTubers, since it can take years to build a large following. In fact, when my channel was first getting started I would get less than 10 subscribers a month, so reaching a threshold such as 1,000 could very well seem like an impossibility for a lot of newcomer YouTubers. In the end, YouTube is simply going against their own stated value, as they are only demoralizing small channels who are waiting to get known.

Anyway, I would like to thank all of you for your support, it really means a lot to me. And as a community, I know that we can unite to combat this injustice! Keep up the great work so far!

Thanks,
Battlecube314.

Really sorry about your channel--sounds like it was growing pretty quickly. Sucks that all the small creators will get hurt from this when it's almost always the big guys who post content worthy of demonetization.

I have a channel with 2k+ subscribers but I don't think I've gotten any AdSense money from it in the past four years. No copyright strikes or anything, it's just a really screwy system, and from what I can see a lot of others had the same problem. Maybe the new system will fix these issues? It's hard to say.

Regardless, YouTube is on its way out. Twitch is the new hotness.

Appreciate the time and effort you've put into your channel and researching this topic, Battlecube.

I mostly stopped uploading to YouTube entirely when their content copyright bots starting parsing all of my content. I was suddenly getting videos removed from my channel without any notice to me - no e-mails, no warning, no notification, nothing. I'd log in one day and half of my content would be missing. Most of the time, it was from using background music in my videos which were previously covered under YouTube's content law, which mysteriously vanished a few years after they were acquired by Google (most likely so they didn't have to pay the music industry a large sum of money to permit their uploaded videos to use their music).

The last straw for me was when I was uploading guild raid battles from Star Wars: The Old Republic, and the bots were removing my videos because the background music during the raid encounters (which was part of the game, that I purchased and paid a monthly subscription for, mind you) were the same theatrical scores used in some of the Star Wars films.

Sadly, this is just another nail in the coffin for the casual YouTubers. There is no legitimate reason for this type of move other than to conserve funding and simplify their payout process using an absurd requirement that's easy to circumvent. Can you imagine how many sites are going to crop up over the next few days that "guarantee" 1000 subscribers after paying them a premium fee? Google accounts are free to create, after all. It's only a matter of time before people catch on and start selling subscription clicks to monetize your videos.

It's a tough cyber world out there, the days of underdog streamers and content creators is becoming more challenging with each passing day. I wish you the best and hope that you continue your online vlog presence.

~Aayrl