YouTube taking money away from the little guys
I’m sure you have noticed that when you watch pretty much any YouTube video these days that there will be some kind of ad that pops up on the bottom of the video screen or that an ad will play before or in the middle of the video you are watching. This is because Google allows video creators to have ads placed on their videos so that they and Google can make money from the companies who pay for these ads.
Recently a very popular YouTube blogger named Logan Paul posed a video that showed a dead body of someone who had just committed suicide in a Japanese Forest that they had just come across while recording a video blog about that forest. Logan Paul got a lot of criticism for showing those images and now Google has made changes as to who gets to use their Adsense feature to monetize their videos.
The new requirements are that you need at least 1000 subscribers and have had your videos watches for at least 4000 hours in the past year. And if you don’t meet these requirements you will be kicked off the YouTube Partner program. The problem with this is that there are a lot of smaller channels that are popular but don’t meet the requirements for the new program and now these people will be losing any income they made off of their videos.
Google says they are doing this because they want their ads to run on more relevant channels and not channels that get a ton of view by posting copied content or content only designed to generate a lot of views. This makes sense but at the same time they are hurting thousands of people who have meaningful unique content that people like to watch. These users will have until February 20th to either get their channels up to speed or they will be dropped from the program.
This is causing quite the uproar in the YouTube community and many are saying that it won’t affect the users who already have the subscribers and hours watched even if the content is stolen or just designed to be what they call “click bait” which entices YouTube watches to click on their video based on the subject or preview image. Time will tell if Google decides to fine tune their policies to allow smaller users back into the program or if this is just the first step for worse things to come.