YouTube’s Decline

During my ongoing literature review I often discover interesting facts about things I’ve never thought about. Sometimes I can connect these facts with my own observations: The result is mostly a completely new idea why things are as they are. Maybe these ideas are new to you, too. Therefore I’ll share my new science based knowledge with you!

This week: This time, I think about YouTube’s latest measurement to stop the exploitation of the monetization system. A measurement that turns YouTube into a very unhealthy ecosystem.

This week, I received an interesting email from YouTube informing me about the fact that I will have no longer access to the monetization system as my channel is not fulfilling some arbitrary yearly watch time and subscriber requirements. Interestingly, although stating that this measurement is an attempt to reduce the exploitation of the YouTube Partner Program, YouTube does not take into account how long a particular channel already is active.

YouTube Partner Program

Personally, I would fully understand if they do not allow new channels to enter the partner program and access the monetization system unless a channel published new content over a certain amount of time. For instance, it would perfectly make sense when they only allow channels that exist and were active for six months or longer to enter the partner program. However, this apparently was never considered by them. Instead, they once again just base their decisions on the success of a particular channel.

This also aligns with previous decisions and the general structure of their platform. Search results and video recommendations are mostly based on the view count of a particular channel. As a result of this, small or new channels do not have good chances to compete with already established channels that accumulated a lot of regular viewers during the early days of YouTube.

From my point of view as a very motivated and vested content creator, YouTube’s new measurement against the exploitation of the monetization system is another setback and a very disappointing decision. Of course, I never relied on the monetization system or created videos to make a living of them, but it gave me the feeling of being part of a healthy ecosystem. Now, the system seems to change to a more and more unhealthy system. After the new measurement entered into force, YouTube even further focusses on key-stones instead of leveraging niche players. In addition, they show once again that they do not care about low subscriber content creators who are the basis of their success.

In conclusion, I have to ask myself if I still like to continue to support a system that does not value the efforts of their users and only focusses on a few selected ones who can do whatever they like due to their huge amount of frequent viewers. Viewers who probably have never heard about smaller channels, that potentially produce better content, as YouTube avoids to leverage them. In the end, I think they went one step too far and it is time to take own measurements by uploading my content to a different video platform …