The YouTube Demon
YouTube was launched on February 14th, 2005. Since then it has become a powerhouse of creativity and free content. Many people have even turned YouTube into their career, and the biggest creators have even become somewhat like celebrities. YouTube as a company and the creators on the platform have gone through many problems but the biggest problem today is the mass demonetization on the creators content. Creators make money off of YouTube after they are accepted into the “Youtube Partner Program” and then based on how many views and subscribers they get and how many adds they put on the video. When someone is making content and earning money from it, their content is considered to be monetized. If YouTube decides that their content violates their policies then they can pull the monetization off the video meaning, the creator will have no adds on that video and earn no money from it.
For the past two years, YouTube has been cracking down on what content gets monetized and what doesn’t, and this has severely hurt many smaller creators that have YouTube as their main source of income. YouTube’s algorithm can strike someone’s channel for many different reasons, from the actual content of the video to the thumbnail, even to just what the video is titled. Violence, swear words, and sexual situations/nudity are all things that will get a video demonetized, youtube goes much more into depth in their policies page. YouTube tries to market itself as a family-friendly website but in reality, the company has no actual control over what content gets put out there so in order to gain some control they will just say “op we don’t agree with your content so we aren’t going to pay you for it even though your audience and subscribers love it”. Creators shouldn’t be worried about what could get their income taken away and sacrifice their content for it, they should be able to make what they love and what their audience enjoys.
The answer seems quite simple to be honest. YouTube needs to chill out on what content they consider violates their policy, or they should change the policy to be more straight forward and not so vague. The creators are the ones determining who their audience is, so why should someone who is obviously making content for teenagers and young adults be punished because there’s a possibility of a child watching. Even with television, there are plenty of shows that aren’t meant for kids but there is still the chance they will see it, but the people who work on the show don’t get punished for that because it is the parent’s job to keep track of what their child is watching, especially with YouTube. YouTube shouldn’t be reprimanding the people who keep their app alive just because they don’t agree with someone’s content, video making is an art form and art is subjective. If YouTube feels someone is making content that isn’t suitable for certain ages then they can age restrict it and keep it monetized but if the content is consistently spreading hate speech or anything that is harmful to someone or a group of people, then YouTube should just take that channel down altogether.
