YouTube’s Continual Advertisement Issues
YouTube in the last three years has had many issues connected to their monetization and advertisement programs. The worse of what has become known as the “Adpocalypse” began in 2016 and 2017 where there was an advertising boycott after ads were seen being placed on videos associated with racism, violence, and hate. After a few patches, it seemed like by the end of 2017 that YouTube had fixed the algorithms and was bouncing back from their financial loss, but many of its content creators continued to face issues (Stanford, 2018).
The new monetization rules which pertain to their Partner Program force creators to have a total of 4000 hours of watch time in a year and have at least 1000 subscribers or followers (Alexander, 2018). This is vastly different from the previous requirements which in contrast only required 10,000-lifetime views. YouTube has openly acknowledged that smaller creators are going to be drastically affected but, claim that 99% of the channels affected make less than 100 dollars a year. The backlash was almost immediate across Reddit, Twitter, and YouTube creators were ranting and criticizing YouTube for their new partner program.
With the new policy in place, many of the big YouTube content creators already had the hours and the subscribers but were constantly getting flagged for inappropriate content for the littlest things like swearing. Because of the flags they also had to look for money in alternate forms like Patreon or other crowdfunding services. While the big YouTubers were able to find ways to make money in crowdfunding and donations, the smaller YouTube channels were forced to suffer under the new guidelines. Many small channels were forced to alter there content to be more simplistic and inoffensive to stand a chance at monetization, as well as upload much more often to have a chance at reaching the 4000-hour requirement (Stanford, 2018).
YouTube's main priority is not on supporting their content creators but appeasing advertisers and in turn maintaining viewers to keep advertisers coming back (Alexander, 2018). They are doing this for good reason though because without its ad revenue YouTube cannot afford to stay afloat or pay content creators at all. Advertisers must feel as though they trust YouTube and the new Copywrite rules and partnership agreements are helping to facilitate that. Another way YouTube is focusing on Advertisers is by letting them help in choosing what channels their ads are being placed on (Alexander, 2018). Keeping advertising relations positive is YouTube's only hope to maintain itself as the site we know and it must do so because their creators and themselves cannot afford another advertisement boycott.
This situation on YouTube is quite a predicament for everyone involved. YouTube is just trying to keep advertisers on board with their site to generate the revenue they need to pay for all their expenses and their creators. Advertisers just want to make sure their products are not getting associated with highly inappropriate videos that can negatively affect their brand. Creators both small and large want to have the freedom to create the content they love and still have a chance to get paid for it without having to jump through hoops. While I support YouTube creators and that they should be able to have the opportunity to produce whatever type of content they want, (that meets the guidelines) I am supporting YouTube and Google in this issue. YouTube is trying their best to put out fires left and right an although they don’t always get it right what they are trying to do with these new rules is to keep the platform alive. YouTube depends on the advertising money and advertisers are the first ones to drop out before creators or viewers so prioritizing them makes sense from a business and financial standpoint. Hopefully in the future once things start to calm YouTube will return to supporting their creators and helping them create the content, they want to but, for now, they have to focus on business.
