The Problem with Youtube: A Continued Downward Spiral

As most of you know, I have made articles about this same topic before. As time went on, I noticed that Youtube still had yet to solve its biggest issue; the silencing of creators.

For ages, Youtube had been a place where you could post videos that pertained to you as a person. Videos you could connect and relate to. There was an air of creative expression within the site. Nowadays, though, this seems to have dissipated. Youtube became a land more dedicated to corporatism rather than the focus on creative individuals. Within this article, I wish to cover how this is, and what may have lead to this.

For those of you who had read the previous article I wrote, this part may be of no surprise or use to you. For those of you who haven't, come. Sit around the campfire and let me spin you a tale from long, long ago. Youtube, from its conception, used to be a platform for those who wanted to post videos from their life. Anything from a video of you hanging out in a zoo, to full-blown tutorials. The site grew exponentially, and before you knew it, Google bought it out. This brought a slew of opportunities because the site now had more funding than ever.

With this came the Youtube Sponsor Program. This gave users the opportunity to eventually earn money from doing something they love. This, however, was only available for select users. There was an application that was required in order for you to be able to even enter this program. That all dissipated as the money flew in from all sides. Ad revenue was available for all, as long as you had enough views on your channel. This brought about one of the most sought-after jobs of all time; sitting down, turning on a camera, and recording yourself for money. It was all fine and dandy until late 2016. That's when all fell apart.

The Adpocalypse

This event in the Youtube timeline was both inevitable and unexpected all at the same time. From all sides, Youtube was being bombarded with articles upon articles showing supposed evidence of big corporation ad's being shown on "alt-right" and "racist" videos. All of these big corporations wanted to save their reputation, so they started withdrawing ads from the site as a whole. This caused a huge problem for innocent creators and those who worked at Youtube.

In severe desperation, Youtube released a plethora of different tactics to try and bring advertisers back to the site. Of all these attempts, they only caused problems. Creators where being punished for using swears and speaking on sensitive subject matters, completely eliminating the whole "Broadcast Yourself" angle was coming from at the get-go. One such creator that was affected by this change was Casey Neistat. Casey is a vlog Youtuber with upwards of 10 million plus subs. In one of his videos, he mentioned using ad revenue from that video to assist people who survived and lost loved ones in the Los Angeles shootings. That video was subsequently demonetized, resulting in major backlash towards Youtube.

On top of this problem, a whole new problem arose. Channels becoming corporate and mass copyright claims.

Within the same time as the adpocalypse, some channels that managed to get passed the whole Youtube sensor gained immense success. Most of these channels fell under the whole corporate banner, or where absurdist "Toy/kid's education channels." This caused a major stir within Youtube as a whole. Most creators didn't feel that it was very fair that their work was being represented fairly in the midst of all the corporatism and the absolute depravity of some of these toy channels. One such corporate channel that caused both me, and a bunch of other Youtubers, a lot of problems went under the name of Ryans Toy Reviews. This channel quickly became a large financial success off of the content it put out. This lead to a lot of internet memes being made on this channel, and all those subsequent videos being striked by Youtube with no chance of appeal.

My thoughts have to lean toward quitting on Youtube as a whole. considering the Youtube rewind that came out recently (I'll be making an article on that soon) I don't suspect it of getting any better. It seems that corporations as a whole seemed to have taken grasp of the platform for good, and there is no foreseeable way of stopping it.