Okay, I’ve spent a good bit of time tearing down the YouTube Partner Program changes. I’m not going to lie, I was rather upset by them initially myself – I still think the principle of creating these kinds of limits to people earning any money via Adsense, SuperChat, or any other built into YouTube feature unless they reach some arbitrary limits to be rather annoying – especially bad for irregular content creators like myself.
I also find the comments that many have made about it absolutely insulting and hypocritical, and many larger YouTube Content Creators have said that they love this, and have had zero empathy for smaller creators upset by these changes.
One larger YouTuber I follow, though, seems to have thought deeper onto this than others, and his way of looking at it actually made me feel better about the whole thing .
First off, we should probably address that this is not a result of Tide Pods, Logan Paul, or anything like that. It’s absurd to even think YouTube would make a change like this pretty much the moment these things happen because that’s just not how business works. Moreover, it shows they didn’t even read the email that was sent out to all channels affected by this!
The email that was sent out had a link to a YouTube blog entry from back in December stating that, among other things, YouTube was looking to cut down on advertising abuse on the platform. You can read the blog entry here.
Their idea is this – if they restrict channels from making money right off the bat, it will cut down on the flood of cheap, throw-away channels that upload content to get quick hits via false thumbnails, following trends and what have you. Starve them of a reason to be, and you begin to clean up the site. Good content, as in, that made with the intent of being an actual video for people to watch and enjoy for what it is, will have a better chance of getting seen. So long as people stick around and fully watch the content you upload (which can be tricky, given the quick-to-boredom nature of most people on YouTube these days) things should eventually be fine. After all, now they at least, in theory, will have a better chance at seeing your real video on a subject rather than 100 fake ones made to get a quick buck.
Once you get to a point where you’re actually making money again, ad revenue should be better than it was – the CPM (cost per thousand views) of a video with ads will be higher than it was and, combined with higher view counts, you should see an all around increase in, well, everything.
We can only hope, that, anyway.
Before we get to the video, though, I did want to say I still think it’s stupid that some “full time” YouTubers want to say you shouldn’t put “all your eggs in one basket” referring to trying to make it big on YouTube, when they do that very same thing and got super mad when Adpocalypse started cutting into their revenue.
Ironically, I actually had my best YouTube earnings ever during Adpocalypse. Kind of makes ya think, doesn’t it?
Anyway, on to the video from someone we haven’t heard from here in a while, Barnacules Nerdgasm! I love his take on this, his understanding at our being upset, and the fact he does properly address how to make money outside of YouTube proper while still producing YouTube content. If we stick with it, this may just pan out in our favor, but it’s going to be a rough, very uphill battle – one I think us small time content creators can win!