YouTube’s relationship with creators has been tense
Many are discouraged over change in policies
SAN FRANCISCO – On April 23, 2005, YouTube launched with a mundane video of a man visiting the San Diego Zoo. It lasted 19 seconds and caused no shock waves.
Fast forward 13 years, and the Google-owned platform has morphed into an online juggernaut that, for many Americans of a certain age, is the source for entertainment and news powered by stars that can make a mint.
That seismic shift — from amateur website to big business — has not always been smooth, with advertisers complaining their commercials screen before offensive content and governments concerned that the platform lets extremists rally supporters.
Stuck in the middle are YouTube’s creators, a swelling legion of amateur video bloggers and personalities who have attracted waves of young users to the service in exchange for a slice of the company’s growing ad revenues.
But recently, some creators have found that the cash is drying up as
YouTube gets aggressive about policing its site with new content restrictions.
Those tensions were on tragic display at Tuesday’s shooting at YouTube’s headquarters. Nasim Aghdam, 37, arrived at the San Bruno complex seeking revenge for what she claimed was YouTube censorship of her workout videos, police say. She injured three employees before killing herself, they say.
“I’m being discriminated and filtered on YouTube,” Aghdam said in a video, one of hundreds she posted over eight years that attracted some 30,000 subscribers. “You’ll see that my new videos hardly get views, and my old videos that used to get many views stopping getting views.”
Aghdam’s apparent reaction to YouTube’s new policies was violent in the extreme. But her sentiments speak to the frustration — often vented on Twitter or in a YouTube clip — some video creators have been feeling in the wake of the platform’s newly aggressive and at times haphazard approach to curating the site.
“This isn’t a problem that’s going to go away soon because creatives across multiple tech platforms are realizing they have less power than they thought over their online destiny,” says Jeremiah Owyang, analyst at Kaleido Insights.
YouTube has enacted a series of restrictions in the past year designed to weed out the worst, including conspiracy theorists, extremists and predators. But these tougher policies have also had repercussions on the amateur actors, comedians and video bloggers — some of whom have become multimillionaires but many of whom man- age to carve out more modest incomes.
Last April, it said creator channels needed to reach 10,000 total views to be part of the YouTube Partner Program, which allows creators to collect income from ads placed before their videos.
Earlier this year, YouTube boosted thresholds again, saying channels would need 1,000 subscribers and to have amassed at least 4,000 hours of watch time over the past 12 months to qualify.
The moves to police the site through ad revenues hits creators where it hurts most, their paycheck.
Complicating matters is the fact that this culling process, called demonetization, is not always that clear, some creators complain, leading people from diverse parts of the spectrum to accuse it of bias and censorship.
Pop culture vlogger Philip DeFranco has posted a number of videos railing against the perils of YouTube’s haphazard approach to cleaning up the platform.
In one, DeFranco says that developing alternate sources of funding, namely fans willing to contribute, is the only way to guard against “a day (when) an automated system said ‘no revenue for you.’”