YouTube Crushes Small “Partner” Content Providers
Last January 17, 2018, YouTube cascaded an email notice to all existing YouTube Partners across the world about their updated YouTube Partner Program and created quite a stir for small content creators and channel owners. YouTube said that now, in order to be eligible to be a YouTube Partner and to be eligible for monetization, you should meet the new threshold of 4,000 hours of watch-time within the past 12 month and reached at least 1,000 subscribers. If not, all current Partners' channels will lose their ability to monetize their videos and all other features associated with the YouTube Partner Program by February 20th 2018 unless a channel surpass the treshold by then. But if not, Partnerhsip will be terminated. This clearly crushes all small video content producers and content providers on YouTube. They should go after those who falsely claim copyright and snatch the earnings of videos. Not the ones who legitimately creating content. One of my friend, Lincoln Ho, also a content creator, expressed his thougts during our conversation about the matter: "I think this will really hurt creators, but YouTube itself the most. Right now, most of the ones out there making the cash quickly are the countless number of list videos (read: copyright infringement from free downloaded content). It will just continue to perpetuate more and more repackaged garbage on the platform. And rather than rewarding good content which is brief and concise, the measurement of watch time only enables content no one wants to watch. Those who blab on and on without getting to the point will automatically get a better rating over someone who can communicate well in a brief and concise way. Someone with an opinion who talks about a news event for 20 minutes with one view, automatically trumps a 30 second news story with 39 views." YouTube should have seen all of these before making any business move like this. I for one, will still continue uploading content on YouTube for now, but merely for "exposure" purposes only. I'd tap in to other video content streaming sites that provides monetization and ones that doesn't kill opportunity for small content creators and providers like Brightcove, Wochit, Liverail, Kaltura, Facebook, and Dailymotion.
