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YouTube And Creators Are Trying To Figure Out How To Coexist After New Policy Change
For the last two years, Youtube has been turning the crank on creators monetizing their videos, inevitably making it harder to for creators to make money in comparison to older Youtube policies. It got a little harder today, with Youtube's new policy on advertising a creator's Patreon coming out of nowhere for many accounts.
The new policy affects most external links from a Youtuber's page, from Kickstarters to personal websites, or most crucially, to Patreons on their channel pages before they are enrolled in the Youtube Partners Program. The partners program is how Youtube designates who can make money from their videos through advertisements, so creators who are not enrolled in the program use Patreon and other services linked on their channel to make money. This is where the problem arises.
In order to join the partners program, a channel must have accrued 10,000 views and be reviewed by Youtube to ensure the channel adheres to Youtube's content standards. So before a creator can link to a Patreon that, say, subsidizes their videos, they have to garner the 10,000 views and hope they pass Youtube's content guidelines.
Established channels are trying to figure out how to make this work, especially those that skirt around Youtube's guidelines for monetized content but subsist off Patreon. Far rockier is the situation for new channels, who will have to make videos for free with no options for monetizing them without being able to link those other options form their Youtube channel. Considering videos about content like gay and lesbian characters in games get demonetized, getting approved is not a guarantee when a channel reaches 10,000 views.
It all sounds like minor inconveniences that, when seen in aggregate, are starting to make Youtube creators feel squeezed by the site. Small channels with dedicated Patreons are now left out in the wildnerness, in a move Youtube says is to keep from their users and site safe from abuse. While the site is unlikely to ever fully push most creators away, as there's really no other option for a video site quite as big, creators being unhappy with Youtube will eventually lead to a lack of content diversity on the site.
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