A Detailed Update On YouTubes Monetization Program Changes, And What It Might Mean For Steemit/Dtube!

As some of you may or may not be aware, YouTube recently drastically changed their YouTube Partner Program requirements which determine whether or not a YouTube channel is able to monetize their content on the YouTube platform. As part of this change it now requires a channel to have 1,000 subscribers as well as 4,000 hours of watch time on their channel (over the past 12 months).

YouTube Partner Program overview

On January 16, 2018, we announced new eligibility requirements for the YouTube Partner Program. Once a channel reaches 4,000 watch hours in the previous 12 months and 1,000 subscribers it will be reviewed to join the program.
https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/72851

Many YouTube channels were made aware of this change when YouTube sent out a mass e-mail to all its current YouTube Partner Program members, which in many cases told them they are no longer able to monetize their content starting soon (including myself who no longer meets the needed criteria to advertise).

Important updates to the YouTube Partner Program

While this might not seem like a huge deal to many people, it may still have a major impact on the YouTube community as a whole, as a huge amount of channels on YouTube don't meet these requirements and are no longer allowed to monetize their content on YouTube, even if their content is family-friendly and meets all the other needed requirements for adverting. On top of that many of these users have pending funds locked away on YouTube due to the current minimum withdrawal amount which is $100USD, meaning any users who are no longer able to monetize their content and currently have between $0 and $100 due to them, are currently unable to ever get the payout of the funds they are due (can't earn more due to rule change + can't withdraw current funds without reaching benchmark). On top of that still, new users coming to the YouTube platform will have a harder time starting out, with a lot less initial incentive due to this recent change which may greatly affect the number of new channels starting on the platform as a whole.

From what I can see YouTube hasn't specifically stated the reason for this change, but I think it can likely be contributed to 3 recent events that took place on the YouTube platform over the last 6 months.

#1 - Apocalypse... It all starting last year with a Wall Street Journal story on the popular YouTuber Pewdiepie, which edited and showed his content out of context in a carefully created hit-piece to try to depict him as a white supremacist as that was the flavor of the month in the US news cycles at the time. Although the Pewdiepie story turned out to be basically bullshit, it was enough to get advertisers to rethink where their online advertising budget was going as a whole. This hit-piece quickly had a chain-reaction in the online advertising world when major brands started to look closer on what videos their ads were appearing, some of which created cause for concern. This caused a large amount of major brands to stop advertising on YouTube until it could resolve the problem.

#2 - Elsagate... A few months later a story finally broke into the main stream after being discussed in the alt media for months but going completely ignored for the most part, which was a disturbing and rapidly growing trend happening on YouTube Kids. This disturbing trend was a series of videos that were aimed at children on the YouTube Kids platform (a platform designed specifically for very young children) but were far from family-friendly... and even worse almost all of them were monetized. The videos ranged in theme a fair bit, but basically consisted of less-then-kid-friendly content such as animated Micky Mouse urinating into the mouth of children in a bathtub, or Daffy Duck tying a young child up and putting them in the trunk of his car, or Spiderman and Else doing less them childish activities together, and some even included real life children being bound and gagged while acting like they were being drugged and kidnapped by their favorite cartoon character (usually played by an elder in a Halloween costume). The phenomenon was quickly nicknamed Elsagate which was a merger of a young princess character from Disney's movie Frozen ("Elsa") who stars in many of these videos, which was then combined with the pizzagate/pedogate branding ("Gate") relating to speculation on high level US gov officials and their potential pedo activities which were brought to light in some of the Clinton Emails that were released during the FBI investigation against her.

#3 - Suicide Forest... And now just recently you have Disney's poster-boy and viral YouTuber Logan Paul, who visited Japan and made a jackass of himself, disrespecting the Japanese community by running around like a dumbass making a scene everywhere he went. Disrespect and difference of culture aside, this was not what caused the recent uproar, as Logan was able to make all that stuff seem like background noise with his actions that would soon follow later that day. Him and his crew decided to visit a location that is called Aokigahara which is better known as the "Suicide Forest", a place in Japan that is known for people going to commit suicide (something which happens a shocking amount each year...). During their adventure into this forest they do in fact stumble upon a man who had killed himself recently by hanging himself from a tree. Being the upstanding individual he is (sarcasm of course) he decides to mock and film this mans dead body and then uploads the video of it to YouTube with the goal of getting viral views (even states "dead body" in the title). The video then does in fact go viral, so much so that it tops the YouTube trending list almost instantly, but even with the words "dead body" in the title, video of a real dead body, and countless people flagging the video, YouTube kept it on the trending page and allowed it to monetize for man hours before doing anything about it.

The combination of these 3 events FORCED YouTube to respond as the constant bad press and outcry from both content creators and YouTube users alike was causing them a lot of problems, problems which appeared to just be getting worse by the day. While these recently YouTube Partner Program changes may help mitigate SOME of these issues from happening (although the new policy change would not have helped at all in the 3 extreme scenarios I mentioned above as all 3 of the creators involved in those scenarios have FAR MORE subscribers and watch time then is required), it will still have some major impacts on whether new creators (or smaller creators) continue to choose YouTube as their platform of choice, or whether another platform may rise up and take its place (enter Steemit/Dtube...).

If you crunch the numbers, you will quickly find that if even a SMALL amount of YouTubers moved over to Steemit & Dtube due to the recently change to the YouTube Partner Program, it would have a MASSIVE impact on Steemit & Dtube as a whole. Lets not lie to ourselves... Steemit/Dtube are great, but the overall number of users capitalizing on these crypto-based platforms are still quite small in the grand scheme of things, especially when compared to a giant like YouTube.

Will the recent changes to the YouTube Partner Program (which again drastically impact smaller channels or new channels, which make up the LARGE majority of channels on YouTube) be enough to start a chain-reaction of events, causing Steemit & Dtube to go viral once these new/small YouTube content creators realize they can profit far more and far easier (with NO censorship) using Steemit/Dtube then they likely ever would on YouTube as their platform of choice (also without the need to force their users to watch stupid Ford truck ads all day)? I think the answer could very well be yes, and not only is Steemit/Dtube a far superior choice for many of these content creators, but this is also happening at a time when the crypto space as a whole is growing and becoming more and more mainstream to the general public across the world (and I have always said Steemit/Dtube is like the perfect gateway drug to the crypto space).

So what do you think, will Steemit/Dtube potentially see a fairly major influx of new users in the coming days/weeks/months as the crypto space grows, Steemit/Dube become more front-and-center, and past platforms like YouTube become less and less catered to the masses? I would love to hear the communities thoughts in the comments below!

If you found this post informative or enjoyable make sure to upvote, and resteem it to help get it in front of more peoples eyes. FULL STEEM AHEAD!