It seems, for the first time in 2 years, the Online community is split on a decision that Youtube has made. Recently, Youtube has changed its monetization policy. The new policy has it so that any channel with less than 1,000 subscribers and 40 hours of view time in the last year can’t place advertisements on their videos.  

Ben, a member of the Trusted Flagger program at Youtube, tweeted that over 90% of partnered channels would lose their partnership because of this.  After watching some videos from well-known Youtubers and seeing their reactions, I decided that this new policy is actually a good thing, and it has inspired me to put more effort into my YouTube content.

Think about it this way: if you can’t reach 1,000 subscribers and 40 hours of view time in a year, then why do you deserve money?  Plus, no one is talking about how a few months ago Youtube changed their policy to only allow people with more than 10,000 views to get monetized, which also affects me. I haven’t made a dime off Youtube in over a year now, and all that’s done is inspire me to better my content.  

Some people may say that it’s hard to get recognized, and even if you’re putting in the effort, that doesn’t guarantee that people will watch your content. I understand that getting discovered on Youtube is difficult.  My rebuttal, however, is that there are a variety of ways to get recognized on the site.  You can advertise on Discord, Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or by word of mouth.

The community generally agrees that this change is moving the monetization policy back to the old days. Before 2012, no one but the big channels Online were able to get partnerships, but then Youtube made it so users can have the opportunity to form partnerships.

I think that this change is for the better, and in the future people will look back on this as the first good thing Youtube has done in almost 2 years.