Once a small idea where people could upload their own content to share with others, Youtube (YT) is going all corporate and dropping the guillotine on small channel creators. Will this be the equivalent to your parent or boss friending you on Facebook? Probaly not, will it be the catylyst for creative minds to find a new outlet? Most likely. With moat things good, it's what makes something interesting and attractive that ruins it.
I started on YT in 2007, mostly searching for music that I had since lost records, tapes and cd's of. I made my first playlist and let it rip on random loop for months. I started posting my own content as a way to post what I was up to long before smartphones, skype and snapchat. It was a great way to share with people ovet distance and also show clients what was going on under, in and on top of the buildings. Photos are great but to show a client the view from the 7th tier of a scaffold with video and narration was exciting!
So I continued with it even though it wasn't all that popular, and then came the ads.......... yup, big advertisement. Before the video, during the video, ad nasuem. (HA!)
The first sign that things were changes over at Alphabet, Google, YT was they wrnt through and cleaned house on any old, unused, or otherwise fake accounts. The advertisers demanded it, what are we paying you for they asked. Then they started the purge, sure violence, bullying, generally inappropriate behaviour, definitely uncalled for and swept away. Then it was time to up the ad ante and get highr CPM (clicks per mille) rates. Get the new channels without the views out of the pool, 10,000 or less views? See ya!
In Febraury comes the next wave of the purge, any channel without 4,000 hours per annum and 1000 subscribers. Ugh, you SOB's, I'm freaking 200 subscribers away from that mark. If they decide to axe it, it won't make it through the algorithm and growth with at best come to a standstill.
You know, back in the day I had an awesome MyGoogle homepage. On one page I had email, calendar, weather, stocks, news and whatever else I needed for a 15 minute status update. They killed that and I had to setup each page separately, so I had MyFinance where I could get all the news I needed about the market with analytics. Nope they killed that too.
So I can I figure each time they kill something I find a new outlet to use. What will replace the YT of old?
Remeber when ETSY went all public? Yea, artists started exiting the site in droves as mass produced products from China took over. Well YT, your time will come as well, innovation turned commercial will be your parents and bosses channel so they can feel "hip".
