Youtube has been continually moving into the direction of family friendly content and political correctness; however, the size of the website and the amount of videos that are posted every day make it very difficult for YouTube to police their site. Large creators complaining about the lack of action on the end of YouTube is nothing new. Many of their features are broken or lacking and it often costs creators big time. This affects all channels as anything that YouTube could see as controversial or politically incorrect can be demonetized which causes a loss in revenue. No channel is consistently safe from the YouTube demonetization hammer.

Famous examples of YouTube handling business poorly is the “ADpocalypse” that dropped the incoming revenue 80% for most creators. This was said to be the result of famous YouTuber PewDiePie’s content being not family friendly or advertiser friendly. The revenue rates have since evened out to a much more reasonable 30% drop. The drop in revenue has resulted in YouTube being more strict with who can actually monetize their videos. The requirements to monetize videos used to be 10,000 lifetime views across all of a channel’s videos. Now it is 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 hours of watchtime viewed in the last 12 months. The more stringent rules have led to many small creators incapable of earning money from their content.

Although smaller channels do not usually make much money anyway, now any opportunity of a “blow-up” video earning anything at all is gone (unless that blow-up video manages to get enough hours and earn that channel enough subscribers to make that channel eligible). YouTube has been more strict than ever with who they allow to have ads. The larger creators should be just fine, but it is questionable whether or not this new YouTube enforcement of content management will continue to tank small channels.