YouTube has had a bit of a rough time recently. With concerns around inappropriate content and brand safety mounting, the platform has taken a few arguably necessary and cautious steps to protect its users. The latest move is that the platform has pulled the plug on displaying ads on the videos of those with under 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 hours of watch time in the last year to prevent ‘bad actors’ from misleading and exploiting the system. But whilst there is incredible pressure for YouTube to ‘clean up,’ and tighten restrictions, there is concern among creators that the new policies will only cause big creators to get bigger, while smaller influencers — who are often more cutting edge — may feel less supported. Although the recent change to the platform isn’t seismic in proportions — for creators with subscribers in the low thousands, the most they can expect to make from a brand deal or from AdSense would be no more than £100 — the principle of exclusion could be enough for up-and-coming creators to stop thinking of YouTube as an exciting creative outlet that rewards talent. The worrying part here for YouTube is that this won’t mean people stop creating new vlogs, blogs, and content online, but it may mean they go elsewhere to start their careers. For YouTube, this could cause future difficulties if they try to migrate creators back to their platform after they’ve built audiences elsewhere. A prime contender against YouTube is the livestream site, Twitch — a gaming focused platform that has extended to streams on art, music, popular culture, and TV.
