YouTube recently announced that it will demonetize all the small channels on its’ platform. The site’s new eligibility criteria state that channels need to have more than 1,000 subscribers, with at least 4,000 hours of watching within the past 12 months.
The decision came after Logan Paul’s ‘suicide video’ incident. According to the company, the decision of demonetizing the small channels was taken in order to, “prevent bad actors from harming the inspiring and original creators around the world who make their living on YouTube.”
The channels that fail to meet these criteria will no longer be able to monetize and will lose access to tools and features associated with the YouTube partner program. If any channel fails to meet the criteria, but later they manage to pass it, they will be automatically re-evaluated with the new criteria. All the new channels joining the platform will have to manually apply for evaluation.
Though many are criticizing YouTube’s new policy and terming it as “favoritism” for big channels or “penalty” for small channels, I don’t think it’s a bad decision.
From my seat, it looks like this. The new policy is not preventing the channels to grow and increases the subscribers. They can improve the content and attract more subscribers to the channel. If the creators want to earn money from the platform, they will work hard on the content and grow the channel.
There are many creators who do run channels as a hobby, others make decent money, and many channels hardly earn money at all. According to YouTube, “99% of those affected channels were making less than $100 per year in the last year, with 90% earning less than $2.50 in the last month.”
Even before this new policy, there was a benchmark of 10,000 channel views. This new benchmark will ensure that the content creators are regularly creating videos and it will push them to hold the subscriber base and get regular views.
Ultimately, having content that stands out and frequent publishing is important to the audience experience. We all benefit from it.