Why Small Content Creators are Leaving YouTube

It's no secret that YouTube has not been handling things very well as of late. By my research, they are and have been running at a loss for some time now. Over time, they have increased the limits required for a channel to be able to monetize their videos. At first and in my case when I first began, all you had to do was apply and you could begin monetizing videos that fell within the bounds of legal copyright. Then, YouTube raised the bar to require 10,000 video views on your channel to allow monetization - a relatively simple and normal requirement. Following that, YouTube implemented an algorithm that would attempt to automatically detect videos that did not meet either YouTube's bounds or an advertisers bounds for monetization.

This idea seems fair enough, except thousands upon thousands of YouTube creators reported unfair demonetization due to faults with the algorithm, which resulted in countless of worthy and deserving videos accruing zero revenue for the creator. More recently, YouTube furthered their campaign against smaller channels by requiring a channel to have at least 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 hours of your content watched (per 12 months) to allow monetization. This new rule has wiped out a fair portion of smaller content creators, including myself, and sent them elsewhere.

The above vlog was my initial reaction after receiving the email. I have since semi-retired from YouTube, outside of a few traditional videos that I would have done anyways because I did not earn income from them, and have chosen Steemit, DTube, and their growing and friendly community as my new home for content creation.

I'm glad to be here.