Will Steemit Become the New Youtube? The "Partnership Program", Elsagate, and the Future of Steemit.

^source

There's been a great deal of controversy as of late over Youtube's decision to exclude smaller channels from being able to monetize their videos. If you have less than 1,000 subs and they total less than 4,000 hours of watch time, you simply don't get to put ads on your videos, and as such you can't make any money.

The way I hear it there are some good arguments for this. It weeds out a lot of spam accounts, a lot of scammers and channels that upload other peoples' content apparently (though it's not clear how, at least not to me).

For Youtube to make money, companies have to buy ads. They won't want to buy ads if there's a chance those ads could appear on a video they find objectionable for one reason or another.

For example imagine some tiny white supremacist channel that monetizes its videos. Would most advertisers want to be associated with such a channel? It's easy to see their side of it. But this basically means if you're small enough, Youtube doesn't give a shit about your existence and has cut off the bottom rung of the ladder, so to speak.

I have long disliked what Youtube is increasingly turning into. The Elsagate scandal only happened because Youtube is so machinelike in how it optimizes for rewarding content that ticks certain boxes (making it the most possible ad revenue) that naturally, the content which makes the most money is equally machinelike.

If you constrain the ability of content creators to make money, it will shape the sort of content which results. The tighter those constraints, the narrower the variety in content.

It seems like their endgame is bland, homogenized, family friendly pablum advertisers will feel safe putting their ads on and which nobody could possibly find objectionable.

You know what sort of entertainment nobody finds objectionable? Marmaduke. Family Circus. Heathcliff. Garfield, post 2000. It's like a samey, flavorless beige paste. There is no worthwhile entertainment which offends no one.

This is because humanity is such a diverse group, any content which has anything meaningful to say, or which expresses any specific meaning whatsoever will inevitably upset at least one of the countless human subcultures out there.

Steemit hopefully has escaped this outcome by not being ad based. Whether their present business model is sustainable remains to be seen. Youtube has yet to make a profit, or so I have heard, so their business model apparently isn't.

Perhaps it is not Steemit which will become more like Youtube, but the reverse? Perhaps Youtube will announce their own ICO soon. It would not surprise me.

It does exhibit some of the same problems already though, with respect to impatient, uncreative users trying to game the system. Figuring out what's the least possible effort they can put in while getting a useful amount of money out.

Spammers are the biggest culprits, but just like Youtube there are many Steemit accounts which do little else besides reposting other peoples' content (usually memes).

I don't have the solution. The best I could think to do was to shine a light on the problem and illustrate by comparison with the present state of Youtube what Steemit might turn into, should it take the same series of wrong turns that Youtube did.

This is a cautionary tale then, but of the non-fiction variety. It's my hope that those associated with the running of this site will see this post, closely study what factors turned Youtube into the bland corporate pablum factory it is today, and chart a course for the future of this website which avoids that outcome.

A great many of us have come to love this community. Many of us rely on the income it generates, but have also put down roots, making lasting friendships with other Steemians. It's no longer just an experiment. The findings are in, it's a success by every metric.

What's left now is to make the best choices going forward in shaping what Steemit becomes, so that it will be a permanent fixture of the internet rather than a flash in the pan. Or worse, the shambling zombie that Youtube turned into.

---

^{Stay Cozy!}