A typically American response: YouTube knifes creators to “protect” them

The email I received this morning regarding the YouTube Partner Program changes should be taught in college courses as a classic example of what to do when you are too incompetent to handle a problem: hurt the innocent while insisting that it is for their own benefit.

One can really only marvel at the double-speak and logical fallacies in the announcement. My children can no longer monetize their channel so that YouTube can better “identify creators who contribute positively to the community and help drive more ad revenue to them (and away from bad actors)”.

Read: “drive ad revenue away from the small content creators”.

But apparently it’s all ok because 99% of the new victims were only making less than $100/year! Yeah, but that sure helped my children and a great many others invest in more production equipment - vital when you are starting out.

Like any too-big-to-fail US corporate monopoly, Google only does what benefits Google because Google can get away with it and no one can stop them. Hurting independent content creators won’t solve the problem, but that was never the point was it?

The brutal fact is that Google doesn’t need small content creators - they cost more than they’re worth. Like rich getting richer and poor getting poorer, large YouTube channels will get larger as more and more small channels fail.

But at least Google gave us a typical American close to the letter, saying that 2017 “was full of the moments” where videos “made us laugh, taught us about our world and warmed our hearts”. Yeah: they think we are all so stupid that moments and warm fuzzy feelings will make everything ok.