The State of YouTube

The+State+of+YouTube

YouTube has been a significant media venue for the spontaneous and wild Internet back in the mid 2000’s. Former PayPal employees Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim created a prosperous website on the Internet. Users of the site could upload animations, videos of themselves, funny skits, and an endless number of animal videos. It seemed the Internet had a new playground where broadcasting yourself and gaining popularity was a tangible achievement. Unfortunately, that changed in the early 2010’s, and it turned for the worse. Ever since Google bought YouTube, they have slowly changed the site into a new platform, which caused those goals and dreams to vanish.

The Adpocalypse

On March 27, 2017, hundreds of thousands of monetized YouTube channels got a terrible surprise when they logged into their accounts: their revenue was plummeting. Five days before this happened, YouTube had gotten hit by a giant boycott on March 23rd. Over 250 brands advertising on YouTube (such as McDonald’s, Toyota, AT&T, PepsiCo, Starbucks, Verizon, Walmart, and many more) boycotted YouTube. The New York Times reported “that ads were appearing on YouTube videos that espoused extremism and hate speech.” Philipp Schindler, Google’s Chief Business Officer, said on March 21st that there would be stricter policies and rule regulations to prevent ads from running on terrorism, extremism, or hate speech-related material. Later on, the new terms of service were released, which hurt successful YouTube channels profiting from their videos. The terms of service stated that violations such as hate speech, swearing, sexually suggestive material, violence or tragedies, would cause the video to be automatically demonetized, or sometimes deleted.

“I believe the the Slingshot Channel, on YouTube, one of their videos was demonized because they demonstrated how ‘stab proof armor’ bought off Amazon wasn’t all that stab proof,” said Matt Silver, a Hall High School Sophomore. The Slingshot Channel demonstrated how armor used during the 2017 Westminster Bridge Attack earlier this year was ineffective against knives. With YouTube demonetizing the video, it hurts the content creator and does not help London Police to strengthen their armory due to YouTube obscuring the video by demonetizing it.

This was done via robots, which scan the video. Consequently, popular YouTube Channels that contained vulgar humor or swearing all of the time have had their ad revenue slashed. The problem with the robot is that it cannot understand the context of why something explicit in nature is being used; for example, a popular educational channel could have a picture of male or female primary and secondary sex organs being displayed for educational purposes. The robot will demonize any videos if explicit material is displayed at all.

Vapid Videos

Old channels that began when YouTube was created have become mediocre as well. An exemplar of these channels is CollegeHumor, who have been on YouTube since 2006; they have lost its charm and it’s humor, ironically, that it originally gained in its heyday. Content creators have lowered the quality of YouTube videos in order to gain easy subscribers and views by using popular or mainstream events going on within the Internet instead of sticking to originality.

Aaron Lemos, who goes by the moniker EmperorLemon or EmpLemon, described in a 49 minute long video called YouTube has been on a Downward Spiral (which is an explicit video) states the positives of early YouTube to the negatives of YouTube in the present time. At the 29 minute and 25 second mark on the video within the “Corporate Corporations” chapter, Lemos said “YouTube audiences don’t want to be challenged anymore. They just wanna get doped up on some polished, sparkly, inoffensive content. Why else would content like BuzzFeed, WatchMojo, and Fine Bros be so successful? It just astounds me how the type of person would go onto Facebook and complain ‘Oh my God, how could people watch The Kardashians?’…‘How could people have such bad taste?’ And then they turn around and watch half an hour of BuzzFeed videos. […] Do you people not realize that?”

Even though Lemos has a vulgar and harsh view of YouTube in the latter half of his analytical video, he raised many good points about the importance and quality of what YouTube can provide along with artistic expressions being depleted off of YouTube.

Political Censorship

“If you look at the trending page, they have liberal-ish type of videos but a lot of the time the videos that are taken down are Conservative leaning ones…. Politics has a lot to do with who they censor [and] who they don’t, who gets ad revenue [and] who doesn’t. And that is under the guise of hate speech rules they have [and] are quite vague if you take a look at them,” said Matt Silverman.

Conservative YouTubers such as Hunter Avallone have had their videos demonetized based off their political beliefs.

In Hunter Avallone’s video, The Problem with YouTube, he said, “…[I]t’s not that hard as to why the mainstream media…wants to take down YouTube: it’s because of YouTube’s massive sway and massive power. Think of it this way: Fox News, on average, pulls in 1.35 million views per day, whereas PewDiePie is pulling 4 to 8 million per day. Obviously YouTubers have a lot more power and can reach a much wider audience. They’re also not connected or controlled by any major corporations. There’s no strings attached – they can say whatever they want and can influence a ton of people. That’s something to be feared by the old mainstream media.” Going back to what Lemos stated in his video, YouTube pulled in a lot of people in 2008 because of being the alternative to television. Therefore, YouTube has a lot more power than TV because nobody wants to be stuck watching shows they do not enjoy.

YouTube in it’s current state does not seem to be getting better. Google does not simply care about the site’s existence anymore and only want to get as much money it can out of it before it’s sucked dry of activity. There is nothing that the individual could do anymore as they have been ignored; the common person is under the thumb of corporations and the artistic expression YouTube once provided will not be cherished by YouTube most likely for a very long time. For that reason, YouTube will continue to decline rapidly, unless it can somehow manage to get back to its roots.