YouTube has once again targeted smaller content creators in efforts to tighten the grey area of demonetisation on the platform; rather than simply address the elephants in the room. Starting February, a new set of requirements will be released, enforcing channels to have at least 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 total hours viewed on the channel before granting them access to the revenue from advertisements.
Here we have two issues: the first being that a massive company like YouTube clearly disconnecting itself from the small, and ambitious creatives on the platform; ultimately choosing the existing whales. The second being monetisation in its own. It's a dying method of advertising on the Internet, especially on a large video platform that's used by millions every day--of course it's still highly profitable, but once again, that favours the existing whales and not the ambitious creatives.
For a company that constantly pushes smaller users down, there are very little alternatives. Existing alternatives are simply not worth the effort; they don't offer monetisation, or perhaps don't have anywhere near of a similar amount of visitors. It's fair to say YouTube has the monopoly at the moment. That said, we have seen YouTube content creators adapt and move to funding platforms like Patreon to combat the issue of demonetisation.
I believe we are at the point in which Steemit and DTube should be advertised as a worthy alternative. We've got a plethora of large names from YouTube posting their YouTube videos here on Steemit, and DTube itself is a neat alternative to YouTube given it's built on top of the Steem blockchain. These are only a few of the existing platforms we could start to create awareness of, and I'm certain that the eventual launch of Smart Media Tokens will only increase the number of worthy alternatives.
The big plus to using Steemit is that embedding a YouTube video into a post still grants that content creator access to the plethora of users still on YouTube, but grants them access to a reward pool. It combats the horrible and flawed system of having an algorithm choose what content is 'advertiser friendly' and what apparently isn't. The censorship resistance on Steemit and DTube effectively removes the cruel hand that claims to give, but mostly takes.
The Steem blockchain doesn't care if your content doesn't appeal to a massive advertiser; it cares that your content is yours, and contains the creative vision you have.