When I received that email that I would be demonetized because I didn't have 1000 subscribers and didn't meet the watchtime threshold of 4000 hours in the past year, I was initially really upset. I had been a partner with Youtube for 4 years and by February 20th, I no longer will have that title. Not that I was really making money from the amount of views I was getting, but to have the incentive ripped away made me feel like I wasn't good enough. Initially.
Now I feel differently. Talking to other small youtubers, I concluded that this change in the policy could either do one of two things for the small youtube community; it could either make small youtubers feel the need to be even more fake in the content they create and toward their own audiences OR there might be a drop in the amount of small youtubers that stick around to stick it out but those creators will be putting out genuine content because these are the people who helped start Youtube. These are the people who did it to connect with each other and didn't care about getting paid for it because they just love it so dang much. I am one of these people.
Small content creators, I urge you to not give up, especially if this is something you love. Youtube used to be a genuine community of people who supported one another and cared about each others' content. It has the potential to be like that again, we just have to stay involved with one another and know we have each other to fall back on.
People who watch Youtube and care about the creators and not how many subs/views they have, I urge you to be a more active viewer and participant of the community. If you like someone's content, share it, like it, subscribe to them, mention them on comments of other videos when people ask for suggestions, help these people out. Because without them, we wouldn't have the basis for what Youtube is now. Without the creators who care about the platform as a communicative platform, it would be very hard to see any genuity in the content that would exist.
Small youtubers deserve to be heard just as loudly as bigger youtubers. We don't need the pocket change from adsense to raise our voices.
▶️ DTube
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