Is YouTube Going Away?

YouTube essentially verified what we've been discussing here with their latest terms of service. Any channels (like mine) that are not considered "commercially viable" will now be subject to being terminated for no other reason than that.

It's over. If you have a small YouTube channel, forget about it.

Oh it's even worse than that. Because YouTube had to pay a huge fine due to violating COPPA (Children's Online Privacy Protection Act) now apparently creators who don't mark their videos properly as "made for kids" might end up having to pay a $42,000 fine to the FTC. A lot of people are freaking out about it and for good reason as far as I understand it.

So we might have been right all along.

Oh, yeah. YouTube got in trouble for Elsagate and, wouldn't we all know it, the individual creators get punished for it.

I blame the FTC for being heavy-handed, tyrannical, and greedy (they will bankrupt small-time creators) and YouTube / Google for being irresponsible.

As for my YouTube channel, I'll delete it once the crackdowns begin. There's a small chance that YouTube will either put appropriate protections in place for kids, therefore removing the burden from creators, or it will be too legally risky for creators to continue having their channels there.

If the situation doesn't change, the prediction that YouTube will be gone by 2023 is on track.

On Sunday, November 17th, 2019 at 4:07 pm, Nitrocosm said:

It's kind of creepy that 2023 might work out perfectly.

And pretty sad to me that if it does we may lose all the videos we like on their, and everything we've uploaded.

Why must a few (few thousand maybe, but still) morons ruin it for everyone with Elsagate?

Ugh. I've heard lots of people lately on YouTube talking about this. There's no clear-cut way to legally say whether a video is meant for kids under 13 or not. If it's really on the makers to bear all the legal responsibility (who seriously has $42k to risk?), I agree, that's not looking too good.

A shame too since so many people dedicated their lives to doing YouTube as their regular jobs, investing in equipment, etc. and now suddenly they might get bankrupted overnight for doing nothing wrong.