Is YouTube Going Away?

That's kind of silly, categorizing web users as "mainstream" or otherwise. I don't even know what the criteria for that would be.

About YouTube, it can be a nice place to waste some time and watch cat videos but I don't put much stock in the bulk of the content uploaded there. Mostly click bait and long, boring rants by people who usually don't understand the subject they're discussing.

They should just stick to cat videos.

It looks like YouTube is moving toward its new model far more quickly than we thought.

YouTube TV just launched. Also, YouTube's partner program has changed so that channels with under 10k cumulative views are no longer eligible for monetization on any videos and channels that do meet that requirement have to be manually reviewed for partnership eligibility.

Of course, YouTube has every right to do this and they have to do it to retain advertisers. This does, however, dramatically push the site toward a model where only YouTube Red channels can be monetized.

The theory that they will eventually drop non-monetized channels seems quite plausible considering the massive cost of running the site and maintaining all of that server space.

I would move the prediction of YouTube's transition to a Hulu-style model to within about a year and a half. What do you guys think?

On Saturday, April 1st, 2017 at 5:11 am, TimeTravel_0 said:

In light of recent events, it looks like the whole political paradigm is changing. Depending on how things play out, we might see the point in time where people put aside their differences sooner than imagined.

With regard to YouTube's future, I would strongly urge people to get used to using smaller sites to host their stuff. Don't trust the "cloud". Use a VPN if you send or receive anything sensitive. Have backup power and backup Internet capability (a pre-paid air card or something similar) if you have vital business to conduct over the network.

Also, look into Wireless mesh networks. Just remember that EMP will destroy both your electronic devices and the power grid. We can't live our entire lives on the Internet to the point where we don't know how to communicate offline.

I'm sorry to hound on this and be so preachy but time is running out.

Acknowledged.

Regarding YouTube, another consideration is that non-monetized, non-partner content also competes with paid / partner content in terms of viewing time. This builds a bit more onto the case that regular, non-monetized content's future may be in jeopardy.