Is YouTube Going Away?

Meh on YouTube. On top (or regardless) of what's already been said, I think most of the content on YouTube is pretty lame nowadays anyway. Stuff like Netflix and Hulu are taking over and I doubt Google's going to be able to compete because they're late to the game. People won't have a reason to get a paid subscription to YouTube Red / TV unless they get exclusive deals for shows. I see them going away for that reason alone.

Also I feel like I've said this before. Deja Vu ?

No, I just tend to stumble all over myself when trying to express some things.

Social media is dying, as is now fairly obvious - at least far more obvious than it was about three years ago. Notice how much the administration of these centralized web sites is scrambling to limit activity to "safe" topics and language? Of course that's not actually what's killing it. It's much simpler than that. It's just losing popularity because people are spreading the word that it's harmful to the psyche (at least to "addicted" users).

Look at MySpace. That site still exists but it's difficult to find people who use it regularly. Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube (in its current user-centric form) will end up that way within five years from now (January 201.

User-generated content is waning in popularity and sites that deliver quality paid content will experience a boom over the next decade.

YouTube just officially announced that they are demonetizing all small channels below a certain threshold of total video watch time. This will begin to eliminate all financial incentive for new YouTube channels and creators. The new rules apply on February 20 this year.

The only channels that will have an incentive to remain will be the larger channels. I would expect incremental changes that raise the requirements for monetizable channels in the future. This appears to be the first step in YouTube's movement toward becoming like Hulu and Netflix.

It begins...

I heard about the YouTube changes the other day.

What it seems like to me is that advertisers are getting skittish about their ads running on anything controversial because "online activists" are searching out videos they find offensive and brigading against any companies that have ads appearing on those videos.

Basically it's an attempt to stamp out anything these activists don't like and it's working. It's well thought out, in a way. Of course, YouTube and its creators are suffering for it.

From the looks of it, this has very little if anything to do with YouTube having any kind of ideological agenda and it's purely a matter of financial interest - maybe some panic.

It might be interesting to see if this affects other sites whose primary function is to host, categorize, search, and data mine user content. Would this be limited to video hosting? Twitter and Facebook have undergone similar changes but for different reasons. It's amazing how relatively small groups can gain disproportionate political power by claiming to have been harmed. Furthermore, the expanding definition of "harm" amplifies this.