I have noticed a literal explosion of posts in my feed about YouTube pulling the plug on small channels monetisation efforts.
All these seem to forecast the end of YouTube etc.
I think not...
Spam and plagiarism
Have you seen how much spam there is on Youtube?
I follow Ozzy Man Reviews on YouTube and have personally reported quite a few users who have plagiarised his content.
The video's they had uploaded had gotten quite a few views and for all I know had not been reported for language yet.
They were probably making money off of being a bottom feeder. When their channel gets reported enough they move onto a new one and rinse and repeat.
My thoughts are that bumping up the requirements for monetisation limits the income that these channels can make before they are shut down, reducing the incentive to churn through this practice continuously.
Scale and load
I imagine that at the scale that YouTube operates, there are hundreds of thousands of small channels, maybe millions, that are costing them a significant sum to process.
What I mean is that the cost of them paying out the few dollars to the channels is so high, that these channels being monetised is costing them money. A lot of money.
It's not fair
I agree with that sentiment.
In my mind they are a big corporate chasing profits and efficiencies at the cost of the very same people who power their platform. The content creators!
Many of the people now cut off from ad revenue put a tremendous effort into creating their content, any income they got from their videos is now gone.
Hopefully this drives people to seek out alternatives ( like... DTube ? ) and lessen the absolute domination shown by YouTube in that space.
It may just be a good thing that YouTube cut so many people off.
Just my 0.02 STEEM's