Will Youtube’s new content policies begin the slow end to its platform?

YouTube is falling apart. The popular video streaming service is crumbling, and it’s all due to one man: Logan Paul.

Logan Paul
(© Luigi Novi / Wikimedia Commons)

Paul very quickly became a YouTube celebrity, gaining millions of viewers and thousands of subscribers over the course of a couple years. Recently, the rising internet sensation filmed an incredibly controversial video of a man who had recently committed suicide in Aokigahara, a Japanese forest, but its notorious reputation of high suicide rates has others informally calling it “Suicide Forest.”

People all across the internet became outraged, shocked that someone would post something like this in the first place. But the real problem? It was monetized.

YouTube monetization occurs once a creator gains so many channel views. Paul had done this as his full-time job for years by this point, so of course the video would be monetized initially, but it remained so for far too long. This set an ugly precedent for what people could get away with online. Thus began the controversy of the monetary value one prescribes to creative platforms and one of the biggest scandals the Google property has ever seen.

YouTube knew they needed to act fast, so they immediately made changes to their monetization policy and videos with too much violence, cursing or anything else YouTube deemed inappropriate were no longer monetized, which meant hundreds of people who made their living on YouTube were no longer receiving a paycheck.

What’s more, large companies heard of the Logan Paul controversy and pulled their ads from streaming services. Intending to hurt Google, they instead just hurt the YouTube creators depending on these ads.

So, as much of what gets posted on YouTube is being stripped of it’s monetization tag, many small time or up-and-coming YouTube creators are forced to give up their YouTube lives and go back to old jobs.

As a result, we the consumer are getting screwed out of new content, as eventually only massive companies and creators who only do it for fun will be able to afford to post YouTube videos. Not that these companies or people aren’t capable of making good content, but the best and most consistent content always comes from those who depend on the video to do well.

YouTube is going to have to fix this policy, or else the streaming service is going to regress to the state it was in ten years back, and we only need so many videos like keyboard cat and Charlie bit my finger in this world.