YouTube stars join forces to fight advertising policy change that could ‘tear the site apart’
YOUTUBE'S latest advertising scandal is threatening to tear the entire community apart, the website's biggest stars have warned.
High profile YouTubers including PewDiePie, Drama Alert and hundreds of other popular vloggers have come together to raise concerns about the future of the video site.
YouTube came under fire after advertisers learned their products were being flogged on .
As a result, several big companies pulled their branding from its videos and forced YouTube to rethink its entire advertising structure, including how content creators are paid.
But several YouTubers have revealed that their videos are no longer earning good money, making it almost impossible for them to justify spending the many hours it takes to create the videos the site relies on.
The problems began after the Wall Street Journal published an investigation which found Coca Cola and Amazon adverts on five videos in which the narrators expressed racist opinions.
It prompted Alphabet (which owns both Google and YouTube) to change the way it places adverts.
But several high profile YouTubers believe that this change in structure is a way to get rid of any content that doesn't suit advertisers' tastes and replace it with bland "family friendly" material.
They also warned that rewarding obedient YouTubers with advertising revenue and eliminating those that didn't conform to the "family friendly" brand could be a step in the direction of censorship.
The world's biggest YouTuber, PewDiePie, revealed that his income was dwindling in a recent video update, titled .
In the clip he warned that "YouTube is being forced to turn into television".
Pewds, AKA Felix Kjellberg, admitted he understood that "advertisers need to feel like if they are spending money, it doesn't show up on racist videos".
"But, it's like, five videos they discovered on the whole platform and there's, what, nine billion videos on YouTube?
"Should everyone on the platform be affected by five racist dudes? It doesn't really make sense to me."
Popular yesterday warned that YouTube was purging "any channel that doesn't toe the company line and doesn't post videos of cute kittens or pranks or toy reviews.
"That's what advertisers like," he said.
On top of the revenue slash, YouTube yesterday announced that vloggers would not be able to make money on their clips until they hit 10,000 lifetime views on their channel.
It claims this threshold will give them a chance to gather enough information on a channel and work out if they are legitimate.
But this could spell an end to up-and-coming small channels, which will take months to accrue the quota to start making any earnings.
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YouTube said the move was largely to deter thieves who re-upload vlogger's work to make money on it.
A spokesperson said: "We will no longer serve ads on YPP videos until the channel reaches 10k lifetime views. This new threshold gives us enough information to determine the validity of a channel. It also allows us to confirm if a channel is following our and .
"By keeping the threshold to 10k views, we also ensure that there will be minimal impact on our aspiring creators. And, of course, any revenue earned on channels with under 10k views up until today will not be impacted."
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