THE FUTURE OF INTERNET VIDEO IS TROUBLING

Ever since YouTube’s “Adpocalypse” back in early 2017, the state of internet video as we know it has changed.

It was always going to happen, but much like the death of the Old West, we can truly see the decline of the lawless, untamed nature of internet 2.0 as we approach this new period of industrialization – or rather, the ubiquity of the internet and online video in the lives of every modern person.

As the old media has tried to transition to the new, many kinks have to be worked out along the way and now with advertisers scared to monetize any video deemed too crass or too political or otherwise not advertiser-friendly, much of the YouTube’s staple content has become non-monetizable.

YouTube has attempted to ameliorate this problem with its content ID system, which not only deems whether a video is advertiser-friendly or not, but also decides if it violates copyright in any way.

Obviously there are a lot of issues that can occur when you ask an algorithm to try and identify copyright violations and advertiser-friendly content while there’s 300 hours of video being uploaded to YouTube every minute.

But, unfortunately, there is simply no way for YouTube to manually review every video that gets uploaded, which means that quite often videos are wrongly deemed to not be ad-friendly, and while they are monetized, companies can simply choose to not serve ads on that video.

What is worse, however, are the many videos that are accidentally deemed to be violating copyright in some way. That instantly means any ad revenue made will go to whoever is deemed the copyright holder of the infringing content, and potentially slap the uploader with a copyright strike on their channel.

With enough copyright strikes, a YouTube channel could be suspended or even terminated completely, depending on the circumstances.

While YouTube has made improvements to its system, and generally the algorithm works to stop spam uploads, unsafe content, and people from uploading whole movies to the site, there is still much progress to be made.

Not even the biggest creators on YouTube are immune to the issues the current content ID system has created.

Popular YouTuber Shane Dawson recently uploaded a video that was hit with a copyright strike, effectively de-monetizing it for its first 12 hours on the site till the issue could be resolved – meaning that while the video racked up over 7 millions views on its first day alone, thousands of dollars in ad revenue were lost at the creators’, and YouTube’s, expense.

Fortunately for Dawson, YouTube tends to prioritize its favorite creators and the copyright strike was removed after about half a day via a manual review of the video.

Hundreds of thousands of other creators who aren’t getting 10 million views a video, though, aren’t so lucky. It can often take days or even weeks for a smaller creator’s video to be manually reviewed and the copyright claim to be disputed. Even then, it’s not a guarantee that the outcome will be satisfactory.

By introducing all these holes to jump through and obstacles to avoid, YouTube has put itself in a position to lose everything that once made it great.

YouTube has transformed from a place where you could go to experience true, raw creativity and the ideas of the everyman, to what is slowly becoming the digital version of regular TV programming.

By forcing creators into a corner and making them bend to the will of the advertisers, and YouTube’s ever-vague and changing guidelines, the type of content and the types of creators who can successfully exist on the platform has changed drastically and grown far more limited.

It’s only a matter of time before the “America’s Funniest Home Videos” era of YouTube is completely dead and every video will be hosted by a moderately attractive young person who either vlogs or plays Fortnight, or does a top-ten countdown.

With all these shakeups, creators have been forced to seek alternate ways of funding their videos, most often by simply hooking up with various companies to personally pitch sponsored ads directly to viewers throughout the course of their videos.

So even if a video is not monetized on YouTube, many viewers on the site will still experience what is basically an unskippable ad in the middle of their video, drawing even more comparisons of the modernized site to cable TV.

With any luck, an equilibrium will eventually be reached and creators and viewers alike will be able to make and view the content they want without needing to remain beholden to thin-skinned advertisers.

But it seems that ideal future is still just a tiny light at the end of a very long tunnel and we’ll most likely have to suffer a few more Logan Paul-esc controversies, and the loss of a few more big advertisers, before any meaningful progress will be made for the good of the site’s creative contributors.