Their focus on family friendly content does not affect anything else - it even has its own app, YouTube Kids. This is the correct way to do it.

If you are seeing channels die then it's for some other reason than YouTube trying to make a separate kid friendly app.

Well, not quite. Channels are dying because their revenue is going away. That revenue is going away because their videos are unfairly (see following) being flagged as un-monitizable - which boils down to not being family friendly.

I say unfairly, because any number of creators can appeal the demonitization and have all of those videos re-instanted... but re-instatated too late to provide any real monetary value to the creator.

Family friendly? No, advertizer friendly in the most generic sense is the issue. There are plenty of places that aren't family friendly and still bring in lots of advertising revenue. The problem is you can't really do both at the same time.

Yeah, they want to go advertiser friendly and are being ridiculous about it.

This is entirely predictable under capitalism. Read Manufacturing Consent.

They don't care about being family friendly, they want to be advertiser friendly. It's harder to sell ads on a controversial platform.

I find it hard to blame youtube for that frankly. They're a completely rational actor here. If you decide to tie all your income from a 3rd party platform who doesn't care about you and what you're doing you have to have a contingency plan for when you'll get screwed over. It's the same story with people developing app store apps, except arguably worse because it's more straightforward to monetize your applications without having to rely on ads or 3rd party services.

I think this complaining by big creators is rather pointless because they have nothing to bargain with. Most of them need youtube a lot more than youtube needs them, with the possible exception of maybe a few very high profile youtubers.

As long as Youtube won't have any serious competition nothing will change on that front I'm afraid. The network effect is too strong, you can't just start self-hosting and expect to get a similar exposition.

I subscribe to a bunch of channels (mostly focused around Brazilian jiu-jitsu, powerlifting and video games) and I have not noticed any attempts at "family friendly content" having any impact on those channels. Where are you seeing it?

Gaming channels. Most gaming channels are having serious issues of one sort or another.

One example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pe5eODFxwy0

It's hard to really isolate it to any given channel, it's everywhere, all of the creators I follow from people who stream video games to people who comment on current events to people who make just dumb videos that are amusing, all of them seemingly are saying that their view counts are in the toilet and a bunch have had many videos demonetized, usually over the mythical "family friendliness" of their content (or lack thereof).

I grew up on YouTube, it's just a shame to see what was once such a democratized and "everybody get's in" service has turned into just an Internet TV, browse the home page without being signed in and it's nothing but celebrity shite, clickbait content, and the sort of faux "internet randomness" that marketers crap out in all of it's corporate sanitized glory.

It's just sad. Maybe I've got the rose colored glasses on but it feels way different than even a few years ago.

It's not a family friendliness issue causing this, it's an 'advertiser friendliness' one.

Anytime an ad was shown on a slightly controversial video, an internet outrage mob would descend on the advertiser saying how dare they provide money to <odious cause>.

Advertisers pressured Youtube for ways to advertise only on non-controversial videos. Youtube responded by demonetizing anything even halfway controversial.

> It's not a family friendliness issue causing this, it's an 'advertiser friendliness' one.

What's the difference? In my mind those are the same thing.

Take something like the Rubin Report [0], which is reasonably family friendly but that covers socially/politically controversial topics and/or speakers.

Not too long ago, a large amount of their back catalog was demonetized. It's not 'advertiser friendly' because sometimes even just the presence of a controversial speaker is enough to bring a hate mob down on anyone advertising on a video with them in it.

0: https://twitter.com/RubinReport

I watch a lot of video game content that is advertiser friendly (a conclusion I make since I see ads before it), but is not "family friendly."

While you don't have any inherent right to, in practice you can post a pretty wide range of content to YouTube without charge. But certainly no one has an obligation to pay you for that just like no one has an obligation to pay you for writing a blog on pretty much any topic you desire.

CodysLab is the most recent one to experience this, which is really bizarre, and his explanation video (after his channel was turned back on) reveals that Youtube automation had a lot to do with it.

They are carving out a Youtube Kids channel rather than filtering content for everyone, so you should at least be indifferent to this.

It's a business, they are going to do things like this to make money.

> the constant focus on family friendly content is killing basically all of the channels I really enjoy watching

If you're not paying for YouTube, they have to get money from somewhere and if those somewheres don't want to advertise on non-family friendly content, what are YouTube supposed to do? Go bankrupt on principle?

Something like Patreon where people pay for premium content would work.

They could set something up so creators could mark videos as premium, and then people have to pay a certain amount to watch.

Google already has the payments side of things covered from their other services, it really wouldn't be a stretch to add something like this.

Creators are basically having to do this anyway using a different site (Patreon) so Google should look at how to bring that internal to them.

That also neatly sidesteps the whole demonitized for being advertiser unfriendly issue, because the only people paying for various content are people who want to watch and support such content.

Alternate take: video creators can already use Patreon; Google adding an equivalent feature doesn't help them. It would actually be harmful if Google decides to pressure creators to move off Patreon onto their own system, since the creators would need to rebuild their paying subscriber base from zero. The only party that would benefit from Google adding that feature would be Google.

> They could set something up so creators could mark videos as premium, and then people have to pay a certain amount to watch.

Isn't that basically YouTube Red? Which almost no-one pays for...

They had it:

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/3249135?hl=en

They killing/changing it:

http://variety.com/2017/digital/news/youtube-kills-paid-chan...

I thought Google wasn't allowing patreon links anymore?

I am paying for YouTube.

Oh noes, poor YouTube, poor Google. Their prime motive is making money. They are not forced to distribute it all for free. If they didn't, then maybe people would go back to the great days of selfhosting or distributed systems would finally become commonplace. I would prefer that.