YouTube has never shown ads on non-monetised videos. If I choose the no monetisation option on a video, it has no ads. So if YouTube is saying these small channels can no longer monetise their videos, it would be a whole extra policy change to say that non-monetised videos will now show ads.

Any YouTube video that currently shows an ad, the uploader has chosen to do so in order to make money from it.

That is slightly inaccurate: ads are also shown to videos of non-monetized accounts if a copyright claim is made by someone for content on that video and the claimer decides to put ads in it for allowing the content.

I have no monetization enabled for my account and still get text ads because of that.

Good point. Although I've disputed a (inaccurate) copyright claim before and had it removed. Plus technically you're not meant to upload anything that you don't have the copyright for.

Thus uploader quits and moves to say Twitch. Suddenly Amazon would be happy.

Or to one of the other sites.

We'll see. As it stands there aren't a lot of YT clones. Hosting a billion videos that will continue to multiply for eternity can't be cheap.

Lets face it most of the stuff on YT has very little ad revenue.

Twitch basically seems to be the only real competition at this point, but they are rapidly building up to take the fight to YouTube. They are publicly shifting away from the gaming focus and towards general content creation. This whole thing seems to be more in the hands of PR and network effects than anything else. Like if the Jiu jitsu community goes to twitch I have little reason to go on youtube anymore.

Google has over 1.6 billion hours a day being consumed and Twitch does not even register. #2 is Facebook with 119 million hours. So Twitch is not really competitive.

Plus Amazon purchased Twitch and then removed the app from the Roku which does not help grow the platform.

https://www.cordcuttersnews.com/amazon-pulls-twitch-channel-... Amazon Pulls Their Twitch Channel from Roku - Cord Cutters News