Similar to response about someone ranting against Teams -- I just don't see the huge issue with YouTube. It seems to work solidly and there are definitely people who make good money from it. Of course there is a long tail. Which is to be expected when my 9 year old nephew and half of his friends have YouTube channels. I just don't think people really have thought through at YouTube level scale what it would mean to "make things better for creators".
I would not expect her to choose the performance indicators. I would expect her to choose another plan if expectations are not being met, but not necessarily come up with those plans.
It's a business, so the goal is making money. YouTube certainly made money when she was calling the shots. We'll see what happens.
YouTube only cares about creators insofar as advertisers care about the eyeballs being there to watch their ads (which, yes, they do); and the people with those eyeballs have a preference for high-quality content (which, uh… undetermined); and there is a seller’s market for content (which, no, there isn’t; the long tail of eyeball-attracting content on YouTube is created completely without compensation.)
Actually, I think Youtube is highly underrated in this regard. The reason so many creators complain about Youtube is because they're the only social media platform that pays people any substantial sum of money in the first place. For other platforms like Twitch, the money they pay you is mostly comes from the viewer. This is why MKBHD called Youtube the only S-tier social media platform.
The more interesting thing would be if they were to start all over from scratch, could they do it again with YouTube as it is today? I suspect even getting to 100k subs would just be a total roll of dice and luck now.
On the other hand, yt streaming and shorts seem to be slowly improving, in the same way google as a whole only seems to innovate insofar as they match exactly what their competitors have already produced. And problems aside, yt is still seems to be growing in popularity and relevance, even with TikTok's competition. If yt can figure out how to actually obtain revenue w/o turning to shadier and shadier advertisers, they might not have to push creators just shy of abandoning the platform, but it's not like creators have anywhere else to go.
[^1]: Revenues for yt continue to miss expectations, payouts for creators and ad spam are obviously low hanging targets. Doesn't make it right, but running a video service isn't cheap.
I am a creator with a subscriber base of 2+ million, and a subscriber to Premium. Trivia: on a per-view basis, I make more from Premium views than ad-watching views.
FWIW it's a step in the right direction, and I'm glad creators earn directly from premium views, but i don't think anyone is saying that yt is going to win the streaming war for commercial content, but if it can tie premium into its creator streaming content like twitch does for subs (maybe like yt premium gives a free sub like amazon prime) then the system seems more well-positioned.
YouTube 10 years ago was a place for people to do what they loved and build a following, now it's just a click bait farm where everyone is gaming the algorithm with the same thumbnails, the same content, and even hawk their own ads/partnerships because YouTube revenue can't support them anymore.
Good riddance IMHO. I hope whoever comes next actually focuses on creators and their needs.