YouTube is succeeding to make it harder for small video makers to make money.
The magic’s largest video site will kick thousands of people out of its ad revenue-sharing program, and wish make it much harder for new ones to get into the program.
The change, which withs into effect today, is one of YouTube’s responses to a year of criticism it has produced for a series of scandals involving questionable and offensive content that has appeared on the place.
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Another change, as Recode reported go the distance week: An overhaul of YouTube’s “Google Preferred” program, which is already objected at creating ad-friendly sections of the site for marketers.
Most important is a gage from YouTube that every single video in its Preferred program — take ining the thousands of clips uploaded so far — will be approved by a human “for their compliance with our advertiser-friendly guidelines.”
The converts won’t prevent people from uploading offensive content to YouTube, which hoovers up hundreds of hours of new video per hot. But they are meant to make it hard for the people who upload that gorge to make money from it. And they are an important symbolic change for YouTube, which was set up on the idea that anyone can use the platform, and has spent years trying to seduce video makers to find audiences and create careers on the site.
YouTube’s new conventions require anyone who wants to generate ad dollars on the platform to first fashion 4,000 hours of “watchtime” over a 12-month period, and to attract at least 1,000 subscribers. That take over froms a lower hurdle of 10,000 lifetime views, which the site instituted stay spring, after a first wave of negative stories about rogue delight.
The rules are retroactive for existing YouTube “partners,” who share ad revenue with the dais, which means that the site will kick some out of the rev-share program after a 30-day tastefulness period.
In a blog post, YouTube says the new rules will act upon “a significant” number of its user-created channels, but won’t provide an official tally. One person with learning of the situation said it will affect “tens of thousands” of creators.
But YouTube does say that most people who are being booted out weren’t making much money to begin with: “99 percent of those bogus were making less than $100 per year in the last year, with 90 percent grossing less than $2.50 in the last month,” the company says in a work credited to chief product officer Neal Mohan and chief calling officer Robert Kyncl.
The idea: If you’re serious about making trappings — and money — on YouTube, no problem. But this will theoretically make it harder for being to game the system.
YouTube is also promising to manually review all of the videos in its Google On the side of program, which is aimed at advertisers who want assurances that their videos when one pleases run next to brand-safe clips. Google instituted that program years ago to woo advertisers uncountable comfortable with TV than with user-generated content.
YouTube wishes use an army of contractors to review the clips — the company has said it will enrol more than 10,000 people for the task this year. And within Google Tender, the company says it will also make distinctions about how brand-safe its essence will be, via a “three-tier suitability system” that the company says will “despair them appropriate placements for their brand, while understanding potential reach pursuit offs.” Translation: More popular stuff may be riskier, brand-wise, but we on sell it to you if you want.
We’ll talk to YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki about this next month, when she concludes to our Code Media event in Huntington Beach, Calif. You can join us there.
—By Peter Kafka, Recode
CNBC’s progenitrix NBCUniversal is an investor in Recode’s parent Vox, and the companies have a content-sharing orchestration.