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YouTube's relationship with creators, the source of so much success, has been turbulent

A bright red office lobby with the YouTube logo in white on the wall.

SAN FRANCISCO — On April 23, 2005, YouTube launched with a mundane video of a man visiting the San Diego Zoo. It lasted 19 seconds and caused no shock waves. 

Fast forward 13 years, and the Google-owned platform has morphed into an online juggernaut that, for many Americans of a certain age, is the source for entertainment and news powered by stars that can make a mint.

That seismic shift — from amateur website to big business — has not always been smooth, with advertisers complaining their commercials screen before offensive content and governments concerned that the platform lets extremists rally supporters.

Stuck in the middle are YouTube's creators, a swelling legion of amateur video bloggers and personalities who have attracted waves of young users to the service in exchange for a slice of the company's growing ad revenues.

A police handout photo of Nasim Aghdam.

But recently, some creators have found that the cash is drying up as YouTube gets aggressive about policing its site with new content restrictions.

Those tensions were on tragic display at Tuesday's shooting at YouTube's headquarters. Nasim Aghdam, 37, arrived at the San Bruno complex seeking revenge for what she claimed was YouTube censorship of her workout videos, say police. She injured three employees before killing herself, they say.

"I'm being discriminated and filtered on YouTube," Aghdam said in a video, one of hundreds she posted over eight years that attracted some 30,000 subscribers.  "You'll see that my new videos hardly get views, and my old videos that used to get many views stopping getting views."

Aghdam's apparent reaction to YouTube's new policies was violent in the extreme. But her sentiments speak to the frustration — often vented on Twitter or in a YouTube clip — some video creators have been feeling in the wake of the platform's newly aggressive and at times haphazard approach to curating the site.

"This isn't a problem that's going to go away soon because creatives across multiple tech platforms are realizing they have less power than they thought over their online destiny," says Jeremiah Owyang, analyst at Kaleido Insights.

Owyang says those upset with YouTube's new policies aimed at keeping inappropriate videos off the site are "no longer just throwing bricks at Google busses," a reference to a book critical of Google's growth. "It's personal now," he says. "Violence has shown up."

Authorities react to a shooter at the YouTube headquarters in San Bruno, Calif., April 3, 2018.

Tech companies have been under a more powerful microscope in the past year, as the rapid growth and influence of Facebook, Google and Amazon has shown a worrisome underbelly. Without the regulatory restrictions that govern more traditional businesses, and reliant on computers and users to flag the worst, they have ballooned in size. But so have the scammers, trolls and fakes.

For all these companies, the model of these platforms as hosts can be hijacked for nefarious purposes, such as Facebook's recent revelation that 87 million Americans had their personal data harvested by political ad targeting firm Cambridge Analytica.

YouTube has enacted a series of restrictions in the past year designed to weed out the worst, including conspiracy theorists, extremists and predators. But these tougher policies have also had repercussions on the amateur actors, comedians and video bloggers — some of whom have become multi-millionaires but many of whom manage to carve out more modest incomes.

 

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Last April, it said creator channels needed to reach 10,000 total views to be part of the YouTube Partner Program, which allows creators to collect income from ads placed before their videos.

Earlier this year, YouTube boosted thresholds again, saying channels would need 1,000 subscribers and to have amassed at least 4,000 hours of watch time over the past 12 months to qualify. It also revealed additional steps it would take to remove a channel from ad sales programs or recommended videos if a creator violated community guidelines.

The moves to police the site through ad revenues hits creators where it hurts most, their paycheck.

Complicating matters is the fact that this culling process, called demonetization, is not always that clear, some creators complain, leading people from diverse parts of the spectrum to accuse it of bias and censorship.

YouTube star performer PewDiePie.

Conservative news site PJMedia posted a story Wednesday with the headline "Sadistic YouTube Deletes Channels, Demonetizes and Censors Content and Refuses to Respond to Press," linking to articles about how the YouTube's recent decision to ban gun sales videos led creators to secure a porn video site as an alternate outlet.

YouTube declined to comment on its efforts to police its site and its strategy of using demonetization as an enforcement tool.

YouTube had previously cut off access for those expressing offensive views, but typically only after an outcry. Last year, YouTube said it would cancel the second season and remove the channel of popular vlogger PewDiePie from its premium advertising program after he made anti-Semitic comments in his videos. 

Pop culture vlogger Philip DeFranco has posted a number of videos railing against the perils of YouTube's haphazard approach to cleaning up the platform.

In one, DeFranco says that developing alternate sources of funding, namely fans willing to contribute, is the only way to guard against "a day (when) an automated system said ‘no revenue for you.'”

While some YouTube stars have managed to make seven-figure sums for their videos — Logan Paul comes to mind, the rich vlogger who ran into a backlash after posting a video featuring a suicide victim, then lost ads after shocking a rat in another video — most are struggling to make money.

YouTube personality Logan Paul had some ad revenues suspended by Google earlier this year after violating community guidelines.

Michael Vaim, founder of the YouTube car channel AutoVlog (311,00 subscribers), posted a video last July explaining just how much money he made off of a segment that explains what happens when you hit the Start/Stop button while driving. In a six-month period, the video garnered 11 million views, which netted Vaim $11,000. 

According to a recent study by Mathias Bärtl, a professor at Offenburg University of Applied Sciences in Germany, 96.5% of YouTubers don't make enough money off advertising to pop above the U.S. poverty line of $12,000 a year. And being in the top 3% of most-viewed channels may bring in ads worth around $17,000 a year.

As YouTube is pushed to take a firmer grasp on the content it disseminates, some of those responsible for helping make the site popular won't make the transition, says Jamie Cohen, professor in the school of new media at Molloy College.

"YouTube is inevitably heading towards being like television, but they never told their creators this," says Cohen. "Some have understood this (mission) and adjusted, finding YouTube to be on the only outlet for their content. But others are reacting differently."

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YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki appears at the Most Powerful Women Summit.

In December, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki said the company would boost the number of human curators in 2018 to 10,000. YouTube gets 400 hours of video uploaded to its site every minute.

"YouTube has yet to figure this (policing) problem out, and considering how many people use it this may wind up being very tough to do," says Joshua Cohen, cofounder of TubeFilter, a trade publication for the online video industry.

"While we don't really know what percentage of YouTubers are impacted (by demonetization), we do know that creators in general are getting frustrated, because many of them have put a lot of time and energy into what they've built," says Cohen. "This creator and platform relationship is a relatively new paradigm, and everyone is trying to figure out what's going on."

One possibility, he says, is that in time YouTube will make its guidelines clearer and most creators will pivot enough to work within a new system that, for many, will continue to generate solid revenues.

But analyst Owyang suggests another option in the offing: alternatives to YouTube.

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"What's going on now could set up the opportunity for a peer-owned platform to take over," he says. "Social media has become centralized with the boom in these huge companies. Maybe it's time for a new approach that finds the equity in and governance of the business dispersed among those who build it and use it."

That could well prove an avenue for both change and empowerment. But, cautions Cohen, the dominance and ubiquity of companies such as Facebook, Amazon and YouTube suggests new players are in for an uphill slog.

"The fact that there really are no other major players in the online video space beyond YouTube speaks to just how big it has gotten," he says. "For anyone trying to do them one better, there's a good chance the grass won't be greener on the other side."

Follow USA TODAY technology writer Marco della Cava on Twitter.

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