So I heard about the changes to Youtube's partner program yesterday, which changed the threshold of being able to apply for partnership...
When it comes to money, I had monetization disabled by default, as I wasn't sure if any of my gameplay and music videos qualified.
However, monetization ended up being disabled for me after a while, not even letting me have the option to turn it on, despite this. My channel is in good standing and doesn't have any infractions, so it's odd.
While I have over 1,000 subs, I don't know if I pass the watch limit. Meaning that if I end up doing, say, a commentary video, and it ends up being popular, I might not be able to make single cent out of it.
This is worrying, even if the money thing isn't affecting me that much at the moment.
It obviously wouldn't make enough money at the moment to pass the income I get from my job, and while I only do YouTube as a hobby, it would've still been a nice reward for my efforts in addition to the views.
And then there are the partner benefits, such as custom thumbnails and end cards and analytics. YouTube claims I will still keep these even after partnership ends, but it's still bad for new channels which haven't been partnered yet.
Custom thumbnails can really help with drawing attention to your videos and making them look professional which helps with views. Small YouTubers just had their chances of getting big views lowered down from where it already was. It will also be harder for me to get back to being partnered on a backup account in case my main one gets banned.
To the surprise of nobody, most YouTubers in support of these changes are ones who are already popular and make good money from their vids.
All together, I find this depressing and bit demotivating, even if it hasn't personally affected me as much as some other small YouTubers.
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