By Devin Dubon

When YouTube was first introduced, it was a platform dedicated to spreading creative and entertaining content. Small animators and filmmakers worked hard to produce unique content for people to enjoy.

Yet for several years, YouTube has slowly become hostile to this type of content. Those who take their time to produce well-edited, well-made videos are being punished while those who pump out quick, lifeless videos are rewarded, all because of an algorithm.

This all started in 2012 when the YouTube algorithm that determines which videos are recommended changed. Before this, videos were filtered on the total number of views they received. Now, they are filtered on the total watch time instead.

One of YouTube’s engineering directors Cristos Goodrow stated that the reason for the change was because they realized that users were spending very little time on each video, and instead clicking between them very quickly.

“We realized that if we made the viewer click that many times, it didn’t seem to be a good estimate of how much value they were deriving from YouTube,” Goodrow said in an interview with Business Insider. “Instead, we realized that if they didn’t leave a video and continued watching, that seemed like a better estimate of the value they were getting.”

Although this sounds reasonable, and indeed most users were spending very little time on videos, the actual result was not quite what was planned. An unexpected byproduct of this decision was that YouTubers who spent long amounts of time to produce short, well-made videos were not featured, while those who uploaded daily, long, poorly made ones were.

Thus, ad revenue for those left behind–mostly animators and those who produce heavily-edited –plummeted and they, therefore, had to either leave YouTube, or find other ways of supplementing their income.

Recently, the situation has become even worse for those who stayed. In 2017, YouTube rolled out measures to make videos more “advertiser-friendly.” Advertisers were given options to opt out of showing their ads on certain “sensitive subject inclusions.”

These subjects included “profanity or rough language,”  and “sexually suggestive content,” but also very vague areas such as “sensational or shocking” and “sensitive social issues.” This led to many videos being marked as “advertiser-unfriendly,” and having most–if not all–of their ad revenue stripped away.

“Taking away the ability to monetize a video where you’re saying things that they don’t seem ‘OK’ has been described as censorship with a different name because if you do this [regularly] and you have no advertising it’s not sustainable,” says popular YouTuber Philip DeFranco in a video about demonetization.

However, to some, this may sound like a reasonable attempt to prevent advertisers having their content shown on controversial material. But again, there were unexpected consequences.

Suddenly, almost overnight, entire channels were essentially blacklisted and had their ad-revenue stripped. To make matters worse, these decisions were made by a prototype algorithm–leading to many mistakes being made.

People woke up to find that videos as benign as toy reviews and cooking videos were suddenly too risqué for YouTube. Channels who had as much as 700,000 views daily suddenly found themselves collecting pennies from their content.

To their credit, YouTube expected this and included a process to request a review on a video you thought was mistakenly marked as unfriendly. However, you couldn’t review both old and brand new videos. Some channels had all of their old content permanently demonetised, and the majority of the views on new content as well, since views usually spiked right after the video is uploaded.

As a result, many creative content makers have left the platform and moved to other ways of supporting themselves such as Twitch or Patreon. It seems YouTube has failed to understand their target audience and is actively acting against creative content and making content creator’s lives as difficult as possible.

The direction YouTube is taking goes against their vision when they were first founded. What was once a bastion of creativity has ruined itself with new policies focusing on making them money. As such, the future of the once great video sharing platform is looking bleak.