I thought YouTube was supposed to be for everyone, not just the same lowest-common-denominator mashed potatoes content you can get from daytime television.
If you are seeing channels die then it's for some other reason than YouTube trying to make a separate kid friendly app.
I say unfairly, because any number of creators can appeal the demonitization and have all of those videos re-instanted... but re-instatated too late to provide any real monetary value to the creator.
I find it hard to blame youtube for that frankly. They're a completely rational actor here. If you decide to tie all your income from a 3rd party platform who doesn't care about you and what you're doing you have to have a contingency plan for when you'll get screwed over. It's the same story with people developing app store apps, except arguably worse because it's more straightforward to monetize your applications without having to rely on ads or 3rd party services.
I think this complaining by big creators is rather pointless because they have nothing to bargain with. Most of them need youtube a lot more than youtube needs them, with the possible exception of maybe a few very high profile youtubers.
As long as Youtube won't have any serious competition nothing will change on that front I'm afraid. The network effect is too strong, you can't just start self-hosting and expect to get a similar exposition.
One example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pe5eODFxwy0
I grew up on YouTube, it's just a shame to see what was once such a democratized and "everybody get's in" service has turned into just an Internet TV, browse the home page without being signed in and it's nothing but celebrity shite, clickbait content, and the sort of faux "internet randomness" that marketers crap out in all of it's corporate sanitized glory.
It's just sad. Maybe I've got the rose colored glasses on but it feels way different than even a few years ago.
Anytime an ad was shown on a slightly controversial video, an internet outrage mob would descend on the advertiser saying how dare they provide money to <odious cause>.
Advertisers pressured Youtube for ways to advertise only on non-controversial videos. Youtube responded by demonetizing anything even halfway controversial.
What's the difference? In my mind those are the same thing.
Not too long ago, a large amount of their back catalog was demonetized. It's not 'advertiser friendly' because sometimes even just the presence of a controversial speaker is enough to bring a hate mob down on anyone advertising on a video with them in it.
It's a business, they are going to do things like this to make money.
If you're not paying for YouTube, they have to get money from somewhere and if those somewheres don't want to advertise on non-family friendly content, what are YouTube supposed to do? Go bankrupt on principle?
They could set something up so creators could mark videos as premium, and then people have to pay a certain amount to watch.
Google already has the payments side of things covered from their other services, it really wouldn't be a stretch to add something like this.
Creators are basically having to do this anyway using a different site (Patreon) so Google should look at how to bring that internal to them.
That also neatly sidesteps the whole demonitized for being advertiser unfriendly issue, because the only people paying for various content are people who want to watch and support such content.
Isn't that basically YouTube Red? Which almost no-one pays for...
https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/3249135?hl=en
They killing/changing it:
http://variety.com/2017/digital/news/youtube-kills-paid-chan...