New Design and Criteria for Channel Verification on YouTube

In other words "If you're not a celebrity of a mega-corp, we don't give a fuck about you." sigh

I mean, sure, it's their right to run their site however they want, but this is still very frustrating to anybody who views (viewed?) the Internet as something of an equalizer, a place where the "little guy" could compete on a playing that, if not exactly level, was at least not totally lopsided. I guess, in the end, there really is no way for a publicly traded company to avoid becoming evil, or at least avoid behaviors that closely approximate evil.

Usually these announcements put a shiny positive PR spin on a negative change, but it doesn't seem like they could even really find a positive spin for this one.

Sounds like YouTube has decided that with the huge size of the site now, it's too much work to verify every account above 100k subs, so from now on they'll just be doing it when they personally see one that they think needs it.

I see some English channels already complaining about this change, but I can imagine it'll be even worse for large foreign channels.