this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2026
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At this point I'm convinced that yt just hates smaller creators.
Small creators cost youtube more than they earn.
Youtube ads are sold by auction, and there is very little bidding interest in small channels with small audiences. The advertisers want as many eyeballs as possible.
But a small channel's videos cost youtube the same amount to store as a big channel's videos.
Nah, they hate signing checks. Not that long ago, they had a push to bring views to smaller creators, and my algorithm definitely shifted to people with hundreds to thousands of subs, instead of the hundreds of thousands to millions folks.
Now they raise the payment threshold.
Result: big creators get less traffic (money) to "boost small creators", small creators get less money because they're too small. YouTube gets to keep more cash.
Always has been
Makes total sense for them. Videos made by small creators take just as much drive space and require just as much CDN distribution, but don't give nearly as much profit or user engagement.
In essence, YouTube exists specifically because of big channels, and smaller ones are a burden to them.
It doesn't make long term sense, they are driving away the new big content creators, and will lose market share.
They have no competition to speak of so they feel comfortable squeezing their creators, this is only the start.
You're thinking long term strategy, YT is owned by Alphabet, a publicly traded company, they are only able to think in quarters. All that matters is short term gains for investors, and besides once the short term gains run out the investors will just dump the stock and move on to extracting what they can from the next company.
Very true, public firms can't see past their next few sets of financial statements.
makes total sense short term. makes little sense long term.
No. This is just how capitalism works; you steal from the smaller ones while allowing the bigger ones to be the “draw”.
I’m honestly surprised they don’t charge for cloud storage for YouTube. Yea, they suck, but also who needs every piece of garbage uploaded in 4k?
That's more how Vimeo works. The creators pay a monthly fee (for uploads over a very small threshold of storage) and have the option to PPV paywall their videos.
likely because they know no one would pay for it. YouTube would die overnight(in terms of content creation). The only people remaining would be the people like Markiplier or the huge content creators that made it big way early on, and even then, I think you would expect heavy resistance against the big content creators just because they're gonna be the ones that are fronting the majority of the bill just due to how many videos they have uploaded.
YouTube would have better chance of survival requiring a subscription to watch the platform than if they were to try to get content creators to pay for storage, it would be content source suicide.