news culture “Even more sponsors”: Le Joueur du Grenier castigates the new Youtube censorships
YouTube’s new policy has been making a lot of noise in recent days, and it’s certainly not going to stop. After many people noticed the censorship of swear words on Squeezie’s video, it’s the turn of other YouTubers like the Attic Player to speak out.
Summary
- The straightener is back
- “Even more sponsors”
The straightener is back
It was the big surprise a few days ago: YouTube has now changed its policy in France and is demonetizing all videos with the slightest swear word. Something to alarm a good part of the content creators on the platform, whether they have several million subscribers or a few hundred. It must be said that YouTube’s voice recognition tool already seems to be very efficient, and has started to sanction a bewildering number of videos.
YouTuber Terracid even posted a video tweet recounting all the videos from the Wankil Studio channel affected by this change, and the result is terrifying:
For you to realize, between the abusive claims, the demonetizations related to the content or the swear words it is the equivalent of more than 2 years of videos released demonetized. pic.twitter.com/5jpTslK3DR
—Terracid (@terracid) January 8, 2023
As you will have understood, in addition to asking content creators to never use any bad words from now on, YouTube also requires them to edit their past posts in order to recover their previously acquired monetization. A colossal editing job that is not likely to be done anytime soon. If some creators like Squeezie have already started to replace their vocabulary with beeps during editing, others already seem to be giving up in the face of such absurd regulations.
“Even more sponsors”
If the most relentless (or those with the most budget to hire editors) will be careful and will no doubt comply with the new YouTube policy, this solution seems unlikely for others. The concern for demonetization is indeed not new, and many creators had already turned to another method to remunerate their work. In any case, this is what Le Joueur du Grenier points out in a tweet:
in real life, monetization has been anecdotal for a lot of Youtubers for a long time, there will just be even more sponsors everywhere, all the time, on the slightest video
— Attic player (@Frederic_Molas) January 10, 2023
According to him, we should therefore expect to see more and more sponsored content on YouTube in the future. An opinion that does not seem to be shared by all creators, since sponsors are not a viable option for smaller creators. According to Bruce Benamran (author of the e-penser channel), YouTubers have a certain responsibility towards young talents:
I disagree with you Fred. The problem to overlook is that young creators have less and less room to create. Whether we like it or not, we are also responsible for that if we don’t push a little (even if I recognize that our room for maneuver is blah)
— Bruce Benamran (@epenser) January 11, 2023
Anyway, this decision by YouTube brings many problems for French creators who have until now been used to not paying attention to their vocabulary during filming. Such censorship is obviously reminiscent of that already in place in the United States for a lot of content, and once again raises the question of possible alternatives to the giant that is Google.
