YouTube’s new terms and conditions will come into effect only on 10th December but it has already caused a lot of discontent among the creators.
The new terms in the section titled “Account Suspension & Termination” with the subheader “Terminations by YouTube for Service Changes,” states that- “YouTube may terminate your access, or your Google account’s access to all or part of the Service if YouTube believes, in its sole discretion, that provision of the Service to you is no longer commercially viable.”
Simply put, the company can delete your account if it is not able to generate enough revenue for YouTube.
YouTube started sending an email to its users last week, notifying them about the new terms of service. Although YouTube summarizes the update in the email, it is not clear about what ‘no longer commercially viable’ entails.
YouTube viewers are clearly not happy about the new changes as the terms are worded to cover not just the content creators but anyone who has an account. It means that a user who views a lot of content on YouTube but does not necessarily monetize can have their account deleted.
(Source: BusinessInsider)
In general, small creators having 10,000 to 100,000 subscribers run a loss for YouTube. YouTube calls such creators as Silver or Bronze level creators. It makes 90% of its revenue from Gold and Diamond creators who have at least a million subscribers.
YouTube is known to change its terms and conditions. Until 2013, users had to submit an application and be approved before monetizing their content. Later, YouTube opened its platform to everyone who had an account. At the time, YouTube was a popular platform that offered monetization for content.
In February 2018, YouTube changed its policy again and asked the creators to 1000 subscribers and 4000 hours of watch time across their channel within a period of 12 months.
Why the new update?
According to Reddit, YouTube had to change its policy to comply with the new Federal Trade Commission (FTC) regulations.
Another theory states that the change will not impact the original creators but only the commercial accounts that use YouTube for free storage. Such accounts keep uploading videos to YouTube instead of storing them on Google drive.
Some believe that the latest development will help cut off creators who start to hurt YouTube business in any way.