What Is Happening To Youtube?

“Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.” This is what you YouTube has as its logline when you search it up on Google. If you’re a human being with an internet connection, you surely know about this portal, which is a world of its own.It was launched in 2005, as an invention of Jawed Karim, Chad Hurley, and Steve Chen.

The portal/website, as a whole, has been subject to a lot of controversies lately. What was meant to be a platform for independent creators to share their content, is slowly shifting into the hands of corporations, large companies which make videos on high budgets, and it’s killing the basic ideology of what YouTube was supposed to be. The recent PewDiePie VS T-Series subscriber war clearly shows the bias that YouTube’s algorithm has towards content from large companies. They want flashier, produced content to be shown on top, to keep up with the growing threats like Netflix. Videos like “Charlie bit my finger” and “David after dentist” which defined YouTube would not be recommended anymore. In their place, shows produced with huge budgets like The Ellen Show, America’s Got Talent, The Tonight Show, started to show in the trending tab. This huge turn of events brought a lot of flak towards YouTube, as the audience which had subscribed for original content from individual creators like Ryan Higa and PewDiePie, were not getting what they wanted. What happens when human beings don’t get what they want? They get angry. They get annoyed. They start Twitter debates, and make fun of the website.

There’s really no two ways about this. There are videos explaining how the YouTube algorithm is problematic and how it could be fixed, but it seems like the heads at YouTube are turning a deaf ear towards this.

Felix Kjellberg aka PewDiePie, is quite literally the face of individual creators on YouTube. He is at 96 million subscribers, right behind T-Series which, again, is a huge music label based out of India. The fact that T-Series shows up more on the feed of the audience, and PewDiePie’s videos, though with more number of views, don’t appear on trending, shows thedark truth of how YouTube is now a ‘not-so-safe’ career option. Independent creators are relying more on sponsorships and merchandise to earn their daily bread, instead of earning from views and subscribers.

Will YouTube improve as a platform? Do independent creators have a clear future in it? These are all questions that cannotbe answered at the moment, but would be pretty crystal clear by the end of 2020, as YouTube finally fixes its policies and algorithms.