The demonetization of Youtube has been going on since 2015 when Youtube first changed their rules and hit content creators. Since then, a lot has changed. Last year in April, gamers were hit particularly hard by targeted demonetization, with most of them not even knowing why they were being tagged. Youtube felt little need to address these concerns, and since April, visitors to the site have declined significantly. However, even as Youtube has released their newest response to demonetization, it seems once again about the advertisers, not about the creators.

In a recent blog post, Youtube high-ups Neal Mohan and Robert Kyncl addressed their new monetization rules. In the lengthy post, they managed not once to comment on any of the issues the community has been concerned with. The Logan Paul controversy, despite featuring an actual dead body, was not mentioned once. In fact, in a sister article on monetization for advertisers, Youtube also failed to identify the ‘bad actors’ as they called them that were operating at the highest levels of their infrastructure.

Instead, the new rules being rolled out will affect tens of thousands of content creators on the very bottom of the barrel. Previously, users needed only 10,000 total channel views to be eligible for monetization, something already challenging for niche creators. The new rules will require 4,000 hours of watchtime as well as 1,000 subscribers for the past 12 months. While Mohan and Kyncl made half-hearted attempts to make this sound like a positive for the community, they ultimately admitted what drove the choice.

At the end of the day, the new rules do nothing but help advertisers who want the biggest bang for their buck. By eliminating thousands of the poorest performers from monetization, Youtube makes advertising more appealing and qualitative. However, it still fails to address any of the content creators concerns, and it makes zero effort to engage with them about the issues that concern them.

The only change Youtube will make for content creators will be to Google Preferred members, which comprise just 5% of all Youtube content creators. These golden gooses will have each of their videos reviewed by a real person for monetization review. While this will quiet the loudest voices in the community, and likely increase monetization for them, it does nothing for the 95% of all other creators across Youtube.