There is no denying that YouTube has become a business tycoon over the last 3 or 4 years, recently YouTube has been collapsing in on itself throughout 2018, With scandals, issues with its creators and how YouTube chooses creators to be monetized and advertised as family friendly. Along with the has been a rise in mental illnesses and YouTubers on the platform becoming more stressed, lonely and exhausted. The chirpy images creator such as Elle Mills portray are fading away fast and influencers are burning out at younger ages than ever before, being forced to pump out absurd amounts of content.
Monetization on YouTube has caused creators are forced into a bubble of what advertisers want them to show audiences, without this creators can not make money off of videos but they can also be more creative with their content.
The controversy with this is that creator like Jake and Logan Paul are monetized for friendly content when studies show that 2/3rds of their content are ads for their merchandise and them manipulating fans into spending copious amounts of money on their favorite creator's merch.
YouTube has had many controversies over the years, but 2018 showed YouTube and some of its creator's true colors, and there are no signs of this stopping anytime soon. With Scandals such as Logan Paul's Suicide Forest Video where Paul filmed a dead body of someone who committed suicide and uploaded it to YouTube, and how he is still monetized to this day, Tana Mongeau and Tanacon, the convention that was planned in one month, MannyMUA and Laura Lee's racist tweets being exposed after condemning others for the same thing. As Shane Dawson's talks of Sociopaths with Jake Paul. These controversies and others have severed the trust between The Creators and Their fanbase, changing the dynamic of the website that was once so unique to the platform.
While 2019 has not been as problematic for Youtube as 2018 was, the ideologies when it comes to monetization has not really changed, all we can hope for is that Youtube does not make the same mistakes they have in the past and that they see the error of their ways and fix issues that have been a problem in the past.