With over 6 million subscribers, Philip DeFranco is one of the most prolific and popular YouTubers. The site’s lack of transparency when it comes to demonetization, however, is driving him and many other YouTubers away. DeFranco, like other YouTubers, also claimed his videos are being suppressed by internal YouTube algorithms.
DeFranco shared a video on YouTube and Twitter on April 16 voicing his frustrations with the platform. In the video, DeFranco said, “As of right now, with the current state of YouTube, the Philip DeFranco show cannot thrive. In fact, I think very soon, the Philip DeFranco Show might not be able to survive.”
DeFranco discussed the issues he has had with demonetization, but also what he deemed the suppression of views. He asserted when videos are deemed “mature,” they are unable to trend or appear as recommended videos. PewDiePie, the most popular YouTuber, uploaded a video earlier in April that claimed YouTube has a secret internal rating system that brands some videos as “mature,” thus restricting their views. This is similar to the claim PragerU made in their recent lawsuit against YouTube in which it argued placing its videos in Restricted Mode was an attack on the First Amendment and conservative views.
DeFranco said the suppression of his videos has hit an “alarming rate.” While saying it makes sense for advertisers to not want to be involved in certain political topics, he said it does not make sense that his subscribers are not seeing his videos in their feeds.
He took the opportunity to discuss the alternatives he has made to relying on YouTube’s ads, such as a Patreon service for his new news show. Patreon allows users to make money per creation or per month, rather than relying on money from ads
“I am tired of trying to work with the alcoholic negligent stepfather that is YouTube,” DeFranco said.
In a blog dedicated to YouTube creators (people who share videos on YouTube) posted the next day, CEO Susan Wojcicki addressed the demonetization controversy. Wojcicki said YouTube increased its communication with YouTube creators by 600 percent and increased its Twitter reply rate by 75 percent when users reported a problem.
Under the “[s]upporting your success” section, she announced the creation of a pilot program to stop “false-positives” in the site’s monetization platform. The program would allow YouTubers to describe their videos to determine their eligibility for monetization. The system would potentially replace the problems YouTubers have with the current system, in which videos are monetized only to lose their monetization status:
This month, we’re launching a pilot with a small set of creators to test a new video upload flow that will ask creators to provide specific information about what’s in their video as it relates to our advertiser-friendly guidelines. In an ideal world, we’ll eventually get to a state where creators across the platform are able to accurately represent what’s in their videos so that their insights, combined with those of our algorithmic classifiers and human reviewers, will make the monetization process much smoother with fewer false positive demonetizations.
Wojcicki also discussed the possibility of certain YouTubers moving away from relying on ads entirely, mentioning the creation of a sponsorship program:
Creators have also told us they want more alternatives to make money beyond ads. We recently began testing sponsorships with a limited set of creators. This lets fans set up recurring sponsorships that can help fund their favorite creators. Many sponsored creators saw substantial increases in their overall YouTube revenue, so we plan to expand this to many more creators in the coming months.
As Polygon noted, DeFranco is not the only major YouTuber who has discussed the problems with the site’s blackbox algorithm. Many YouTube creators have already begun relying on Patreon in order to supplement their income and YouTuber Casey Neistat reportedly met with Patreon co-founder and CEO Jack Conte to discuss a business venture.
