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YouTube is Trying to Create a Two-Tier Platform, But Creators Still Hold the Cards
The platform continues to care little about its creators — and keeps testing how far it can change things without consultation
Pity YouTube’s PR team as the platform bungled another big announcement last week. Within a matter of hours, YouTube unveiled a major new change to the way it treated its creators, requiring them to go through more hoops in order to achieve the coveted status of a verified user — which grants them better visibility for their videos on the Trending page, as well as being the imprimatur of legitimacy on the site — then took it away.
The change didn’t just affect lowly creators on the platform: at one point, some of the site’s biggest names, including David Dobrik, Jake Paul, PewDiePie and Mr Beast lost their checkmark. (Looking at those who didn’t was an education in who YouTube really wants to see as the face of its platform: Casey Neistat, Marquess Brownlee, Liza Koshy and Will Smith all kept their tick.)
The speed of the rollback was speedy: a blog post apologizing for the misstep after a creator outcry was posted in the name of YouTube product manager Jonathan McPhie, and Susan Wojcicki, YouTube’s often-misstepping chief executive, tweeted out a…
