Prosumerist Approach Of Youtube And Changes In Policies Of The Company

Introduction

From its inception, YouTube was intended as a video sharing platform for anybody with PC access to share and view videos among a community of peers, reflected in its slogan “Broadcast Yourself”. This slogan, which was introduced early on played a powerful part in the brand’s strategy to promote the prosumerism, where an active consumer offers their own products to a wider audience (Jarrett, 2008). However, changes in YouTube’s policy in 2012 led to a change in direction from an open platform to a tightly regulated one, followed by continuous changes over the years. Consequently, YouTube’s original slogan was dropped without replacement in 2019. This essay will show how YouTube made a transition from a prosumerism-empowering platform to a profit-oriented social media company, where traditional and corporate-friendly content is strongly prioritised over prosumer-oriented activities.

Background

YouTube was launched in 2005, by former PayPal employees Steve Chen, Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim (Bellis, 2019). The slogan “Broadcast Yourself” was aligned with YouTube’s concept to give its members a free platform for video sharing, a significant innovation, which helped to democratise who can visual content to the world. Consequently, YouTube emerged as the leading video sharing website of the 2.0 era and has since become the second most accessed website in the world after Google’s search engine (Collins, 2019). In doing so, it created significant impacts socially, politically, culturally and economically, as it created a shift from one-directional mass communication of the TV era to bi-directional communication where dialogue is possible (Martini, 2018; Raby et al., 2018; Gonzalo et al, 2014). Today, the website has on average 1 billion video views per day (Brand Watch, 2019). YouTube created a more dynamic and creative way for millions of people to entertain, educate and learn from one another.

Role of YouTube in prosumer activity

The meteoric rise of YouTube can be attributed to a large part to its role in promoting the prosumerism culture, where consumers create professional content and share it to a worldwide audience of peers. YouTube initially gave consumers almost complete freedom in broadcasting their content. This gave rise to vlogging, a visual format of blogging (Kleinberg, Mozes and Van der Vegt, 2018). It allowed for publications of amateur media, videos recorded on home equipment. In addition, it served as an outlet for citizen journalism, as a marketing tool for independent artists and organisations, videographers, and as a platform for educational and instructional videos. YouTube differed from traditional broadcasting, as media content could be distributed in a more affordable and direct fashion with no filters.

YouTube slogan

As the slogan dictates, “Broadcast Yourself” should be mainly focused on consumers, ordinary people who normally do not have access to broadcasting platforms to share their content from. In this context, broadcasting on YouTube is democratized to allow mass participation. Users are allowed to upload videos of their choice by titling and describing its content. Broadcasting option is by default accessible to the public, thus motivating people to use YouTube as a medium of mass distribution (Lagiovane, 2018).

Shift from prosumerism to corporate-friendly content

Soon upon its launch, YouTube was discovered by the corporate world, leading to its purchase by Google within a year in 2006 for $1.6 billion (Brand Watch, 2019; Luckerson, 2016). YouTube’s potential as an advertisement tool for companies to a worldwide mass audience was evident. However, advertisers began to play an increasingly powerful role, eventually pressuring YouTube to change its policies, when it emerged that extremist channels were monetising their channels, in a campaign called “adpocalypse” in which major brands boycotted YouTube (van Eis, 2019). These events led to a change of policy of YouTube in 2012.

2012 YouTube policy changes

In 2012, Google, the parent company of YouTube, established a stricter set of rules and guidelines of what can be posted on the platform. It reduced users’ freedom to share whatever they desire (Fischer, 2014). In line with current policy, the section prohibits videos with harmful, hateful, violent, threatening and dangerous content and tags content that is not children-friendly.

While, on the surface, this policy change sought to regulate hate speech, harassment and bullying, it soon became evident that it targeted a wide range of non-traditional content, including that of many of YouTube’s pioneering content creators, many of whose content was suddenly delisted for breach of policy (Alexander, 2019). On the other hand, YouTube began to promote advertisement-friendly content to viewers by making it more visible for instance through a new “Recommended for you” feature (Crooked Fingers, 2013). As YouTube promoted content that was deemed advertisement friendly to attract more advertisers, it began pushing non-advertisement friendly content to the margins, increasingly irrespective of whether the material was harmful or not (PeeDiePie, 2017). The role of advertisement therefore began to play a major factor in YouTube’s choice of the type of content it promoted to its users.

Demonetisation

As part of its changes of policy and to appease brands who had pressurised YouTube to demonetise extremist material, YouTube also began to devise a process to decide which videos would be monetised, and which ones would not (van Es, 2019). To make things worse, the new demonetisation process was automated, unclear and inconsistent, which has created both fear and anger among many prolific content creators who financially depend on monetisation of their videos (PewDiePie, 2017; Solon, 2017). In the absence of a human factor in the demonetisation process, prosumers now have to guess for the reasons of the demonetisation of their content (PewDiePie, 2017).

New monetisation rules were introduced in 2018. Particularly, users have to have a total watch time of 4,000 hours over the past 12 months, 10,000 views and at least 1,000 subscribers to be eligible for monetisation (Alexander, 2018). Videos must be at least 10 minutes long. Consequently, channel monetisation has developed into a tool with which YouTube and the corporate world consistently threaten content creators with the loss of their source of revenue for broadcasting non-traditional material.

Effects of policy change

In some instances, it can be said that the implementation of YouTube’s new policy created a positive impact on the community by curtailing extremist content and ensuring child safety and growing esteem in people (Chang et al, 2015). On the other hand, the implications of YouTube’s policy change went far beyond its declared intention of curtailing harmful content and almost completely abided by the preferences of the corporate world, while largely disengaging with the prosumerism culture it helped create. As a consequence, many pioneering YouTubers had their accounts shut after they had contributed to the success and popularity of the channel (Alexander, 2019). A warning and strike policy was also introduced, with various degrees of consequences for policy breaches.

Consequently, it can be argued, that in view of corporate advertisement, YouTube wants users not to be themselves that they are broadcasting, but rather to be a self-censored and watered-down version of themselves, aligned with the expectations of the corporate world. In the current days, YouTube retains the power to dictate what and who they want on their platform. Accordingly, the independence of its users is suppressed. Corporate media are favoured to expand advertising revenue.

Prosumers versus corporations

While prosumers and peer production are still a vital part of YouTube, there has been a shift towards the prioritisation of content which is either deemed very corporate friendly, produced by corporations themselves, or by market influencing vloggers who use the platform to create business and revenue (Lagiovane, 2018; Gonzalo et al, 2014). This is a sharp contrast to prosumerism, where the motivation for the creation of services and experiences is based on personal and social factors and not on monetary or production process-related considerations (Chandler and Chen, 2015).

Prosumerism has always been about democratisation. However, as the former top leading website for prosumer activity, YouTube has been silently reshaped to fit the demands of the corporate market. The process of video creation is no longer one that is democratic, liberal nor does it give equal opportunity to all voices; it is one which is now ultimately dictated and regulated by the expectations of the traditional corporate establishment.

Although average viewers may be largely unaware of the changes in YouTube’s approach, the changes have effectively reversed YouTube’s transformational role in its former support for consumer agency. While YouTube is still viewed by billions of people who believe they freely choose the content they would like to view, the content creators are, in reality, regulated and monitored by YouTube. Under the guise of copyright protection and the promotion of good citizenship policies, YouTube’s business strategy has abandoned its prosumerism-oriented strategy. The recent dropping of YouTube previous slogan “Broadcast Yourself” is therefore a reflection of the policy changes in 2012.

Conclusion

In conclusion, YouTube’s powerful slogan 'Broadcast Yourself' was introduced to indicate the freedom of users to share what they desire. This was YouTube’s creative soul from its beginning. However, after YouTube changed its policy in 2012, it embarked on an aggressive policy to regulate the content on its platform. YouTube effectively began to expect individuals to engage in self-censorship and present a watered-down version of themselves.

To achieve this goal, YouTube uses an array of tools to dictate what, and who they should post on the platform, through an aggressive demonetisation strategy for content that is deemed non-advertisement to delisting for breach of policy on one hand, and the promotion and recommendation of advertisement friendly material to its billions of users, on the other hand. While YouTube still plays a significant role in prosumerism culture, it has become a platform where prosumers are no longer free to produce and share the content they want.