First of all, I’d like to start off-topic and say that I hate rain. A few days ago, I woke up in the morning and took a shower. Then I went outside to go to class and took another shower. Except, the only problem was, for the second shower, I had nothing to use to dry off because I was in a lecture hall and not my bathroom, so I was dripping wet throughout my entire class. By the time I got moderately dry, class was over and it was time to go back outside and be rained on again.

Back to my complaints on YouTube.

I’m sure all of you have realized this to be a recurring theme, but I absolutely hate it when YouTube comes out with an update. First it was the home page redesign that made it impossible to actually view all your subscribers’ videos and remove them from the home page after you were done watching them, then it was randomly removing people as subscribers and making popular YouTubers lose almost half their views. Now, it seems like they’re going to mess up the partnership system as well.

For those of you slightly familiar with my YouTube channel, I have a handful of game-related videos from which I am making money. This is permitted under copyright law because throughout the entire video, I am providing insightful and relevant commentary and critique, rather than just playing the game and not adding any accompanying words. Usually, when I submit a video for monetization, I’m able to clarify this so the video gets approved and I start making advertising revenue off my views.

From the latest update, they changed the request form such that you’re not allowed to explain what is in your video. Now, when you submit your video, you click a button that says you accept the terms and conditions, then your video gets automatically submitted. Then, the idiot who goes and looks through submitted videos doesn’t even watch the video, sees that the thumbnail includes video game footage, and rejects the video for copyright infringement without even taking a look at what the actual content of the video is.

So, the point is, I’ve lost a good amount of money as a result of this ridiculous new system, and it’s very annoying.

This update came along with the new partnership update from about a week ago. I’ve been told by a handful of my friends that they got an email from YouTube letting them know they were approved for partnership. Sorry to burst your bubble, but you weren’t actually approved for the partnership you were hoping for. YouTube also happened to change the partnership system so they are no longer accepting applications for real partners (with custom branding), and opened up the new partnership system to everyone. The only additional feature you get as a “partner” now is monetization.

I’m not quite sure what the motivation was behind making this change, but now, anyone can become a “partner” with the click of a button and start making money off their videos. But, don’t be fooled by this, because it’s not quite what it seems. Your money is deposited into Google Adsense. For those of you unfamiliar with Google Adsense, you only get payouts once a month, IF AND ONLY IF you make more than $100 that month. If not, it carries over to the next month and you don’t get paid for that pay period.

Now of course, the “real” YouTube partners have absolutely no problem making over $100 per month because they’re good- and popular-enough video producers to attract enough viewers and display enough ads. However, everyone starts at the same spot, and I was back at square one at one point of my career as well, when I wasn’t making over $100 a month in the blink of an eye. Looking back at when I first started, it took nearly forever to get the first payout from Google Adsense. Thus, this seems more like a YouTube money maker rather than an update that’s supposed to give people a better opportunity to improve their video making. I can guarantee that a majority of these “new” partners aren’t ever going to reach the $100 mark. They simply don’t have the audience to display enough ads and make enough money. However, they might end up reaching about $50 before they give up. When they give up, that money doesn’t go anywhere, and stays with Google. Multiply that by the thousands upon thousands of people who are going to try out the new open partnership program, and those are some nice profits for Google without doing anything new.

Of course, if you know me, you know that I love Google and use pretty much all of their service. I even posted on Google+ not long ago that the new Google+ layout was the first time a social network has ever come up with a new theme and I liked it immediately without going through a “getting used to it” period. I use Gmail for all my email needs, and I forward four or five accounts’ emails all to my Google account. Keeping this in the back of my mind, it feels like YouTube is never up to par with all of Google’s other services. YouTube is always falling behind, and whoever is coming up with these YouTube updates seems to be the severe underdog at Google.

Am I expecting YouTube to ever change? Not at all. Their customer service is worse than terrible, and it seems like they simply don’t have the desire to take users’ thoughts into consideration before releasing updates. But hopefully something will work out, and even if YouTube itself becomes a failure, I’m hoping that the people who run YouTube – the video producers, not the staff members – will bring it back as close as possible to what it used to be.