Board Thread:News and Announcements/@comment-26239285-20191122101158/@comment-26239285-20191123035724

Unfortunately it can't blow simply over. Something has to change and changes drastically in the next few weeks.

A lot of channels are posting videos about it, including art and gaming channels. The law as it stands says that anything that might appeal to a child, including anything portraying bright colours or cartoon characters. That's like most of my videos, including ones dealing with adult themes such as romance, grief and even one with suicide!

One problem is that YouTube will hobble videos that are marked as targeted for kids: they won't send notifications or promote them in any way, they'll disable comments and prevent them from being added to playlists. Monetized videos will no longer be shown targetted ads thus reducing revenue and affecting viability of the channels. And the killer is that if the FTC disagrees with an uploader's classification, the uploader can be fined exorbitant amounts.

They're saying that people in foreign countries are not immune from penalties. I have no idea how that works, but having lost my job a few years ago and now basically retired on a very meagre budget, it would be impossible for me to take any risks. Even if I had a job, with hundreds of videos on my channel (and some channels have thousands of videos), that's potentially over a million dollar fine.

For me and many other channels, it's over on YouTube. Unless things change in the next few weeks.